The eternal complement

Authors’ note: This is the first essay in our series on the next economy, part of a new platform to host independent voices exploring an AGI future. It reflects our views, not those of OpenAI or our colleagues.

Humanity has seen almost to the beginning of time.

Our equations tell a mostly coherent account of the universe from its first moments. With our telescopes, we have looked to the reaches of the cosmos and glimpsed its early history. We know about the birth of stars and the formation of galaxies.

Yet no human being has ever traveled beyond the Moon.

The explanations we seek span the universe, while our bodies have barely left home. Our minds venture way beyond the reach of our hands.

That mismatch could mean two very different things.

One possibility is that we needn’t go very far, that the deepest truths might be fathomed from a single planet. Armed with enlightened reasoning and efficient instruments, we reveal the universe without traversing it. In this story, our civilization advances through depth instead of width. It would help explain why we haven’t seen other intelligent life: we might live in a galaxy full of brilliant minds that never needed to expand and become noticeable to us.

The second possibility is more intimidating. Our minds may have simply outrun our execution capacity. Each next step takes more time and more resources. We have no shortage of dreams but we lack the manpower to realize them.

Galileo widened our sight with two lenses and a tube. To widen it again today, humanity built the James Webb Space Telescope, a ten-billion-dollar observatory folded inside a rocket and sent a million miles away. Its eighteen enormous mirror segments are engineered to a fifty nanometer precision. The observatory was born from three hundred organizations across fourteen countries. Galileo’s contribution called on a few dozen hands. Webb needed an army, and a global economy behind it.

It didn’t just take brighter minds to see farther. It took a larger bureaucracy.

Progress needs a support system

We question more than we can investigate. We design more experiments than we can run. We dream up creative possibilities faster than we can realize them. And across many fields: the further we advance, the more complicated it becomes to build what we imagine.

Nick Bloom and his coauthors ⁠ (opens in a new window) studied research productivity across the American economy. Sustaining Moore’s law now requires more than eighteen times as many researchers as it did in the early 1970s. Economy-wide effective research effort rose twenty-three-fold from the 1930s, while measured research productivity fell by a factor of forty-one.

The technician workforce is growing twice as fast ⁠ (opens in a new window) as the scientists. The use of specialized equipment in science has doubled ⁠ (opens in a new window) over four decades. A chip fab today is five times as costly ⁠ (opens in a new window) —and a much more sprawling operation—than thirty years ago.

These statistics hint at a rising cost to further progress. The economy still advances because a vast increase in research enterprise has compensated for the declining yield of each unit.

The ingredients of progress

That history should make us think differently about genius: not to be considered in a vacuum, but as one input to a production process. A brilliant hypothesis still needs evidence, instruments, and the means to carry it out. An idea isn’t yet progress without the machinery and the support staff to actualize it.

Economists call two inputs complements when more of one raises the value of the other. Frontier intelligence and the capacity to realize its ideas are complements in this sense. A better telescope makes a good astronomical question more valuable. A better question makes the telescope more valuable.

Some complements are physical. A theory waits on a particle accelerator; a technological design waits for the energy and machinery to build it.

Other complements are harder to see with your eyes. An idea, on its own, is a fragile thing. It needs institutions of all kinds. Laws, bureaucracy, funding mechanisms, supply chains, and much else come together to execute on the idea.

A great idea must survive a long chain of correct local actions across these institutions. Call this institutional intelligence: the uncelebrated intelligence of execution. Genius designs the monument; institutions lay the stone. One is brilliant, the other seems boring; both are absolutely crucial.

We sometimes imagine superintelligence as a billion Einsteins. But a civilization of a billion Einsteins still needs most of them to mine the quarries and manage the accounting. Frontier innovation can only happen when the normal world works seamlessly around it. Progress calls on everyone—from the welder of a screw that goes in the telescope, to the insurer for a grade school that taught a nurse who treated the astronomer. Progress is built on a humming economy we often ignore in the tales of our greatest feats.

Like human intelligence, AI will be channeled toward both brilliant insight and institutional competence. The question is where it will spend the preponderance of its time.

The bottleneck today