Do you have any ideas?

The Machine Stops (E M Forster, 1909) is an enormously prescient sci-fi dystopia. Everyone lives in isolation, with the titular Machine responsible providing for all their needs, and communication done via video calls. It’s incredibly accurate for predicting some aspects like the internet, social media and AI. But other aspects, like humanity’s total surrender of control to the Machine, have yet to come to pass.

But one aspect that always fascinated seems to be on the verge of becoming true. The citizens of Forster’s story are obsessed with new ideas. They are constantly trading them, and people’s chief activities are “eating, or sleeping, or producing ideas”. The implication is that the omnipotent Machine, which supplies everything needed to the citizens, is sterile. The citizenry still depend on each other to keep life interesting.

I don’t think current AI is sterile, exactly. They’re capable of remixing and random exploration, which is a large fraction of the creative process. But they are weaker at novelty than some of their other strengths. The result is a curious inversion of the usual supply-and-demand for creative content. In the past, “ideas guys” were reviled as the lowest form of tyros. Ideas were a dime a dozen, but few had the skill and persistence to execute on those ideas to turn them into something worthwhile.

Well, no longer. The gap between “idea” and “output” has shrunk incredibly, and will continue to do so. But the best ideas remain as scarce as ever. They may always remain scarce, as the attention of the world is a limited resource that ideas compete for. Blogging and youtube democratised articles and media by reducing the production costs, which massively widened competition, so the same is happening for everything else.

In extremis, we’ll start seeing all the social credit for a popular thing accumulating to the person whose idea it was, rather than the inevitable high-quality execution that follows. Conjectures will be valued more than proofs and short posts more than movies. Mainstays of culture will get mined out of their idea value, and we’ll chase the high of novelty over polish and quality.

We may even get bored of quality itself and simply prefer to consume the ideas directly. Instead of releasing a movie, you’d release a script draft, and everyone watches the movie customised to their own preferences. We saw something similar in art after the invention of photography – realism became so easy to achieve that art fled in the opposite direction, often highly conceptual or symbolic pieces.