The diagnosis is precise - especially the shift from verbs to nouns as a leading indicator of capability loss. Two observations underneath it.
First: AI deployment is not the first translation failure. Making Tax Digital has been in progress since 2015 - eleven years for what is, structurally, a simpler problem than anything involving frontier AI. No model opacity, no safety-critical decisions. Just getting tax records from spreadsheets into a digital format. Meanwhile, several countries solved the same problem years ago - not partially, but completely: every invoice, every receipt, every tax filing, machine-to-machine, mandatory, end-to-end digital from day one. Same problem. Different outcome. The gap is not technological. It is institutional.
Second: the system that built the valley cannot cross it from inside. Karl Deutsch described this in 1963 as pathological self-closure - systems that overvalue internal messages over external ones and imprison themselves in an invisible rut of their own making. Every cycle of fund-institution-recruit-CDO widens the valley, because the people who could have built the bridge spent another cycle not building it. The debt grows exponentially. The institutional response is itself a symptom: each restart produces a shorter effect. The countries closing the gap fastest are not building better research institutions. They are building alongside - different structures, different people, different logic. The exit is never inside the loop.
Thank you. These are really great points and if you look at these things as "machines" and systems (cyber physical socio-technical). Would love to have a chat ..
I write about innovation systems through Deutsch, Shannon, Schumpeter - finishing a book called Anatomy of Breakthrough. Your valley-as-capability-gap maps closely to what I'm working on from communication theory side. Happy to continue the conversation.
Get AI to say this while losing 75% of the words. More bang for your book.
Thank you John. Yes I doo drone on a bit. Im no writer, but LLMs perhaps invented for this reason. 🤣
The diagnosis is precise - especially the shift from verbs to nouns as a leading indicator of capability loss. Two observations underneath it.
First: AI deployment is not the first translation failure. Making Tax Digital has been in progress since 2015 - eleven years for what is, structurally, a simpler problem than anything involving frontier AI. No model opacity, no safety-critical decisions. Just getting tax records from spreadsheets into a digital format. Meanwhile, several countries solved the same problem years ago - not partially, but completely: every invoice, every receipt, every tax filing, machine-to-machine, mandatory, end-to-end digital from day one. Same problem. Different outcome. The gap is not technological. It is institutional.
Second: the system that built the valley cannot cross it from inside. Karl Deutsch described this in 1963 as pathological self-closure - systems that overvalue internal messages over external ones and imprison themselves in an invisible rut of their own making. Every cycle of fund-institution-recruit-CDO widens the valley, because the people who could have built the bridge spent another cycle not building it. The debt grows exponentially. The institutional response is itself a symptom: each restart produces a shorter effect. The countries closing the gap fastest are not building better research institutions. They are building alongside - different structures, different people, different logic. The exit is never inside the loop.
Thank you. These are really great points and if you look at these things as "machines" and systems (cyber physical socio-technical). Would love to have a chat ..
I write about innovation systems through Deutsch, Shannon, Schumpeter - finishing a book called Anatomy of Breakthrough. Your valley-as-capability-gap maps closely to what I'm working on from communication theory side. Happy to continue the conversation.