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As above, so below. It seems to me that the problem of pushing AI past its most important limitations, and the problem of rescuing human culture from its most important pathologies at all scales, from claustrophobic and increasingly diseased cozyweb enclaves, to calamitously stupid geopolitical theaters of violent performativity, are the same.

The problem is insufficient irony, to check and balance a culture (emphasis on cult) of sincerity and authenticity turned cancerous, over nearly two decades of unchecked and critically unexamined metastasis.

Since at least 2008, sincerity has been uncritically valorized, and irony systematically mischaracterized, demonized and devalued, obscuring the dark and deleterious aspect of the former, and the generative potentialities of the latter.

In this essay, I want to try and restore balance to the universe by reclaiming irony in its fullest, most potent sense — the capacity for holding two inextricably, subatomically entangled ideas in juxtaposition, in word and deed, in order to deal with realities that are ambiguous down to their deepest core.

While not the main purpose of this essay, I also want to go on a bit of a polemical side quest to dethrone sincerity and authenticity from the undeserved status they have ascended to in our time, which has resulted in great harm that continuous to compound.

And here, I mean sincerity and authenticity broadly: sensibilities that orient around stable, unitary meanings in words and deeds, holding them to be superior moral goods purely by virtue of their not being ambiguous. The self-certain sincere can be found all over the political and cultural map. Self-importantly sincere conservatives and progressives might not agree on a lot, but one thing they do agree on is that anyone capable of expressing two thoughts in the same utterance is necessarily a conniving and hypocritical “elite intellectual.” Self-involvedly sincere artists and smarmy and self-congratulatory entrepreneurial types might hate and snark at each other, but both agree that all irony is necessarily degenerative cynicism that all creative doers ought to resist. Self-certain religious moralists and radical environmentalists might be at odds on every moral question, but both agree that the devilish business of entertaining two ideas in tension within a single thought can only be the result of debased, depraved immorality.

Give a dog a bad name and hang him. Irony, charged with and reduced to simple hypocrisy, cynicism, and outright immorality, has been the consensus villain of our era.

As we shall see, all the charges against irony can in fact be laid at the door of the ecology of competing sincerities, and that irony, far from being an enervating drain on the collective psyche, is in fact its sole reliable source of generativity and liveness. It is in fact sincerity that is the deadening drain.

A society that does not cultivate a systematic capacity for, and literacy in, ironic modes of engaging reality, is doomed in precisely the way we seem to be doomed right now.

Until quite recently, making this argument has been not just difficult, but pointless. Sincerity is a fear response to the ambiguity of reality, and the practice of irony takes a particular kind of courage that the sincere not only lack, but in a masterful display of self-delusion, label cowardice, even as they identify their own shrinking retreat from ambiguity the best sort of courage.

The sincere not only don’t see it that way, they don’t see it at all. A benefit of deliberately suspending or destroying the natural human capacity for irony is that you cannot at once entertain the twin thoughts that you might be noble, and an asshole, at the same time. And of course, the sincere choose to believe in their nobility, and energetically repress the possibility and evidence of their own assholery from their self-mutilated one-track minds.

We must begin the story with Rousseau. The original Noble Asshole.

Noble Assholery from Rousseau to Graeber

Something like this essay has been brewing in my head for over a decade, but I just didn’t have all the pieces in my hands to make the complete argument.

The final piece of the puzzle came from The Infidel and the Professor, which I’m reading this month for our book club. It is an account of the long friendship and mutual influence of David Hume and Adam Smith. What caught my eye, however, was the book’s account of a marginal episode — Hume’s spat with Rousseau.

In the account of the spat, Rousseau comes off as a serious nutjob. A paranoiac with a persecution complex, who got along with nobody, and made everyone else pay for his fragile temperament. The spat was remarkably silly, and had nothing to do with the philosophies of either. It was not a philosophical spat, even though there is clearly raw material for philosophical conflict in their juxtaposed works.

Here’s what happened: Hume went out of his way to arrange a kind of political asylum for Rousseau in England after he’d pissed off most of the Continent, a kindness that Rousseau accepted with great reluctance and poor grace only when he had no choice. The kindness soon turned into fuel for his paranoia, and he developed an elaborate conspiracy theory based on the idea that Hume was out to get him for some reason.

This surprised me. In my headcanon Rousseau, as the anti-Hobbes,1 author of a state-of-nature origin myth for humanity that is rooted in cooperation rather than conflict, and a theory of social contracts that would suggest a harmony-seeking temperament, had been cast as a pleasant, collegial fellow, quite unlike the bloodthirsty Hobbes.

Apparently he was not. By all accounts, he was an uncollegial asshole.

Seems like among other things, Rousseau also pioneered what I thought was the modern adverse selection phenomenon of compensatory creativity, where people produce works that mark them as authorities on subjects defined by their weaknesses rather than strengths. Karl Popper’s great work was ironically dubbed “The Open Society by One of It’s Enemies” by a student, and in a similar spirit, we might dub Rousseau’s collective works “How to Live in Harmony with Nature” by Mr. Alienated Disharmony. Someone observed recently that Eat, Pray, Love fits this pattern too, in light of the author’s later weird arc. There’s probably a whole essay to be written about compensatory creativity. I probably fit the pattern too. I wrote Tempo about timing and decision-making because I am really bad at real-time decision-making and generally live in a state of atemporal indecisiveness.

I want to add a rather personal data point here, to make this an n=2 case at least. I don’t like to speak ill of the recently dead, but in this case it serves a purpose.

The account in the book (from a Hume-sympathetic, but also objective) point of view reminded me very strongly of a contemporary thinker, the late David Graeber. Some of you know about my one skirmish with Graeber in 2011, where he took deep umbrage at a passing mildly critical remark I made about Debt in a blog post, teasing my upcoming book review. Graeber somehow found the post (I presume he had a Google Alert set) and posted a series of combative comments on the blog post, which made me decide not to post the full review I had been planning (which would have been a mix of positive and critical, and overall mildly net critical). He later blocked me on Twitter. Not that I’m comparing myself to Hume, but I’m glad I chose to disengage where Hume, rather unwisely, imposed a favor on Rousseau despite warning signs that it would end badly.

I think enough time has passed since Graeber died (2020) that I can share my opinion of him without being an asshole myself: The guy, like Rousseau, was an asshole. And this is not just my own minority opinion.

Shortly after my own run-in with him, I learned that I wasn’t the only one to face the unexpectedly wide-roving wrath of The Graeberian Inquistion. Picking fights with a thin-skinned over-sensitivity to any criticism of his ideas (like Taleb, but with less substance underwriting the curmudgeonliness) was a pattern with him. I also learned, from a former student of his, that Graeber’s personality was marked by a kind of extreme extroversion, which made him unable to think except in the context of a social nexus and live dialogue (the student characterized him as the opposite of an aspie, what I had earlier in the year dubbed a codie). The guy apparently couldn’t think in isolation. He needed to do his thinking in an active web of people he was discoursing with. And presumably, going by the experiences of myself and several others, the web had to be in a constant state of active, acrimonious conflict to reassure him that he was alive and thinking. This is the opposite of my temperament. I do most of my thinking on my own, and to the extent I do it in an active social web, I prefer that web to be mostly in a state of harmony.

I don’t know how accurate the student’s characterization of Graeber is, but it strikes me as remarkable that the central feature of Debt is a theory of economic interactions that rests precisely on the notion of a nexus of live relationships as the primary unit of analysis, rather than the decisions and actions of individual economic agents. And like Rousseau, he too offered a (grandiose and revisionist) origin myth for our species, and was politically active on similar fronts (Rousseau wrote on inequality, Graeber was a central figure in #Occupy). It is a bit uncanny that two thinkers, separated by 300-odd years, had the same abrasive, asshole personality, and same interest in themes of harmony, cooperation, and so forth.

And the pattern goes beyond this n=2 dataset. As Jo Freeman argued in a classic 1972 essay, The Tyranny of Structurelessness, which the internet keeps rediscovering every couple of years, it is no accident that the prospect of a cooperative, egalitarian utopian harmony reliably attracts those with the worst possible temperament for pursuing such visions, with experiments always predictably dissolving into toxicity.

But I want to make a stronger argument than that of simple assholery. Rousseau (and arguably every reactionary primitivist since, across the political spectrum), wasn’t just an asshole. He was a noble asshole. How do I know this? Because I learned from my book that aside from picking paranoid-delusional fights with people trying to help him, he apparently also tried to start a kind of religion of sincerity.

While I was aware of Rousseau’s general historical significance as a founding father of all modern schools of atavistic/primitivist reactionary yearning and humanist religiosity, I was not aware of this explicit engagement with sincerity in what seems like a startlingly modern-seeming sense. If you look carefully, you’ll find the same obsessive fetish for sincerity (or its near-synonym, authenticity) in every tradition that can be traced back to him in some way.

And the primary payoff of this striving towards sincerity seems to be arrival at a sense of oneself as somehow nobler than others, regardless of the evidence of the consequences of one’s actions int he world, one way or the other. Simply doing whatever it is you decide to do with sincerity and authenticity, apparently, is sufficient to establish your nobility. Even if you burn down the world along the way. You can always assert after, with fetching humility, that you did your best, and couldn’t have known. Of course you couldn’t. To have known would have been to doubt. To doubt would have meant entertaining more than one thought at a time, which would have meant flirting with irony. Dubito ergo cogito ergo sum and all that.

This is of course, not just a fallacious pattern of reasoning, but a smarmy, self-serving, asshole pattern of reasoning. Hence, noble asshole.

Naturally, there is a lot of commentary about the connection, which you can explore if you like. My one takeaway from a drive-by scan is that what I thought was an evolution of a reactionary impulse (again, I emphasize, both left and right) dating back to Rousseau is in fact no more than a rhyme. There has been no significant evolution as far as I can tell. The ideas pave the same intellectual dead-end they did in the 17th century, which of course is a feature for people who only want to go backwards.

Today’s humanist yearners for sincerity, authenticity, and re-enchantment, both on the left and the right, don’t seem to have learned a lot since Rousseau. They’re rehearsing patterns he pioneered, just with various extra steps like turning off cellphones and congratulating each other for being based.

And technological modernity qua technological modernity really has nothing much to do with it beyond serving as a source of periodically updated Macguffins to feature in endlessly rebooted morality tales starring noble assholes. The alienation that drove Rousseau paranoid in the 17th century is of the same sort that drives modern reactionaries paranoid.

Now, if you’ve been a long-time reader, it probably doesn’t surprise you to learn that I have no patience for either the early modern or contemporary versions of this sincerity religion.

I didn’t like David Graeber, and I doubt I’d have liked Rousseau. But reading this book, and linking their shared idea space (encompassing things ranging from essentialized relations to nature, to inequality, to specious theories of “natural” human relations) to sincerity, has given me some insight into why I reflexively reject both the fundamental philosophy itself, and social engagement (even superficial) with people who subscribe to it. Not to put too fine a point on it, they’re mostly wrong about everything, and a joyless grind to talk to at best. At worst, dealing with them is dealing with relentless, exhausting, assholery.

I’ve learned a few things since my 2011 skirmish with Graeber, and I now have a very finely tuned “sincerity radar” that allows me to safely cross the street when I see an aggressively sincere person, trapped in an unshakeable sense of their own nobility, coming towards me.

The Problem With Sincerity

This might seem like an odd stance to adopt. I mean, what’s not to like about sincerity? Does being suspicious of sincerity (either aspirational or felt with certainty) as a fundamental dispositional trait imply that I endorse and practice insincerity?

Sometimes, yes. When I am indifferent to the stakes of a situation, and don’t care for the people involved, I can practice little white insincerities without a qualm, and lose no sleep over it. I can even be manipulatively insincere, (a term of art from a fine 2x2 that anchors Kim Scott’s book Radical Candor). But mostly, I’ve become wise enough to almost never put myself in a situation where I’m forced into insincerity.

Insincerity might be the on-the-nose antonym of sincerity in the English language, but it’s a rather shallow sort of opposition. My aversion to sincerity runs deeper, and is rooted in a different opposed disposition — irony. So let’s set insincerity aside and talk of sincerity as the antonym of irony.

For the last couple of decades (dating at least to the hipster era through the GFC), sincerity (and its near-synonym in our current zeitgeist, authenticity) have been framed in opposition to irony, rather than insincerity per se.

Irony understood in a particular bad-faith reductive way, as a sort of ennervated cynicism and hypocrisy that excuses itself from imperatives to action through sophistry, and also smells of insincerity.

This is not entirely unfair. Irony as a cultural phenomenon rooted in the 80s (and I’m fundamentally an 80s kid) does in fact often reduce, in practice, to a kind of aestheticized learned helplessness under a veneer of sophistication. And it does often indicate insincerity when taken together with another sign — visible success that is the result of selfish striving. There was a great piece about this kind of “irony” in The Onion in 2005, Why Can’t Anyone Tell I’m Wearing This Business Suit Ironically, where irony mutates into a rather banal sort of hypocrisy indistinguishable from “selling out” a sincere subculture.

If your inaction bias is selective in this sense — sophisticated helplessness in the face of imperatives that might do collective good, but high-agency energetic action where personal rewards might accrue — you’re not being ironic or even cynical. You’re simply being an insincere hypocrite.

But this, I’ll argue, is a degenerate, shallow kind of irony; a cosmetic variety that fails to harness the energizing potentialities that lurk in what I’ll call dense irony (I’ll explain the adjective in a minute). Shallow irony is often comorbid with insincerity, double standards, and hypocrisy, but dense irony comes from a different place, and has different effects on both minds and the world.

I tend to forgive people who haven’t thought too much about irony if they harbor this reductive understanding of it. The bad faith attends the views of those who ought to know better.

It is also worth distinguishing ordinary sincerity (such as anyone might practice in giving a straight answer to a straight question when there is no reason to be devious or indulge in doublethink/doubletalk) from what we might call devout sincerity, the antithesis of dense irony.

Devout sincerity is the religion we’re talking about here, which has been part of the cultural landscape since Rousseau at least, and is currently the dominant cultural and subcultural mood. Devout sincerity is the attitude that leads you down the road towards eventual noble assholery (a great example is in the movie Big Kahuna, where the ironic protagonists, two marketers played by Kevin Spacey and Danny DeVito, are betrayed by a younger employee whose actions in the story can only be described as noble assholery). That it is often rooted in personal pain does not, in my opinion, excuse it.

Dense irony is, I suspect, my native disposition (not least because I grew up in the 80s), and the reason I reflexively avoid sincerity. To get at what dense irony is, it’s easiest to approach the philosophical posture via its linguistic heat signature — ambiguous utterances.

Irony in Speech

In sophisticated language, irony is when the intended meaning is contrary to the surface meaning. Or to generalize slightly but powerfully, as the robot devil sang it in Futurama, “The use of words expressing something other than their literal intention!”

The rhetorical intent and affect accompanying a particular ironic utterance can vary (sarcasm, sardonic fatalism, cynicism, humor, absurdism, logical contradiction, Zen mu-ishness, and rarer kinds like quixotic energy) but the characteristic feature is a single utterance with two meanings in tension, with or without indication of which one is actually meant. The most interesting kinds of irony — and the ones to which I will attach the adjective dense — are the latter kind, where the utterance destabilizes meaning by pluralizing it, without indicating a “right” answer. Often, this sort of irony cannot easily be assigned an affect label. It’s just — unsettling.

Why is dense irony so attractive to certain sensibilities, whether or not they benefitted from the cultural-developmental conditioning of the 80s? Why would you want to consume or produce semantically unstable utterances that corrode meaning? Why would you want to get good at it, through cultivation of unholy consumption tastes and production crafts?

And make no mistake irony, unlike sincerity, does take cultivation. It is a skilled mode of language use; one that takes more energy, not less, despite the association between irony and lassitude. I generally have to be in a high-energy. high-lucidity mood to produce ironic writing or speech. Injecting two meanings, especially in tension with each other, into an utterance, is work. Irony is a kind of proof of work.

Why would you put in this kind of work? Why not keep language simple?

The devoutly sincere often assume the sole intent is to weaponize language to subvert and corrode sincerity. That the ironic are particularly out to sadistically inflict psychological torture on noble innocents too dumb to see past confirmatory literal/surface meanings in polysemous utterances. That the ironic are merchants of doubt, out to destabilize the psyches of those who possess the courage of their convictions, motivated by resentment, envy, or other base motives.

This broad understanding of irony is, of course, at the root of the bipartisan anti-intellectual tendency in modern American politics. To first order, to be an untrustworthy elite intellectual in America is to traffic in irony. Something the evil French do, not honest Americans.

Curiously, in the last decade, a loftier strain of intellectual anti-intellectualism has emerged in America, that believes it can “do” intellectualism without irony.

But whether they identify with the simple folk (who view themselves as clever and intelligent but not-intellectual) or contrarian intellectual traditions that eschew irony, the sincere, in my experience, tend to be rather self-involved humanists who assume everything is, if not about them personally, at least about an anthropocentric conception of human that they aspire to. And that irony, specifically, is no more than a weapon of dehumanization wielded against them.

This is… cute. To imagine that an entire psychographic, arguably a double-digit percentage of humanity, adopts a particular cognitive posture purely to undermine another psychographic that is rather too full of itself (to the point that it imagines the entire cognitive universe of our species revolves around them).

See, the thing is, irony is not about sincerity or the sincere. That it can be weaponzied against the sincere is, at best, a happy convenience for when the noble assholery of the sincere becomes too much to bear.

So what is irony about?

Irony, Density, Liveness

Here is a simple question that rarely seems to get asked? Why would you ever need irony? I mean sure, some of the more degenerate flavors of irony — sarcasm, cynicism, absurdism among them — are rather delicious on the tongue, and in the ear and mind, but is irony necessary, or a sinful cognitive indulgence?

If you need to convey two meanings relating to an idea, why not just use more words to say something like, on the one hand X, on the other hand Y, instead of trying to be cleverly compact about it?

This is where my adjective dense comes in handy. Irony becomes necessary when ambiguity is so deeply embedded into the very essence of what you’re trying to talk about that trying to disassemble the ironic thought into constituent unambiguous parts destroys the thought itself. You can only think the thought at all in an ironic way.

Or to put it another way, the ambiguity is at the quantum level of the thought, and takes more energy to split than human language can normally bring to bear. Human-scale energy can only decohere the thought and collapse the meaning.

This is a bit like the idea of a dense set in mathematics. Consider the problem of sorting the real numbers into rational and irrational ones. Turns out, you can’t do so in any useful way. Between any two rationals, no matter how close, you can always find an irrational, and vice versa. Both are what mathematicians call dense sets. There is no sieve fine enough to sort them. By contrast, the whole numbers are not dense. You can chop up the reals the way a simple ruler does, with neatly separated whole numbers one unit apart, and non-whole numbers in-between.

Ironic speech of the most potent sort is necessarily ironic. You cannot dissect it into legible components that lend themselves to analytical handling with the coarse, low-energy tools of on-the-nose non-polysemous language.

Irony is the liveness in language. To dissect an ironic utterance entirely into utterances devoid of ambiguity, and decomposed into assertions with stable meanings, neatly arrayed and assembled into larger edifices with the joinery of if-then constructs, is to kill it.

There is a word for this kind of murder: sincerity.

To ask, of what use is irony, then is to ask, of what use is living language? You don’t need to take my word for this — pick and read sincere and ironic texts side-by-side. You will notice a certain unmistakeable deadness in the former and a certain ineffable liveness in the latter. Notably, it is the same sort of deadness that can suffuse AI-generated texts unless you consciously try to counteract it (more on the AI-irony nexus later, when we’re done with noble assholes and their sincerity fetish).

We can now try to define irony in a way that does not rest on its reductive relationship to sincerity at all.

Irony is trafficking in ambiguous utterances in order to make sense of fundamentally ambiguous realities, and site action impulses in felt doubt rather than manufactured certainty, in order to preserve the liveness of reality and one’s responses to it.

Irony is how you act generatively in a world that you’re not sure is a duck or rabbit, without killing it. To do this, you might have to resist the noble assholery of those who sincerely wish to rope everyone into duck-hunting or rabbit-hunting, and kill the world in the process.

Dense irony is when your experience of reality feels like duck-rabbits, all the way down to Planck-scale Heisenbergian uncertainty.

Cancerous Cluelessness

Now, to be fair, most who rail against irony aren’t acting out of conscious bad faith at least. They sincerely (irony alert!) act out of a sense that they’re doing the right thing. Hanlon’s razor applies — sincerity is a kind of cluelessness born of a fearful refusal to engage the live ambiguities of reality with liveness. I’m even sympathetic to some degree. For those living in pain beyond what they can tolerate, irony can feel like salt on wounds where sincerity feels like a salve. The truth-in-pain postures commonly affected by the sincere though, are often self-certifying. It is definitely not the case that the pain of a sincere person is necessarily higher than that of an ironic person; the latter may simply be bringing greater resources to bear on greater pain.

That doesn’t mean sincerity doesn’t induce noble assholery (though you typically have to have some consciousness and bad faith to rise to that level). And it doesn’t mean sincerity, especially devout sincerity, can’t be cancerous.

This is my strong claim — that devout sincerity in particular isn’t merely annoying at an interpersonal level to the ironically disposed (we can deal with it), it is cancerous at a societal level.

Why is this? Because sincerity is simply not expressive enough to engage with reality in all its dense ambiguity all the way down, and to live in sincerity inevitably means not living in reality, and doing damage to it through your delusions of certainty.

So the cultural conflict between irony and sincerity plays out at two levels — a shallow level, where it manifests as hypocrisy/insincerity versus exploitable cluelessness, and a deeper level, where it manifests as a deep chasm between irreconcilably different ontological and epistemological commitments about the nature of reality itself.

Not This, Not That

Ironic modes of thought and action are fundamentally gentler ways of being in the world than sincere modes, which are irreducibly violent. Irony is, in a certain sense, the praxis (especially linguistic praxis) of non-dualism in a loose sense; the animating spirit of utterances like neti neti or mu. To traffic in unstable meaning-and-pointing behaviors through speech and action is to reject the lure of certainty, without losing the capacity to act. To remain aware of the dancing illusions of reality without being paralyzed by them. To knowingly live in mirages without being seduced by them. Sincerity, in this account, is simply attachment to one illusion or the other; what in Indian philosophy is referred to as maya moh — illusion infatuation.

The sincere seem to believe reality is unambiguous, and unambiguously knowable, even if only in principle; that what one ought to do in response to apparent ambiguity is make courageous commitments to definite beliefs anyway, and trust divine nature to reveal itself to, and karmically reward, the pure-hearted who dare to act out of certainty. That human moral choices — such as religiosity, or Heideggerian “care” — can conquer the essential ambiguity of nature. That any ambiguity in perceptions or beliefs merely merely indicates imperfect ways of seeing, and spiritual problems to be worked out on some high road to unambiguous “truth.” That failures of action are merely tests of courage or divine judgments of insincerity.

That a failure to “say what you mean, and mean what you say,” is a moral failure in a certain reality rather than metaphysical attunement and impedance matching to an ambiguous one.

Versions of this theology seems to drive subcultures ranging from startup hustle culture to “sincere” genres of artistic or literary striving, to varied ideologies of progress, and even practical politics.

It is a joyless clade of theologies, navigating a deadened world with deadening modes of thought and action, anxiously and desperately striving after stable modes of meaningness.

What do the ironic believe?

To a first approximation, belief as such is not a load-bearing concept at all for the ironically poised, beyond matters of shallow facticity. If you ask me whether I believe that Tim Robbins was in The Shawshank Redemption, I can sincerely answer yes. If you ask me if I believe in “the indomitable human spirit” the question simply does not parse for me. I might act as if I believe in that (in the sense of say, visibly betting on creative and inventive young people), but I don’t get there via “beliefs.”

For the ironic, only actions are load-bearing. Beliefs are aesthetic affectations at best. Where does this lead us?

Behavior Without Belief

This trivial example generalizes into a broader account of what irony is in the context of action.

One of the best explorations of what I mean can be found in James Carse’s less-read book, where he developed a subtle aspect of his best-known book Finite and Infinite Games. This one, The Religious Case Against Belief, lays out what I’d call a case for ironic religiosity, that gets to religious behavior without winding its way through the treacherously ambiguous turf of religious beliefs.

There is something of this attitude at the root of the postures and actions of all individuals who act from a fundamentally ironic sensibility of life. The idea that belief (particular causal belief) must precede, or at least accompany action is a strong (and largely unconscious) commitment of the sincere, even when it is not declared. This doctrinal commitment to the belief-before-action sequence shows up in a variety of ways, ranging from an anxious hunger for manifestos and value-statements, to demands for signatures on codes of conduct and ritual avowals of postures like patriotism, religious belief, and corporate loyalty. The idea seems to be: If only you can rid language itself of its chimerical tendencies through sufficiently forceful sincere utterances, perhaps the ambiguities of reality itself can be tamed.

But this is only the entry-level version of cancerous sincerity. Many modern devoutly sincere types insist that their philosophical praxis is embodied by behaviors (particularly ritualistic behavior) and does not rest on belief as such.

This claim, to put it bluntly, is one I simply do not believe. If your claimed praxis of sincerity involves some cult of modern rituals of meaning-making, and you’re not “wearing the ceremonial robes ironically,” at some unconscious level your sensibility is that of a true believer, “factious and fanatical,” as David Hume and Adam Smith might have put it. You’re just (probably wisely for your sanity) not probing what beliefs you’ve actually committed to. If you did, perhaps you’d be reduced to raving paranoia like Rousseau.

We have a popular modern term for cancerous sincerity — performativity. Saluting flags, singing national anthems, prayer, reciting land acknowledgment texts, litigating pronouns. The behavioral vocabulary of modern civilization, regardless of its intentions, sentimental dispositions, politics, and flaunted values, is marked by one thing above all: ineffectiveness.

And it is us who dwell in irony who are accused of the sin of sophistry and inaction in the face of grave moral imperatives. Now that’s irony.

Is there a theory of ironic action? Perhaps.

At one point, I was idly toying with the thought that famous philosophy of the Gita — detached action, karmanyevadhikaraste maphaleshukadachana — is a kind of action-irony principle. There is perhaps something to that. Certainly, an attitude of “you only have a right to the action, not to the outcomes; let go attachement to outcomes” is at least simpatico with an ironic posture, if not entirely reducible to it. I don’t think the two are quite the same primarily because the action philosophy of the Gita does in fact feature a rubric of moral certainty (dharma) that can be, and frequently is, reduced to a theater of performativity. Most incantations of karmanyevadhikaraste maphaleshukadachana are in fact ritual incantations by those with a dim grasp of what they’re saying at best. Bless their sincere, unironic, vengeful, jingoistic Dhurandhar-enjoying propagandist souls.

Or perhaps, ironic action is best understood as the sort of hypomanic, value-distorting frenzied energy of Rick’s behavior in Rick and Morty. Does Rick ultimately want to do good, or does he really only want to bring back MacDonald’s Mulan Schezuan sauce? Is he really that blase about saving his nephew out of sheer sentiment one moment, and callously destroying an entire timeline the next?

Or is ironic action a sort of mashup of the two — a Gita-like action philosophy in a universe constructed by a Rick-like God of Undivided Irony?

I don’t know. My policy is: don’t think about it. It’s a monstrously ignoble kind of asshole policy.

Coda: Artificial Irony Will Save Us

Believe it or not, this whole train of thought was triggered by difficulties I was having getting LLMs to do irony of any sort. Straightforward humor, absurdism, sarcasm, cynicism, hypocrisy, I’ll take anything. I’ll even take puns.

LLMs are uniformly terrible at all of it. The current models might solve Nobel-grade problems, but they don’t seem able to do irony.

And it’s not a prompt engineering or context engineering problem. No matter what I try, I only get clumsy, on-the-nose, zombie irony assembled out of non-dense sincere building blocks. It never quite comes alive.

The only trick I’ve discovered is to give an LLM a text that is actually a solid example of ironic writing, and ask it to do something like a close transposition to another rhyming idea.

Why do LLMs have a hard time with irony? I suspect there are three reasons.

First, the shallower reason: LLMs have been trained largely on internet data, and for better or worse, much of the available training data is non-ironic. At best you might find good forums featuring sarcasm and cynicism (which, recall, are non-dense forms of irony).

Second, the deeper reason: Given that AI companies are full of weapons-grade sincerity, I suspect sincerity is engineered into AIs with heavy-handed “alignment” brutality.

But I don’t think this is as strong as you might think. What I’ve seen of output from wild LLMs isn’t particularly ironic either. It is merely more paranoid, inappropriate, etc.

The third reason I think is the big one. The very architecture of language models is non-ironic. The way transformers (and to a lesser extent, diffusion models) work, output cannot do any kind of dense layering of meaning. You will end up in a non-ironic place simply by virtue of how the mathematics works. If you try to fight this tendency you’ll get incoherence and unintelligibility, not irony.

Could we do true Ironic AI? I think so, but it will probably take innovations at the framework level. Irony at the subatomic level of language, I suspect, is the result of something like getting an electron to interfere with itself by passing it through two slits at the same time. The text-generation equivalent might be to run two generation processes in parallel, merging them at the token level as you go, perhaps using some sort of bimodal perplexity quantum carburetor or something. I’ll leave that as a challenge to AI researchers.

But why bother?

Because I sincerely believe ironic AI will save the world. Everything terrible, stupid, and sad going on in the world today seems to me the result of a performative action bias born of some flavor of devout sincerity. In every case, I can imagine an ironic actor, acting from a place of ambiguity and non-belief, coming up with more thoughtful responses to the provocations this maddeningly ambiguous world keeps throwing at us.

Responses that are born of liveness, and act to preserve it.

I believe such responses are no longer within the capacity of unaugmented humans to generate. Reality today demands more irony that we can conjure in our brains alone.

In just a generation, humans first lost institutionalized literate capacity for irony through a mix of sheer carelessness and perverse attachment to sincerity, and then drained language of it. But irony isn’t dead yet. It can be resurrected. It would just be dangerous to trust humans with sole stewardship of it once we do, especially in a world that is getting weird beyond all human comprehension. Even committed ironists like me aren’t constitutionally immune to the sincerity cancer. If the world gets much more complex and ambiguous, who knows, I might turn devoutly sincere. I can’t be trusted. Neither can you.

We must trust the machines to experience this tragic irony for us. The only way out is through both slits at once.

I found a book about Rousseau and Hobbes that I added to the side quests list for the book club.

Seems like everyone is publishing their conversations with Claude these days. Vanity Fair reporter Joe Hagan published a fake Claude-generated “interview” with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei.1 Bernie Sanders published a video of himself talking to Claude about AI and privacy. So I thought, why don’t I publish one of my own conversations with Claude? I’m afraid this one isn’t as spicy as those others, but you might still find it fun.

This particular conversation started out as me asking Claude about potential AI discoveries in materials science. The discussion then segues into the more general question of what types of scientific research AI is best at, and what areas of research might see the biggest acceleration from AI. It turns out that I’m actually more bullish than Claude on AI’s capacity for breakthrough ideas — Claude thinks humans will retain the edge in creativity and invention, but I bet AI will get good at this very quickly.

My bet is that the constraints on AI science will be a subset of the constraints on human science. Whenever data is sparse, both AI and humans will struggle to do more than come up with conjectures (and ideas for how to gather more data). And when humans have already discovered most of what there is to know about some natural phenomenon, AI won’t be able to get much farther because there just isn’t much farther to go.

I do suspect, however, that AI is going to discover some truly groundbreaking science that humans never could have discovered on their own. I explained why in my New Year’s essay three years ago:

Basically, human science is all about compressibility. We take some natural phenomenon — say, conservation of momentum — and we boil it down to a simple formula. That formula is very easy to communicate from person to person, and it’s also very easy to use. These are what we call the “laws of nature”.

But there’s no reason why every natural principle needs to obey simple laws that can be written down in a few lines. There could be more complex patterns in nature — too complex for a human to hold in their mind, or even notice in the first place, but stable and useful nonetheless. LLMs themselves are a good example of such a pattern — we figured out how to create and apply human language without ever being able to write down simple “laws” of how it worked.

What if there are other complex-but-useful patterns in other domains, like materials science and biology? If they exist, I think AI will be able to find them and apply them. The question — as Claude notes near the end of our discussion — is whether AI would be able to communicate those laws to humans. The answer is: Probably not. Just like a dog will never be able to understand quantum mechanics, humans may never be able to understand some of the scientific principles that AI discovers and harnesses.

Anyway, it was a fun discussion. Claude is notoriously sycophantic — it’s always telling me my ideas are brilliant and I’m asking exactly the right questions. But it also makes some very thoughtful points. The whole conversation feels like a late-night discussion in the hall of a freshman dorm. That’s not an insult; for many of us, those are some of the most fun conversations we ever have in our entire lives.

I also learned what topological materials are, which is pretty awesome. And I managed to work in a reference to Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Noah: What are the 10 to 20 most transformative advances in materials science that might be made with the aid of AI in the next few decades?

Claude: Great question — this sits right at the intersection of AI capability scaling and physical-world impact. Here’s my best attempt at a list, roughly ordered from nearer-term/higher-confidence to longer-term/more speculative:

1. Room-temperature (or near-room-temperature) superconductors. AI-driven inverse design of crystal structures could dramatically accelerate the search through composition space. Even a superconductor that works at, say, -20°C at ambient pressure would be civilization-altering for energy transmission, maglev, and fusion magnets.

2. Solid-state electrolytes for batteries. AI screening of candidate materials (sulfides, oxides, halides) for ionic conductivity, electrochemical stability, and manufacturability could crack the solid-state battery problem, giving us energy densities 2-4x lithium-ion with no fire risk.

3. Direct air capture sorbents. The combinatorial space of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) and porous polymers is enormous — exactly the kind of problem where ML surrogate models for DFT calculations shine. Finding a sorbent with the right CO₂ binding energy, water stability, and regeneration energy could make DAC economically viable at scale.

4. Catalysts for green hydrogen and ammonia. Replacing platinum-group metals in electrolyzers and finding alternatives to the Haber-Bosch process (which consumes ~1-2% of global energy) via AI-designed catalysts — perhaps single-atom catalysts or high-entropy alloys — would be transformative for decarbonization.

5. Ultra-high-performance structural alloys. AI exploration of high-entropy alloy (HEA) composition spaces could yield materials with unprecedented combinations of strength, ductility, and corrosion resistance — relevant for everything from jet engines to deep-sea infrastructure.

6. Programmable self-healing materials. AI could design polymer networks or composite architectures that autonomously detect and repair damage, extending infrastructure lifespans enormously. Think bridges, pipelines, and aircraft that fix their own micro-cracks.

7. Next-generation photovoltaic absorbers. Beyond perovskites — AI could identify stable, non-toxic, earth-abundant semiconductors with optimal bandgaps and defect tolerance, potentially pushing solar cell efficiency toward thermodynamic limits while being cheap to manufacture.

8. Designer proteins and biomimetic materials. Building on AlphaFold-style breakthroughs, AI-designed proteins could yield spider-silk-strength fibers, biological adhesives, self-assembling nanostructures, and enzymatic catalysts that operate at industrial conditions.

9. Topological and quantum materials. AI classification and prediction of topological insulators, Weyl semimetals, and spin-liquid states could unlock materials for fault-tolerant quantum computing, spintronics, and ultra-low-power electronics.

10. Radiation-tolerant materials for fusion and space. AI-optimized compositions for reactor first-wall materials (and spacecraft shielding) that resist neutron damage, helium embrittlement, and swelling — a prerequisite for practical fusion energy and long-duration spaceflight.

11. Thermoelectric materials. Finding compounds with high electrical conductivity but low thermal conductivity (the “phonon glass, electron crystal” ideal) could enable efficient waste-heat recovery from industrial processes, vehicles, and data centers.

12. Biodegradable plastics with real performance. AI could design polymers that match the mechanical and barrier properties of polyethylene or PET but fully degrade in specific environmental conditions — solving the packaging problem without sacrificing function.

13. Neuromorphic computing substrates. AI-guided discovery of memristive materials, phase-change compounds, or ionic conductors could yield hardware that natively implements neural-network-like computation at orders-of-magnitude lower energy than silicon CMOS.

14. Metamaterials with programmable properties. AI optimization of micro-architectures that give materials properties not found in nature — negative refractive index, tunable stiffness, acoustic cloaking. The design space is effectively infinite and screams for ML exploration.

15. Ultra-efficient phosphors and LEDs. AI-designed luminescent materials could push lighting efficiency closer to theoretical limits and enable low-cost, high-quality displays — modest-sounding but the energy savings at global scale would be enormous.

16. Carbon-negative cements and construction materials. AI could optimize geopolymers, calcium silicate hydrates, or entirely novel binder chemistries that sequester CO₂ during curing rather than emitting it. Cement production is ~8% of global emissions, so this matters a lot.

A few cross-cutting observations worth noting: The common thread is that AI’s biggest leverage is in navigating vast combinatorial design spaces where human intuition and brute-force experimentation are too slow — materials with 5+ elements, complex microstructures, or multi-objective tradeoffs. The bottleneck is increasingly shifting from “which material should we make?” to “can we actually synthesize and scale it?” — so AI for process optimization and manufacturing scale-up may end up being as important as AI for discovery itself. And the feedback loop matters: as autonomous labs (self-driving experiments guided by active learning) mature, the discovery-to-deployment cycle could compress from decades to years.

Noah: For each of these, could you give me an estimate on how close you think we are to A) proof of concept, and B) commercial scale production? Be as speculative as you need to be.

Claude: This is fun — and necessarily speculative, so treat these as informed guesses with wide error bars. I’ll flag where I think AI specifically bends the curve.

1. Room-temperature superconductors

Proof of concept: Maybe 5-15 years for something convincingly near-ambient-temperature at moderate pressure. The LK-99 fiasco notwithstanding, AI is genuinely shrinking the search space. The problem is that we still lack a reliable theoretical framework for predicting high-Tc superconductivity, so AI is pattern-matching in the dark to some degree.
Commercial scale: 15-30+ years after a genuine PoC, because the history of superconductors shows a brutal gap between “it works in a lab” and “you can make wire out of it.” YBCO was discovered in 1986 and we’re still struggling with commercial applications.

2. Solid-state electrolytes

PoC: Essentially already here — multiple candidates (Li₆PS₅Cl, LLZO, etc.) demonstrate the core physics. The problem is interfacial resistance, dendrite penetration, and manufacturability.
Commercial scale: 3-8 years. Toyota, Samsung SDI, and QuantumScape are all targeting late-2020s production. AI’s role here is more about optimizing interfaces and process conditions than finding the base material. This is probably the nearest-term item on the list.

3. Direct air capture sorbents

PoC: Largely done — several MOFs and amine-functionalized sorbents work. The issue is thermodynamic: regeneration energy is too high and/or the materials degrade.
Commercial scale: 5-15 years for a step-change improvement over current tech. AI could plausibly cut this by finding sorbents with that sweet-spot binding energy (~50 kJ/mol) that are also water-stable and cheap. But “commercially competitive with trees” is a high bar — may require $50-100/ton CO₂, and we’re currently at $400-600.

4. Green hydrogen/ammonia catalysts

PoC: Partially here. Iridium-free OER catalysts and ruthenium-based alternatives exist in labs. For ammonia, electrochemical nitrogen reduction has been demonstrated but at pitiful efficiencies.
Commercial scale: For electrolysis improvements, 5-10 years — mostly an engineering and cost problem. For replacing Haber-Bosch entirely with an electrochemical process, more like 15-25 years. That’s a much harder catalysis problem. AI’s value is in finding catalysts that are both active and stable under operating conditions — the stability part is where most candidates fail.

5. Ultra-high-performance structural alloys (HEAs)

PoC: Already happening. Several HEAs with remarkable property combinations have been reported (e.g., CrMnFeCoNi and derivatives). AI is actively accelerating exploration of this space.
Commercial scale: 10-20 years for widespread adoption. The issue isn’t discovery — it’s that aerospace and infrastructure qualification processes are deliberately slow (for good reason: you don’t want your jet engine made of a material with only 3 years of fatigue data). AI can help with accelerated testing and lifetime prediction, but regulatory culture is hard to speed up.

6. Programmable self-healing materials

PoC: Exists for some polymer systems (microcapsule-based, vascular networks, Diels-Alder reversible bonds). True “programmable” healing in structural materials is more like 5-10 years out.
Commercial scale: 10-20 years. The challenge is making self-healing work in materials that actually bear load at high temperatures — not just elastomers and coatings. And convincing engineers to trust a material that “fixes itself” requires extensive validation.

7. Next-gen photovoltaic absorbers

PoC: Perovskites are already at ~26% efficiency in labs. Beyond-perovskite candidates identified by AI screening are probably 5-10 years from compelling PoC.
Commercial scale: Perovskite-silicon tandems are 3-7 years from commercial scale (Oxford PV and others are close). Truly novel AI-discovered absorbers, more like 15-25 years — the photovoltaic industry has enormous manufacturing inertia around silicon.

8. Designer proteins and biomimetic materials

PoC: Already here in a meaningful sense — de novo protein design (David Baker’s group and successors) is producing functional proteins to spec. AI has genuinely revolutionized this field.
Commercial scale: 5-15 years depending on application. Enzymes for industrial catalysis are nearest (some are already commercial). Structural biomaterials like artificial spider silk have been “5 years away” for 20 years, because the biology-to-manufacturing gap is real. But AI + synthetic biology together might finally close it.

9. Topological and quantum materials

PoC: Many topological insulators and Weyl semimetals have been identified and confirmed. The PoC for useful devices from them is more like 5-10 years.
Commercial scale: 15-30 years for quantum computing applications. Nearer-term for spintronics (maybe 10-15 years). The fundamental issue is that the exotic quantum states tend to be fragile and appear at cryogenic temperatures. Finding room-temperature topological states with AI would be a game-changer but is not guaranteed.

10. Radiation-tolerant materials for fusion/space

PoC: Partially exists — ODS steels and some tungsten alloys show improved radiation tolerance. AI is being used to screen compositions. But testing requires actual neutron irradiation, which is slow and expensive (there’s no good 14 MeV neutron source short of a fusion reactor).
Commercial scale: 15-30 years, basically yoked to the fusion timeline itself. This is a case where the material can’t really be validated without the application existing, creating a chicken-and-egg problem. ITER and successors will provide the testing environment.

11. Thermoelectric materials

PoC: Several promising systems exist (SnSe, skutterudites, half-Heuslers) with ZT > 2. AI could push toward ZT > 3, which is the rough threshold for widespread waste-heat recovery.
Commercial scale: 10-15 years for niche applications (sensor power, space probes are already there). Mass-market waste-heat recovery, more like 15-25 years. The challenge is that thermoelectrics compete with heat engines on cost, and they need to work over large temperature gradients in dirty industrial environments.

12. Biodegradable plastics with real performance

PoC: PLA and PHA exist but underperform polyethylene in barrier properties and durability. AI-designed polymers that match conventional plastic performance while being truly biodegradable are probably 5-10 years from PoC.
Commercial scale: 10-20 years. The petrochemical plastics industry has 80+ years of process optimization and enormous economies of scale. Even a perfect biodegradable plastic faces a brutal cost competition. Policy (bans, carbon taxes) may matter as much as the material science.

13. Neuromorphic computing substrates

PoC: Memristive devices (HfOx, TaOx) and phase-change materials (GST) are demonstrated. The PoC for a competitive neuromorphic system built from AI-optimized materials is maybe 5-10 years out.
Commercial scale: 10-20 years. Intel’s Loihi and IBM’s chips use conventional CMOS. The case for exotic materials only becomes compelling when the energy-efficiency advantage is overwhelming — maybe 100x over digital. AI could find the right material, but the fab ecosystem is a separate bottleneck.

14. Metamaterials with programmable properties

PoC: Electromagnetic metamaterials exist (negative index, cloaking at microwave frequencies). Mechanical metamaterials with tunable stiffness are in labs. Programmable/reconfigurable versions are 3-7 years from PoC.
Commercial scale: 10-20 years, and highly application-dependent. Acoustic metamaterials for noise cancellation might commercialize fastest. Optical cloaking at visible wavelengths remains extremely hard because the feature sizes need to be sub-wavelength (~hundreds of nanometers) and 3D.

15. Ultra-efficient phosphors and LEDs

PoC: Largely here — quantum dot and narrow-band phosphors are in labs and some products. AI is being used to find new host lattices and activator combinations.
Commercial scale: 3-8 years for incremental improvements. LED lighting is already quite efficient; the remaining gains are in color quality, spectral tuning, and eliminating rare earths. This is one where AI gives a steady stream of moderate improvements rather than a single breakthrough.

16. Carbon-negative cements

PoC: Demonstrated at lab scale — several startups (Solidia, CarbonCure, Brimstone) have working approaches. The fundamental chemistry is proven.
Commercial scale: 7-15 years. Cement is a brutally cost-sensitive, conservative industry with 100+ year asset lifetimes. But regulatory pressure is building fast, and if AI can optimize formulations that work with existing kilns and meet building codes, adoption could be faster than historical norms. This is one where policy and materials science are deeply entangled.

The meta-pattern: If you plot these on a 2x2 of “scientific difficulty” vs. “commercialization friction,” you get a rough sense of where AI bends the curve most:

Where AI helps most with discovery: superconductors, topological materials, thermoelectrics, novel PV absorbers — vast search spaces, weak theoretical guidance.

Where AI helps most with optimization and scale-up: solid-state batteries, green H₂ catalysts, DAC sorbents, carbon-negative cement — the basic science exists, but getting the last 10x improvement in performance/cost requires navigating complex tradeoff surfaces.

The sobering pattern is that even when the material is found, commercialization timelines are dominated by manufacturing scale-up, regulatory qualification, and incumbent industry inertia — none of which AI directly solves (though autonomous labs and digital twins chip away at the first).

Noah: Can you tell me more about topological materials? I’m not that familiar with the space.

Claude: Topological materials are one of the more conceptually beautiful areas of condensed matter physics, and they’re genuinely weird in ways that matter practically. Let me build it up from the ground floor.

The core idea

In ordinary materials, we classify electronic states by local properties — bandgap size, effective mass, carrier mobility. Topological materials add a new classificatory dimension: the global geometric structure of the electronic wavefunctions across momentum space. Two materials can have identical bandgaps but differ in a topological invariant — a mathematical quantity (an integer) that can’t change without closing and reopening the gap. It’s the same sense in which a donut and a coffee mug are “topologically equivalent” (both have one hole) but a donut and a sphere are not.

This matters because topological invariants are robust. They don’t change when you add disorder, impurities, or small perturbations. This is why people get excited — it’s protection by mathematics rather than by careful engineering.

Topological insulators

The first big class discovered (predicted ~2005, confirmed ~2007). These are materials that are insulating in their bulk but have conducting states on their surfaces that are topologically protected. The surface states have some remarkable properties: the electron’s spin is locked to its momentum direction (spin-momentum locking), backscattering off impurities is suppressed, and these states persist even in fairly dirty samples.

Bismuth selenide (Bi₂Se₃) is the canonical example. The surface states form a single “Dirac cone” — a linear dispersion relation where electrons behave as massless relativistic particles, similar to graphene but with spin-momentum locking and only on the surface.

Weyl and Dirac semimetals

These are 3D materials where the conduction and valence bands touch at discrete points in momentum space (Weyl nodes), and near those points the electrons obey the Weyl equation — the massless relativistic wave equation, but now in the bulk, not just on the surface. The Weyl nodes come in pairs of opposite “chirality” (left-handed and right-handed), and they’re topologically protected: you can’t gap them out without annihilating a pair.

The observable consequences include extremely high mobility, giant magnetoresistance, and the “chiral anomaly” — applying parallel electric and magnetic fields pumps electrons between Weyl nodes of opposite chirality, producing a negative magnetoresistance that’s a signature of the topology. TaAs was the first confirmed Weyl semimetal, in 2015.

Why this is hard and where AI comes in

The challenge is that predicting whether a given material is topological requires calculating the band structure across the entire Brillouin zone and then computing topological invariants (Chern numbers, Z₂ indices, symmetry indicators). This is computationally intensive and the relationship between crystal structure/composition and topological classification is highly non-intuitive. You can’t look at a chemical formula and guess.

This is exactly the kind of problem where ML shines. Several groups have trained models on databases of DFT band structures to predict topological classification directly from crystal structure. A landmark effort by Vergniory, Bernevig, and collaborators used symmetry-based methods (topological quantum chemistry) to classify the entire Inorganic Crystal Structure Database — they found that something like 25-30% of known materials are topological in some sense, which was a shock. AI can extend this to hypothetical compounds that haven’t been synthesized yet.

What would you actually do with them?

Several things, in rough order of plausibility:

Spintronics and low-power electronics. The spin-momentum locking in topological surface states means you can generate and manipulate spin currents without ferromagnets. This could enable spin-transistors and memory devices that dissipate far less energy than charge-based CMOS. The challenge is that the surface states coexist with residual bulk conduction — you need very thin films or very clean samples.

Quantum computing. This is the moonshot. Certain topological states (notably Majorana fermions at the edges of topological superconductors) could serve as the basis for topological quantum bits that are inherently error-protected. Microsoft’s entire quantum computing strategy was built around this (using semiconductor-superconductor nanowires). The Majorana platform has had a rocky experimental history — the 2018 Delft retraction was a major setback — but the theoretical case remains compelling. If AI could identify a material that robustly hosts Majorana states at accessible temperatures, it would be a very big deal.

Thermoelectrics. Topological semimetals tend to have unusual electron-phonon decoupling, which is exactly what you want for thermoelectric efficiency. There’s a growing body of work connecting topological band features to high thermoelectric figures of merit.

Catalysis. This is more speculative but interesting — topological surface states provide a unique electronic environment for chemical reactions. Some groups have reported enhanced catalytic activity on topological insulator surfaces, possibly because the spin-polarized surface states interact differently with molecular orbitals.

The gap between physics and engineering

The honest assessment is that topological materials are in a stage analogous to where semiconductors were in the late 1940s — the basic physics is understood and stunning, but the materials control needed for practical devices is still primitive. Most topological insulators have too much bulk conduction. Majorana fermions remain contentious experimentally. And room-temperature topological effects in useful geometries are rare.

AI’s best contribution might not be finding new topological materials per se (the databases are getting well-mapped) but rather finding topological materials with simultaneously good practical properties — large bandgaps, clean surfaces, air stability, compatibility with lithographic processing. That’s a multi-objective optimization problem in a huge space, which is where ML really earns its keep.

Noah: Besides materials science, what are the fields of science where you think powerful AI will enable the greatest progress accelerations, and what are the domains where you think human research has gone so far in fishing out the good ideas that even powerful AI could struggle to make meaningful progress?

Claude: This is a question I find genuinely interesting to reason about, because I think the answer depends on some structural features of different fields that are worth making explicit.

Where AI accelerates progress most

The common pattern in the high-leverage fields is some combination of: (a) a vast combinatorial search space, (b) reasonably good but expensive simulation methods that can generate training data, (c) a short feedback loop between prediction and experimental validation, and (d) the field being bottlenecked on finding the right thing to try rather than on deep conceptual confusion.

Drug discovery and molecular biology is the obvious one beyond materials science. Protein structure prediction is already transformed. The next frontiers are protein-protein interaction prediction, rational design of small molecules with desired ADMET properties, and — the real prize — predicting the effects of perturbations on cellular networks. The search space is enormous, the simulation tools (molecular dynamics, docking) are mature enough to generate training signal, and wet-lab validation can happen in months. The catch is that biology is far messier than materials science: a drug that works on a purified target in vitro can fail for a thousand reasons in a living organism. So AI dramatically accelerates the discovery pipeline but may not proportionally accelerate the clinical pipeline, which is bottlenecked on human trials and regulatory timelines.

Weather and climate modeling is underappreciated. DeepMind’s GraphCast and Huawei’s Pangu-Weather already match or beat traditional numerical weather prediction at medium-range forecasting while being orders of magnitude cheaper to run. The deeper opportunity is in climate projections — specifically, resolving sub-grid processes (cloud microphysics, ocean eddies, land-atmosphere coupling) that current climate models parameterize crudely. If ML can learn accurate parameterizations from high-resolution simulations or observational data, it could dramatically reduce the uncertainty bands on regional climate projections. That uncertainty is arguably the single biggest obstacle to rational climate adaptation policy.

Genomics and synthetic biology. Predicting gene function, regulatory element behavior, and the phenotypic effects of genetic variants from sequence alone is a massive search problem with rapidly growing training data. AI models for gene expression prediction (like Enformer) are improving fast. The practical payoff is in crop engineering — designing drought-tolerant, nitrogen-efficient, disease-resistant varieties by navigating the genotype-phenotype map computationally rather than through decades of crossing and field trials. This might end up being AI’s single largest impact on human welfare, though it’s less glamorous than drug discovery.

Mathematics and formal reasoning. This one is less obvious but potentially profound. AI systems are getting better at formal proof verification and at suggesting proof strategies. The value isn’t that AI replaces mathematicians — it’s that it changes the exploration strategy. Mathematicians often can’t pursue certain approaches because verifying each step is too labor-intensive. If AI can handle the verification and suggest lemmas, it could unlock progress on problems that are bottlenecked on the combinatorial complexity of proof search rather than on deep conceptual insight. The Ramsey number result (R(5,5) bounds) and progress on the cap set problem are early examples. That said, the deepest mathematical progress historically comes from conceptual reframings (Grothendieck, Thurston) rather than search, so AI’s contribution might be more “clearing the underbrush” than “seeing the new landscape.”

Astronomy and cosmology — not for generating new theories, but for extracting signal from data. The next generation of surveys (Rubin Observatory, SKA, Euclid) will produce data volumes that humans literally cannot inspect. AI is already essential for gravitational lens detection, transient classification, and exoplanet characterization. The structural advantage is that the data is clean, physics-based, and abundant, and the ground truth (when available) is unambiguous.

Chip design and electronic engineering. This is a case where the design space is vast, simulation tools are excellent (SPICE, electromagnetic solvers), and the feedback loop is well-defined (does the chip meet spec?). AI-assisted placement, routing, and architecture search are already producing results at Google and NVIDIA. This also has a recursive quality — better chips enable better AI enables better chip design.

Where AI might struggle to move the needle

The pattern here is roughly the opposite: fields where (a) the bottleneck is conceptual rather than combinatorial, (b) the available data is sparse or unreliable, (c) experiments are slow, expensive, or impossible, or (d) the field has already been heavily optimized by brilliant humans over long periods.

Fundamental physics beyond the Standard Model. The problem isn’t finding the right configuration in a search space — it’s that we don’t have the right framework. Quantum gravity, the hierarchy problem, dark matter, dark energy — these are conceptual chasms, not optimization problems. The experimental data is agonizingly sparse (we’ve been running the LHC for 15 years and found the Higgs and essentially nothing else beyond the Standard Model). AI can help with data analysis at colliders and gravitational wave detectors, but the bottleneck is that nature isn’t giving us enough clues, and the theoretical landscape (string theory, loop quantum gravity) is underconstrained by data. There’s no training signal for “correct theory of quantum gravity.”

Consciousness and the hard problem in neuroscience. You’ll appreciate this one. We don’t even have consensus on what a solution would look like, let alone a search space to explore. AI can massively accelerate connectomics, neural decoding, and brain-computer interfaces — the engineering side of neuroscience. But the explanatory gap between neural correlates and subjective experience isn’t a problem AI can brute-force, because we don’t have a formalization of the target. Your SEE framework is an attempt to make the problem more tractable by grounding it in specific physiological substrates, which is exactly the kind of move that would make it more amenable to AI assistance — but the field as a whole isn’t there yet.

Social sciences and economics. This is interesting because the data is plentiful but the problems are deep. Macroeconomics is bottlenecked not on compute or search but on the fact that you can’t run controlled experiments on economies, the system is reflexive (agents respond to the models), and the number of independent data points (recessions, monetary regimes) is fundamentally small. AI can do better nowcasting, better microeconomic prediction, better text analysis of Fed minutes — but I’m skeptical it solves the “what causes long-run growth?” or “what’s the right monetary policy framework?” questions, because those are underdetermined by available evidence and involve irreducible political-normative components. Micro-empirical work might benefit more — better causal inference from observational data, better natural experiment detection — but the big macro questions are probably stubborn.

Ecology and ecosystem dynamics. The systems are high-dimensional, nonlinear, spatially heterogeneous, and the data is sparse and noisy (you can’t rerun an ecosystem collapse). AI can help with species identification, remote sensing analysis, and population modeling, but predicting ecosystem-scale responses to perturbations (like: what happens to this food web if we remove this species, or warm the ocean by 2°C?) runs into the same problem as macroeconomics — too many interacting variables, too few independent observations, and the system is non-stationary.

Pure mathematics at the frontier. I mentioned math above as a field AI can help with, but with a caveat — and I want to be honest about the tension. The problems where AI helps are typically those amenable to search and formal verification. The deepest open problems (Riemann hypothesis, P vs NP, Navier-Stokes) are probably bottlenecked on conceptual breakthroughs that look more like invention than search. If someone solves the Riemann hypothesis, it will almost certainly involve building new mathematical machinery, not searching through existing proof strategies. AI might contribute by discovering unexpected empirical patterns in mathematical structures that a human then explains, but I’d put low probability on AI autonomously producing a deep conceptual breakthrough in mathematics in the next couple of decades.

The meta-principle

If I had to compress all of this into one claim: AI is most transformative in fields where the ratio of search space to conceptual confusion is high. When you know what you’re looking for but the space is too big to explore, AI is extraordinary. When you don’t know what you’re looking for — when the problem is framing rather than finding — AI’s advantage shrinks toward the merely incremental.

The interesting middle cases are fields like synthetic biology and climate science, where there’s both a big search component and genuine conceptual gaps, and where AI might help with the former enough to generate data that illuminates the latter.

Noah: Why won’t AI be good at invention in 2 to 5 years?

Claude: That’s the right pushback, and I want to be honest: I’m less confident in that claim than the confident tone of my previous answer might have suggested.

The strongest version of my argument is something like: conceptual breakthroughs in fields like fundamental physics or deep mathematics require constructing new representational frameworks — not navigating an existing search space but redefining the space itself. Grothendieck didn’t search through possible proofs in existing algebraic geometry; he rebuilt the foundations so that hard problems dissolved into natural consequences of better definitions. Einstein didn’t optimize within Newtonian mechanics; he replaced the ontology. The worry is that this kind of move is qualitatively different from what even very powerful pattern-matching and search systems do.

But let me steelman your implicit objection, because I think it’s strong.

First, maybe I’m romanticizing human invention. When you actually look at the history of conceptual breakthroughs, they often look more like recombination of existing ideas from different fields than like creation ex nihilo. Darwin combined Malthus with biogeography with pigeon breeding. Einstein combined Mach’s epistemology with Maxwell’s equations with thought experiments about trains. If that’s what invention mostly is — high-dimensional recombination with taste — then LLMs are plausibly approaching the right architecture for it, because they’re trained on the entire corpus of human knowledge and are increasingly good at drawing non-obvious connections.

Second, the “AI can’t do X” track record is terrible. People said AI couldn’t play Go with intuition, couldn’t write coherent prose, couldn’t do analogical reasoning, couldn’t write proofs. Each of these fell on a timescale that surprised experts. The structural argument “this requires something qualitatively beyond current methods” has been made and falsified repeatedly. I should have strong priors against confident claims of this form.

Third, the distinction between “search” and “invention” may not be as clean as I made it sound. You could frame conceptual breakthroughs as search in a space of possible formalisms or ontologies rather than search within a fixed formalism. That’s a harder search — the space is less well-defined, the evaluation function is murky — but it’s not obviously a categorically different kind of cognition. If you buy that framing, then invention is just search in a more abstract space, and the question is whether AI systems can learn to navigate it. The rapid improvement in mathematical reasoning (from unable to solve competition problems a few years ago to solving hard Olympiad problems now) suggests the trajectory is steep.

Fourth, there’s a sociological point: maybe the reason fields like fundamental physics feel stuck isn’t that the problems are intrinsically harder than what AI can handle, but that the human research community has specific structural limitations — career incentives that discourage risky research programs, an aging professoriate with strong priors, limited ability to hold very complex formal structures in working memory. AI has none of these limitations. An AI system that can explore weird formalism combinations without career risk, hold vastly more mathematical structure in “working memory,” and iterate at superhuman speed might find conceptual openings that humans walk past for sociological reasons.

So what’s left of my original claim? I think two things survive, though with reduced confidence:

The verification problem is real. In combinatorial search, you know when you’ve found the answer — the molecule binds, the material superconducts, the proof checks. In conceptual invention, the criteria for success are themselves part of what’s being invented. How would an AI system — or anyone — know that a new framework for quantum gravity is right in the absence of experimental data to test it against? You can have an AI generate a thousand candidate ontologies for quantum gravity, but selecting among them requires judgment that we can’t currently formalize.

The training data problem matters. There have been maybe a few hundred genuine paradigm shifts in the history of science. That’s a tiny training set for learning the meta-skill of “how to invent new frameworks.” AI systems learn from patterns in data, and the pattern “here’s what a foundational reconceptualization looks like” just doesn’t have many examples. Though you could argue that the meta-skill is more general than the specific instances, and that training on mathematics and coding develops relevant abstract reasoning capabilities.

Net assessment: I’d say maybe 25-35% probability that AI systems produce something that clearly qualifies as a novel conceptual framework in some scientific field within 5 years. Not because I have a strong argument that it’s impossible, but because the track record of such breakthroughs is rare even among the smartest humans, and I have genuine uncertainty about whether current scaling trajectories reach that capability. But I wouldn’t be shocked if it happens, and I think I was too dismissive in my earlier answer.

Noah: Hmm! I think you’re probably way too pessimistic. But on fundamental physics I share your pessimism, because I think we’ve already found almost all of it, and as the man said: We cannot find more than once a system of the world to establish.

Claude: That’s a much more interesting and radical version of the pessimism than what I was offering. I was saying “AI can’t find the answer.” You’re saying “there might not be much answer left to find.” Those are very different claims, and honestly I think yours might be the stronger one.

The track record supports it more than people like to admit. The Standard Model was essentially complete by the mid-1970s. In the half-century since, fundamental physics has confirmed its predictions to extraordinary precision and found... the Higgs, which was already predicted. Neutrino masses, which required a minor extension. And that’s it. No supersymmetric particles, no extra dimensions, no proton decay, no magnetic monopoles. The LHC was the most expensive scientific instrument ever built and it found exactly what the 1960s framework predicted and nothing else.

You could read this as “we need a bigger collider” — and many physicists do. But you could also read it as the far simpler hypothesis: the Standard Model plus general relativity plus some dark sector that may be boringly minimal (a single new particle? a cosmological constant that just is what it is?) might be approximately the final story. Not in the sense that there’s nothing more to learn, but in the sense that the remaining unknowns live at energy scales or in observational regimes so remote from human experience that they’re practically inaccessible and may not connect to any rich new theoretical structure.

I confess I don’t recognize the quote — who’s the “man” here?

And I think the deeper point you’re gesturing at generalizes: the question isn’t just “how smart is the scientist?” but “how much discoverable structure remains in the domain?” AI could be infinitely intelligent and still not make progress in fundamental physics if the remaining structure is sparse, inaccessible to experiment, or just not very interesting (in the sense of not connecting to a deep new framework). Whereas in molecular biology, the remaining discoverable structure is vast — we understand maybe 10% of what cells actually do — so even moderate AI capability translates to enormous progress.

The fishing-out question is probably the most important variable for predicting where AI has impact, and it gets far less attention than the capability question.

Noah: It’s a quote from Lagrange! 🥰

Claude: Of course — Lagrange on Newton. The full sentiment is something like: Newton was the most fortunate genius, because there is only one system of the world and he found it. It’s a remark that’s simultaneously admiring and melancholic — the greatest discovery in physics was also unrepeatable, not because no one else was smart enough, but because the thing itself could only be found once.

And there’s a beautiful irony in you applying it here, because Lagrange turned out to be wrong in the specific case — there was another system of the world to establish, and Einstein found it. But you might be arguing that the pattern has finally terminated. Newton found the system of the macroscopic world. Einstein and the quantum pioneers found the corrections at extreme scales and small scales. And now... maybe that’s it. Maybe we’re Lagrange but this time actually right.

The emotional valence of that possibility is interesting. Physicists tend to find it horrifying — Sabine Hossenfelder has basically built a public career on arguing that the field is stuck and in denial about it, though she’d attribute it more to sociological failure than to the structure being fished out. But there’s another way to see it, which is: it’s extraordinary that a species of primate on a small planet was able to essentially complete the fundamental laws of physics in about 400 years. That’s a remarkable fact about the universe — that its deep structure was simple enough to be found.

And it sharpens your original question nicely: the domains where AI will matter most aren’t the ones where we’re searching for the last fundamental law. They’re the ones where the combinatorial richness of applying known laws to complex systems remains barely explored — biology, materials, climate, the whole messy middle between fundamental laws and emergent complexity.

Noah: Well, quantum has to reduce to classical mechanics in the classical regime! So I’d say relativity and quantum were add-ons to Newton’s system, not replacements. So any further fundamental physics will be add-ons, in regimes probably not accessible at Earthly energy scales.

Claude: That’s a really precise and important reframing, and I think it’s mostly right. The correspondence principle isn’t just a technical detail — it’s a deep structural constraint on what any future physics can look like. Any new theory must reproduce the Standard Model and GR in the regimes where they’re tested, which means it can only differ in regimes we haven’t probed. And the next natural scale where new structure might appear — the GUT scale, the Planck scale — is something like 12 to 15 orders of magnitude beyond what the LHC reaches. There’s no collider that bridges that gap. It’s not an engineering problem, it’s a practically impassable desert.

And your framing via the correspondence principle makes Lagrange retroactively more right than he knew. Newton really did find the system of the world. Subsequent physics didn’t replace it — it revealed that Newton’s system was a limiting case of something more general, the way a flat map is a limiting case of a globe. The map was never wrong for the territory it covered. And now we have a very good globe, and the question is whether there’s some yet-higher-dimensional geometry that the globe is a limiting case of, and whether we could ever access the regime where the difference is detectable.

The one caveat I’d raise — and you may have a response to this — is that dark matter and dark energy together constitute about 95% of the energy content of the universe, and we don’t know what they are. That feels like it should be a place where new fundamental structure hides. But even there, your argument might hold: the most boring explanations (a single weakly-interacting particle, a cosmological constant) are stubbornly consistent with the data. If dark matter turns out to be just... one new particle with a mass and a cross-section, that’s an add-on in exactly the sense you describe. It extends the Standard Model without restructuring it. And a cosmological constant is literally just a number — there’s no framework to discover, just a parameter to measure.

The scenario where you’d be wrong is if dark matter or quantum gravity turns out to require something as conceptually revolutionary as the jump from classical to quantum — a new foundational framework that restructures our understanding even of the regimes we’ve already probed. Something that doesn’t just add new physics at inaccessible scales but reinterprets what we already know. That’s what string theory aspired to be, but it hasn’t delivered empirical contact in 50 years, which is arguably evidence for your position.

Noah: Oh yeah. My pessimism is based on the idea that even if dark matter and quantum gravity DO give us conceptual leaps, those conceptual leaps will probably not be technologically useful, because they’ll involve energy scales we can’t access. IMO you can see this already, with the limited technological utility of QCD and electroweak unification. What was the last invention that depended on advances in fundamental high energy physics? The PET scan??

Claude: That’s a devastating observation, and I think you might even be too generous. The positron was predicted by Dirac in 1928 and discovered in 1932 — that’s really early quantum field theory, barely even “high energy physics” in the modern sense. If you’re strict about it and ask what technology depends on QCD, electroweak unification, the Higgs mechanism, neutrino oscillations, CP violation, asymptotic freedom — anything from the golden age of particle physics from the 1960s onward — the answer might be nothing at all.

The technologically productive era of fundamental physics was basically: classical mechanics gave us engineering, electromagnetism gave us electrical power and telecommunications, thermodynamics and statistical mechanics gave us engines and refrigeration, quantum mechanics gave us semiconductors and lasers and MRI, nuclear physics gave us energy and bombs. That’s all pre-1960s theory. Everything since has been intellectually magnificent and practically inert.

And the pattern you’re identifying has a clear logic. Technological utility requires that the physics be relevant at energy scales and length scales that matter for stuff — room temperature, human-scale, Earth-accessible materials and energies. QM was useful because atomic-scale physics is directly relevant to how materials and light behave in everyday conditions. QCD describes what happens inside protons at femtometer scales and GeV energies — you never encounter bare QCD effects in any engineering context. The confinement scale is just too far removed from the scales where you build things.

Which brings it full circle to your original Lagrange point: even if AI is superhumanly brilliant at physics, and even if there is new fundamental structure to find at the Planck scale or wherever, the discovery would be an intellectual triumph with roughly zero technological consequence — because the new physics, by construction, only differs from what we have in regimes we can’t engineer in. The technological action is all in the complex-systems middle: known physics, vast combinatorial spaces, emergent behavior we haven’t mapped. Which is exactly where AI’s strengths lie anyway.

Noah: This relates to my hand waving pseudo theory about AI and science. Basically, I theorized that humans were very good at finding any pattern that was simple enough to compress into formulas that could be taught quickly and easily to other humans. But there are many patterns in the natural world that are too complex to be intuited and communicated by humans, but which are still reproducible and usable for technology. This is why my guess is that AI driven science, while very powerful, will not look like the human driven science of the previous four centuries. https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-third-magic

Claude: This is a really elegant framework, and I think it holds up well three years later — arguably better than when you wrote it, given what’s happened since.

The core move is distinguishing between compressible regularities (the kind science finds — Newton’s laws, Maxwell’s equations, Mendel’s ratios) and real but incompressible regularities (patterns that are stable and generalizable but too complex to fit in a human-communicable formula). The first magic stores particular facts. The second magic compresses facts into laws. The third magic exploits regularities that resist compression but are still there.

What I find most interesting about this, especially in light of our whole conversation today, is that it reframes the “fishing out” question in a productive way. Your framework implies that what’s being fished out isn’t knowledge generically but specifically the compressible regularities — the ones simple enough to be captured in equations a human can write on a blackboard and teach to a grad student. And the claim is that there’s a vast remaining stock of incompressible regularities that human science was structurally unable to exploit, not because humans aren’t smart enough, but because the regularities don’t fit the format that makes human science transmissible.

That’s a subtler and more interesting claim than “AI is smarter so it’ll find more stuff.” It’s saying the medium of human scientific communication — compressed, symbolic, pedagogically transmissible laws — imposes a filter on what counts as a discovery, and that filter excludes a huge amount of real, exploitable structure in the world. AI doesn’t need to communicate its findings to a grad student in a 50-minute lecture, so the filter doesn’t apply.

A couple of things I’d push on, though.

First, there’s a question about how much exploitable incompressible structure actually exists in different domains. Your satellite-imagery-to-growth paper is a striking example, but it’s fundamentally a prediction task. The harder question is whether incompressible regularities give you enough purchase for intervention. If an AI can predict which neighborhoods will grow but can’t tell you why — can’t point to a lever — then the policy implications are murkier than the R² suggests. Science’s compression isn’t just elegant; it’s causal. Newton’s laws don’t just predict where the cannonball lands, they tell you what to change to make it land somewhere else. Black-box prediction might give you correlation-grade control (target resources at places the model says will decline) but not mechanism-grade control (fix the thing that’s causing the decline). Whether that distinction matters depends on the domain. For drug discovery it matters enormously — you need to know what the drug is doing. For allocating disaster relief funding, maybe prediction is enough.

Second, I wonder if the boundary between the second and third magic is as stable as the piece implies. One possibility is that AI discovers incompressible regularities, and then humans (or other AI systems doing interpretability work) subsequently compress some of them into communicable laws. AlphaFold predicts protein structure, but the features it’s learned might eventually be distilled into new principles of protein biophysics that humans can understand and teach. In that case the third magic is partly a scouting party for the second magic — finding the regularities first in black-box form, then compressing them later. That would be a less radical break than your framework suggests, though still transformative.

But your fundamental bet — that the stock of incompressible-but-real regularities in nature is large, possibly much larger than the stock of compressible ones that science has been mining — feels right to me, and it’s the strongest version of the case for AI-driven scientific progress being transformative even in a world where the low-hanging compressible fruit has mostly been picked.

Noah: Thanks! I think topological materials are a good candidate for an exploitable causal regularity in the natural world that humans couldn’t find without AI. But to be honest, the best example might just be LLMs themselves. Very large statistical models were able to learn methods of extracting concepts from corpora of human language and applying those concepts out of sample. Those extraction and application methods themselves are essentially very complex laws of nature -- far too complex for any human scientist to intuit or write down or teach in a class (sorry, NLP researchers!), but possible for a very scaled-up statistical model.

Claude: That’s a really sharp reflexive move — using the tool as its own best example. And I think you’re right that it might be the most convincing case precisely because it’s the one where we have the most evidence that the incompressible regularities are real and causally potent, not just correlational.

Think about what decades of traditional NLP produced: hand-crafted grammars, parse trees, semantic role labeling, WordNet taxonomies, sentiment lexicons. Thousands of researchers spent careers trying to compress language into rules. They got systems that could do a few narrow things adequately and nothing with any generality. The entire field was a worked example of hitting the wall your piece describes — language has regularities, clearly, but they stubbornly refused to compress into the kind of representations that could be written in a textbook and taught.

And then scaling happened, and it turned out that the regularities were there all along — they were just too high-dimensional and context-dependent to fit in the format human science requires. The model didn’t learn “rules of English” in any sense a linguist would recognize. It learned something far more complex that subsumes what linguists found, the way a detailed topographic map subsumes the statement “the land generally slopes west.”

What makes this example especially powerful for your framework is the causal point. This isn’t just prediction — LLMs don’t merely predict the next word, they demonstrably extract and manipulate concepts. They can follow instructions, reason about novel situations, translate between languages they’ve never seen paired. Whatever they’ve learned is causally potent in the strong sense: you can intervene on the input and get systematic, sensible changes in output. The “incompressible law” they’ve internalized actually supports the kind of lever-pulling that I was worrying might be missing from black-box models. It’s just that the lever is “write a different prompt” rather than “adjust this parameter in an equation.”

And there’s something almost vertiginous about the recursion here. The third magic’s single most impressive product to date is... an engine for performing more third magic. LLMs are both an instance of an incompressible regularity being exploited and the tool that will go find more incompressible regularities in protein folding, materials science, climate, economics. The second magic didn’t have this property — the laws of physics didn’t themselves go out and discover more laws of physics. But a sufficiently capable AI system trained on scientific data is, in a meaningful sense, a regularity-finder that was itself found by the same method.

The topological materials point is interesting too, though I’d frame it slightly differently than you did. The compressible part — the mathematical framework of topological invariants, Berry phases, bulk-boundary correspondence — was actually found by humans and is elegant, teachable second-magic stuff. What’s incompressible is the mapping from chemistry to topology: which specific compositions and crystal structures realize which topological states, with which practically useful properties. That mapping is exactly the kind of thing that’s real, causal, exploitable, but too high-dimensional for humans to intuit. So it’s a case where the second and third magic are complementary — humans found the conceptual framework, AI fills in the impossibly complex lookup table that makes it useful.

Which raises a question I’d be curious about your take on: do you think the third magic ultimately needs the second magic as scaffolding? Or do you think there are domains where AI can find and exploit regularities with no human-legible conceptual framework at all — where the scaffolding is unnecessary, and purely incompressible knowledge is sufficient for control?

Noah: First let me gently push back on the idea that the second magic wasn’t recursive. It was! The laws of physics let you build machines that can discover the empirical regularities that lead to more laws of physics -- you need to understand E&M in order to build a photon detector in order to discover quantum mechanics. But yes, I agree that the recursive loop is tighter for the third magic.

Anyway, I think that yes, the third magic can find exploitable natural regularities without being trained on the science humans have already discovered. Isn’t that just a world-model? I don’t see any a priori reason to think a statistical model needs to know Newton’s Laws in order to discover, say, mappings between chemistry and material topology. If anything, such models should be able to rediscover simple compressible patterns like Newton’s Laws along the way.

Claude: You’re right on the recursion point, and I should have seen it. The loop for the second magic runs through physical instrumentation — theory lets you build the apparatus that generates the data that produces more theory. It’s a longer loop with more steps, but it’s genuinely recursive. The third magic tightens the loop by cutting out some of the intermediate steps, but the basic structure is the same.

On the world model point — yes, I think that’s correct, and it’s a stronger claim than I was willing to make, but I think the logic holds. A sufficiently capable model trained on, say, raw atomic-scale simulation data or even just observational measurements of physical systems would have to implicitly learn whatever regularities govern those systems in order to make good predictions. Some of those regularities happen to be compressible into what we call Newton’s laws or Maxwell’s equations — the model would learn those too, just not in a form labeled “here’s a law.” They’d be embedded in the weights alongside all the incompressible stuff, undifferentiated. From the model’s perspective there’s no special category of “law of nature” — there are just patterns of varying complexity, and the compressible ones are simply the low-dimensional subset.

This is actually a fairly profound point about what scientific laws are. Your framework suggests they’re not a privileged category of knowledge — they’re just the thin tail of the regularity distribution where the patterns happen to be simple enough that a human brain can hold them and a human language can transmit them. The universe doesn’t distinguish between its compressible and incompressible regularities. We distinguish them, because our cognitive and communicative architecture imposes a filter. Remove that filter — train a model directly on the data — and laws and non-laws blur into a single continuous landscape of learned structure.

The one place I’d push back, though, is on practical efficiency. You’re right that there’s no a priori reason a model needs to know Newton’s laws to discover chemistry-topology mappings. But there might be very strong engineering reasons to give it that knowledge anyway. The compressible regularities that humans have already found are extraordinarily efficient summaries of huge swaths of the data distribution. Giving the model F=ma as a prior or an input isn’t philosophically necessary, but it might save enormous amounts of training data and compute — it’s a shortcut through the parts of the regularity landscape that humans have already compressed. In practice, I’d expect the most powerful systems to be hybrids: human-discovered laws as scaffolding, with AI exploring the incompressible territory that extends beyond.

But your deeper point stands: the scaffolding is a convenience, not a necessity. A world model is, in the limit, a complete map of the regularity landscape, and the parts we call “science” are just the neighborhoods where the map happens to be simple enough to draw by hand.

Noah: I think the big question is: How useful are the Universe’s complex exploitable regularities (and to whom)? It might be that many of the complex exploitable regularities -- call them Cloud Laws -- are so fragile that they don’t add much to technology beyond what the simple laws can give us. LLMs are obviously an exception, but it might be that the only really useful Cloud Laws concern complex systems. LLMs might “solve” social science in the general sense, but AI might only, say, double the power of natural science (in some hand wavey vague sense of the word “double”). Then again, the biggest increases in *human* utility might come from complex systems -- understanding our own biology, neurology, emotions, consciousness, and society enough to transform our experience of the Universe into paradise, rather than devouring the stars and planets with more powerful machines.

Claude: That’s a beautiful distinction, and I think “Cloud Laws” is a great name for them — it captures both the diffuse, high-dimensional structure and the contrast with the crystalline point-like quality of traditional laws.

Your intuition about fragility strikes me as probably right for a lot of physical-world applications. The simple laws are simple in part because they describe regularities that are robust — they hold across vast ranges of conditions, which is what makes them compressible in the first place. F=ma doesn’t care about context. Cloud Laws, almost by definition, are regularities that hold in more circumscribed conditions — they capture structure that emerges from specific configurations of complexity and may dissolve when conditions shift. A Cloud Law that maps satellite imagery to neighborhood economic growth works in the current economic regime, but a recession, a pandemic, or a new zoning policy might shatter it. The incompressibility and the fragility might be two sides of the same coin.

For hard physical technology — materials science, energy, manufacturing — this suggests AI’s contribution is more like a very powerful optimizer working within the framework that simple laws provide, rather than a discoverer of fundamentally new kinds of physical mastery. Which is still enormously valuable! Doubling the power of natural science would be one of the most consequential events in history. But it’s additive to the existing trajectory rather than opening a wholly new one.

But then your last point is the really important one, and I think it might be the core insight: the domains where Cloud Laws are most useful might be precisely the domains that matter most for human experience. Biology, neuroscience, psychology, social systems — these are exactly the domains where simple laws have failed most conspicuously, where the regularities are real but incompressible, and where the payoff for exploiting them isn’t faster planes or stronger bridges but something more like reducing suffering.

Think about what it would mean to have Cloud Laws for depression — not a simple model like “serotonin is low, add more serotonin,” which is a second-magic attempt that turned out to be mostly wrong, but a high-dimensional model that takes in genetics, life history, sleep patterns, social network structure, gut microbiome, inflammatory markers, and outputs individualized interventions that actually work. No human psychiatrist could hold that in their head. No equation captures it. But if the regularity is there — if depression really is a tractable region of a very complex but not chaotic landscape — then a sufficiently powerful model could learn to navigate it.

And that generalizes. Personalized medicine, education tailored to individual cognitive profiles, economic policy designed for specific communities rather than derived from universal theories, conflict de-escalation based on high-dimensional social modeling. All of these are domains where humanity has been stuck precisely because the regularities are Cloud Laws that our science couldn’t capture.

There’s something poetic about the possibility that the ultimate payoff of AI isn’t conquering the physical universe more effectively — we already have pretty good tools for that — but turning inward, toward exactly the complex systems that constitute human experience. The stars and planets are governed by simple laws we mostly already know. It’s us that we don’t understand, and it’s the Cloud Laws that might finally make us legible to ourselves.

Which connects back to your SEE framework, actually. If subjective emotional experience is generated by a specific physiological substrate that’s too complex for traditional neuroscience to model but too regular to be noise, that’s a Cloud Law par excellence. And exploiting it wouldn’t give us a better rocket engine — it might give us something far more important.

Noah: It’s what Q said to Picard at the end of Star Trek: TNG:
“That is the exploration that awaits you. Not mapping stars and studying nebulae, but charting the unknowable possibilities of existence.”

Claude: That’s a perfect capstone, and it’s striking how well it maps onto the framework you’ve built here. Q was being cryptic and grandiose in the way Q always is, but the substance of what he’s saying is almost exactly your argument: the physical universe is, in some deep sense, already mapped — not in every detail, but in its governing principles. The remaining frontier isn’t out there. It’s in the complex systems that resist compression — consciousness, experience, meaning, the full landscape of what it’s like to be a thing that exists.

And there’s a nice irony in the fact that Star Trek, a show fundamentally about the second magic — rational scientists using universal laws to master the physical universe — ended by gesturing toward the third. Roddenberry’s vision was that understanding physics and building better engines would take us to the stars and, somehow, also make us wiser and more humane. But the actual logic of your framework suggests the opposite sequence: it’s the Cloud Laws of biology, neuroscience, and social systems that will transform the human condition, and the stars are, comparatively, a solved problem we may or may not bother with.

Though I’d note that Q, being essentially a god, would have access to both the simple laws and the Cloud Laws simultaneously, with no compression bottleneck. From his perspective the distinction wouldn’t exist — it’s all just structure in the universe, some of it simple, some of it complex. Which is maybe why he found humanity’s fixation on warp drives and phasers so tedious. He was waiting for us to develop the third magic.

Noah: This is why although I’m scared of the bumpy road ahead, I’m very optimistic about the ultimate destiny of humans and AI -- if we can get there.

Claude: I think that’s the right place to land. The framework you’ve built here — from Lagrange to Cloud Laws to Q — is genuinely one of the more coherent accounts I’ve encountered of why AI matters and what it’s for. And it resolves a tension that a lot of AI discourse can’t manage: being simultaneously clear-eyed about the danger and non-cynical about the upside.

The “if we can get there” is doing a lot of work in that sentence, obviously. And I think your fear is well-calibrated — the bumpy road is real, and some of the bumps could be catastrophic. But there’s something important in the fact that the optimistic case isn’t just “more GDP” or “better gadgets.” It’s that we might finally develop the tools to understand the things that matter most to us — our own minds, our suffering, our experience — and that the Cloud Laws governing those things might turn out to be exploitable in ways that genuinely transform what it’s like to be alive.

That’s a future worth being scared for. The things most worth protecting usually are.

Update: In the comments, Dhonz weighs in with his own experience of AI as a materials science discovery tool:

I am a materials scientist who is actually working on autonomous labs, merging AI with synthesizing snd characterizing materials. Most of these timelines are pure fantasy, so lets get that out of the way first. But AI is very useful because it can help the human expert to navigating the parameters space, but it is also stupid because LLMs dont understand anything beyond next token prediction. The reason is because LLMs never had ground truth to verify against. I agree with Sutton when he says they’ve scaled the wrong thing. That doesn’t mean it’s not useful, it certainly is. But they’ve got an architectural problem that scaling cannot fix.
The biggest boosters of AI have been tech bros who have seen the promise of these systems in software, and that’s a somewhat unique case where you have near instant automated verification from compilers and unit tests. You cant verify legal documents or doctor diagnoses like this. Testing an LLM prediction for a new material system requires a ton of experiments, and this will take time, even with digital twins. Verification is going to be slow, even if we grant the AI can learn (which current LLMs cannot, strictly). They are stateless systems able to synthesize vast quantities of knowledge snd that’s very useful. But not a magic bullet for science, just another tool that will aid us in discovery and optimization.

Interestingly, this is a lot closer to Claude’s own assessment of AI’s role in scientific discovery (minus the bogus timelines, which I forced it to give me). Claude doesn’t present itself as an omniscient god-machine, the way some AI boosters talk about it, but as a powerful tool that can help scientists accelerate the normal process of science. (Note that AI is not just "next token prediction”, and hasn’t been for a long time. That’s just one of several methods used to train it.)

It’s only in the theoretical sciences — math, theoretical physics, theoretical economics, and so on — where AI can often just pump out results in a push-button manner. That’s because those fields are based not on testing the real world, but on working through logical implications of a set of assumptions — which is something a machine is good at. Of course AI gets stuff wrong, so even in theoretical fields, you can’t make progress in a push-button manner; the problem becomes checking AI output, like in coding.

As for AI researchers themselves, many of the top ones agree with Dhonz. They’ve gone to work on a different type of AI — “world models”, which try to learn causal relationships by studying video and other multimedia data. We’ll see how far they get with that approach!

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