Not sure if you like “Country & Western Music” or if you hate it, but if you can at least tolerate it – see “The Bitter Lesson” video in Ethan Mollick’s post – a short song about AI…
Basically Rich Sutton wrote a two page essay some time ago (2019) [1] – that said every time we try to teach AI “manually” we get 20% of the way there at best (“a ladder with the first steps”) – and it is slow and hard, but if we can just provide the rules of the game and enough computer power, and sometimes enough data (but often it can generate its own data) that the machine will find a better way to get to high performance. Oddly, this may be an argument for not manually building guardrails, but letting the systems learn threw massive computation to build its own better guardrails – this is the approach explored in Chapter 12 Acquiring Values in Bostrom’s “SuperIntelligence” book [2] about Coherent Extrapolated Volution (CEV) [3]. . Perhaps CEV is the path to Deming & Hamel (2025) “Blueprint for a Spacefaring Civilizations: The Science of Volition” society without coercion [4]. Of course, there are many connections to the service research related literature, both recent 2026, MatrAIx [5] and old 2005, hyperreality [6].
See Ethan Mollick’s substack and country western “The Bitter Lesson” video [7] – just click on the picture to see the video and hear the country western song …
Thanks, -Jim
References
[1] BiblioS2019 Sutton R (2019) The Bitter Lesson.
URL: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~eunsol/courses/data/bitter_lesson.pdf
Quotes: “The biggest lesson that can be read from 70 years of AI research is that general methods that leverage computation are ultimately the most effective, and by a large margin. The ultimate reason for this is Moore’s law, or rather its generalization of continued exponentially falling cost per unit of computation.”;
[2] BiblioB2016 Bostrom N (2016) Super Intelligence.
URL: https://www.amazon.com/Superintelligence-Dangers-Strategies-Nick-Bostrom/dp/0198739834/
[3] Coherent Extrapolated Volition (CEV)
URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherent_extrapolated_volition
Quotes: “Coherent extrapolated volition (CEV) is a theoretical framework in the field of AI alignment describing an approach by which an artificial superintelligence (ASI) would act on a benevolent supposition of what humans could want if they were more knowledgeable, more rational, had more time to think, and had matured together as a society, as opposed to humanity’s current individual or collective preferences.[1] It was proposed by Eliezer Yudkowsky in 2004 as part of his work on friendly AI.[2]”;
[4] BiblioD2025 Deming J, Hamel M (2025) Blueprint for a Spacefaring Civilization: The Science of Volition.
URL: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DV4HB4R5
[5] BiblioM2026 MatrAIx (2026) MatrAIx: Simulating the World with 8.3B Persona Agents
URL: https://youtu.be/cNFkz9Wo1y4
Quotes: “JCS: The key point is that the cost generating persona is dropping rapidly. This is a long-held dream in the service science community – see https://service-science.info/archives/2264 . Of course, this may also sound like science fiction “The Matrix” or for those who remember the Hitchhikers Guide, where Earth is a giant super-computer calculating for millions of years – the answer was 42.”
[6] BiblioE2005 Edvardsson B, Enquist B, Johnston R (2005) Cocreating customer value through hyperreality in the prepurchase service experience. Journal of Service Research. 8(2):149-61.
URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1094670505279729
[7] BiblioM2026 Mollick E (2026) The Dot and the Swarm.
URL: https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/the-dot-and-the-swarm
Quotes: ” The history of the Bitter Le—— you know what? I don’t really need to explain the Bitter Lesson, I asked Claude to do it in a music video. With one prompt, Fable wrote the lyrics and submitted it to Suno; Opus 5.5 did everything else using code alone without any image generation (How did Opus 5.5 pull this off? The Bitter Lesson tells you!). I gave no feedback at all.”;