Flutterby™! : A Camera, Not an Engine

A Camera, Not an Engine — Modern AI puts us firmly into an age of exploration of computational reality

The title of this essay inverts the title of a book about economics by Donald Mackenzie, An Engine Not a Camera. The premise of that book is that economics theories are engines that produce (via policies and institutions) economic behaviors, but trick us into thinking they merely describe them. Modern AI has the reverse problem. It’s a camera that tricks us into thinking it’s an engine that “generates” rather than “sees” things. As an aside, this weird symmetry makes me suspect that economics and modern AI are true duals of some sort — maybe the way to get to AI with agency is to bolt on an economics theory.