I was fortunate in that Internet cafes started happening and I could volunteer to administer networks and troubleshooting for them while getting PC time for free. I also maintained PCs for friends with businesses who could afford one. So the Pravetz sparked my curiosity but the real growth happened on begged and borrowed time from other peoples computers.

They had Pravets computers and robotic arms in rural classrooms in places that didn’t have traffic lights, or English teachers. Chess and Math competitions as well, were accessible everywhere. Those were all self-feedback mechanisms that are cheap but allow an interested individual to iterate infinitely to reach advanced levels. Even if only a tiny subset of any population has the cognitive surplus to meddle with programming and math, they had easy access to fulfill that and be found. In the US, schools enable that with sports, which monetize as entertainment venues. In the Eastern Block they had that with brains. As soon as the stupid restrictions on travel were lifted, the brains knew to leave the other restrictions and immigrate to places that reward cognitive surplus.

Intelligence builds with reinforcement learning on context that gives you feedback - which makes it easy to iterate on. If you’re not making those types of games/tools/systems available to kids, you are going to lose that generation to more attention grabbing stuff like Youtube or sports.

So if we consider AI a chemical substance - if inserted in with limited context in tools with specific intent, can it be useful beyond tools available at this moment?

You can trust just any liquid that looks like water, just as you can trust just any model or especially any inference provider (they can switch models to save money or mess with other key parameters, or insert ads). You have to test your water supply and your AI supply regularly. And benchmark new sources. We’ll see labeling and quality guarantees in future suppliers. We’ll see personal models and model families trained and refined as brands for reliability. Bottled neatly for you by certified suppliers.

In the mean time we all just found our selves out of a desert and splashing around in this funky thing that we now find on the ground and falling for free from clouds.

Now if you are in a high trust society, you may have a lot of leveraged businesses or governments who have gotten loans or permission to do something based on past trust history. If the trust degrades systematically Investors may want returns faster, or interest rates go up, or partnerships don’t happen. That’s why low trust places don’t grow as fast - trust is the oil for growth engines and lack of it is sand for the same.

Corruption also does a lot of small-profit-for-the-corrupt that leads to massive damage to the overall society via second and third order effects. (example: someone stealing copper cables that stop electricity to entire cities for a while).