The eternal complement

Genius machines might prove most valuable by handling monotonous work rather than breakthrough thinking. Throughout history, advancing human progress has required increasingly large support systems of execution and institutional infrastructure alongside frontier ideas, with the bottleneck shifting from having good ideas to having the capacity to realize them. As AI becomes capable of both brilliant insights and routine labor, it could either relieve today's execution shortage by giving more people the support staff to build their own ideas, or it could create a new problem by generating ideas faster than supporting infrastructure can absorb them. The central question is whether the complements needed to make productive use of AI's insights will grow, shrink, or remain stable.