Karpathy's keel

Andrej Karpathy is so clearly one of the good ones. It’s not his bril­liance that makes him notable, but rather his apparent com­pul­sion for public com­mu­ni­ca­tion and indeed public service — along with his even-keeled sanity.

All of this is on dis­play in his long con­ver­sa­tion with Dwarkesh Patel. Andrej models a flavor of curiosity and opti­mism that remains guarded and grounded. Around the 1:08 mark, when he notes that “knowledge work” accounts for a rel­a­tively small por­tion of the economy, I wanted to stand up and cheer.

Like Andrej, I’m skep­tical about the dis­con­ti­nuity of the Indus­trial Revolution, which for Dwarkesh is a foun­da­tional assumption. Instead, I would say it was a pro­found transformation … in a long chain of pro­found transformations! One of the rea­sons the period seems to “pop” is that it lit­er­ally invented most of the mea­sures of an economy that we still use today–even per­haps the idea of “an economy”. Call it a home-field advantage.