Einstein famously said "Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited." In school we're still taught that cramming information equals intelligence.
There are layers to that. Kim Peek, the real Rain Man, memorized twelve thousand books and couldn't button his own shirt.
AI is even better at that kind of recall and genuinely bad at anything creative. When it hands you something novel, that says more about the gaps in your knowledge than the intelligence of the machine. And the price of the uncreative recall is showing. Bubble or not, the shine is wearing off, not because anyone's quitting but because we're learning the limits. The biggest one is memory. Run out of context mid-chat and you're talking to a stranger with zero idea of what happened before. The machine that memorized the whole internet can't remember you.
When dementia erases someone's memory, music still brings them back to the present. I built a company on it. Vera played people the music that had meaning to them. It looks like a miracle every time. It isn't. Our system (brain and body) runs on feelings, imagination and wonder. This combined with knowledge enables us to be creative. AI runs on knowledge alone.
🎵 P.M. Dawn — Set Adrift on Memory Bliss A hit built entirely on the memory of another song.
— Nicc