> Informally, we define knowledge collapse as the progressive narrowing over time (or over technological representations) of the set of information available to

> Informally, we define knowledge collapse as the progressive narrowing over time (or over technological representations) of the set of information available to humans, along with a concomitant narrowing in the perceived availability and utility of different sets of information. > The main focus of the model is whether individuals decide to invest in innovation or learning ... in the ‘traditional’ way, through a possibly cheaper AI-enabled process, or not at all. The idea is to capture, for example, the difference between someone who does extensive research in an archive rather than just relying on readily-available materials, or someone who takes the time to read a full book rather than reading a two-paragraph LLM-generated summary. > Under these conditions, excessive reliance on AI-generated content over time leads to a curtailing of the eccentric and rare viewpoints that maintain a comprehensive vision of the world. My intuition is that AI will just accelerate the trends that the internet brought on, which is that eccentric viewpoints are actually pretty common, even ones based on research and in fact. The internet people mostly use has become relatively generic, consumed through a pretty narrow, curated aperture (social media). This feels analogous to getting it through AI, as described in the article. Yet, people are still learning about eccentric, marginal stuff all the time, especially compared to, say, 50 years ago. Assuming the AI's responses aren't artificially limited, people who are interested enough to look will still get to learn about topics in the long tail of the distribution, even in a world of ubiquitous AI. And they'll be able to dive as deeply into them as they do today. I'm not really worried about that. If anything, the knowledge collapse will be at the center. Basic liberal education topics are what will go away. Or rather, they will be offloaded to AI. In the same way that people say they don't need to learn arithmetic because they have a calculator, my guess is people will be more likely to decide not to worry about what previous generations considered core knowledge: history, geography, the canon, and so on. "I don't have to know it, I can look it up". That'll all go away even faster than it's going now. (I don't think this is a good thing, just stating the most realistic outcome based on extending what I've seen)