The velocity of ideas

There is a principle in economics called the velocity of money. The health of an economy depends less on how much money exists and more on how fast that money circulates. A small town where every pound changes hands five times a week can outperform a wealthy one where everyone sits on their savings. Movement is what creates value, not stockpile. I believe ideas work the same way.

From individual to scene

Behind most creative breakthroughs there is not a single individual but a scene.

The impressionists did not come from a single brilliant painter. Monet, Renoir, Degas, Pissarro and Morisot knew each other from the cafés of Batignolles in the 1860s. They critiqued each other, exhibited together (despite being rejected everywhere else) and iterated on a shared visual language until something entirely new emerged. No single one of them “invented” Impressionism.

Seattle’s grunge scene in the late 80s is another example: a geographically isolated city where Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Alice in Chains shared venues, labels and even band members. Their isolation concentrated the creative energy instead of dispersing it, and the ideas bounced around fast enough that an entire genre crystallized in a few years.

In these cases and many more in history, the “supply” of individual raw talent was not the deciding factor. What made extraordinary things happen was the velocity of ideas: the rate at which they circulated, collided, and evolved through exchange. The collective intelligence of a community ends up producing work none of its members could have done in isolation.

AI comes into the picture

AI gives us something we have never had before: a tireless partner, endlessly patient, reasonably knowledgeable and capable of pushing back on our thinking. In some sense, this allows for an approximation of the mechanics of a scene.

But is it a subsitute for the real deal of leaving your chair and getting critizised from another fellow human? When the goal is to produce something new, a good chunk of value comes from the collision of genuinely different perspectives. Collaboration with humans works precisely because you cannot fully control what others do. The feedback is unpredictable, sometimes uncomfortable, shaped by lives and experiences that are not your own.

When the sparring partner lives inside your screen and adapts to you… does the velocity still count? Or is it just a pound bouncing between your left and right pocket?

The opportunity cost

There is a lot of evidence pointing out towards AI multiplying individual productivity. Here is what worries me though: everyone retreating into a silo to iterate with their own AI is akin to me to stockpiling of wealth, at the cost of its circulation.

Every individual gets an inmediately visible productivity boost. But the great things that happen from exchange and collaboration never emerge, and nobody realises it because you cannot miss what never existed in the first place.

A heuristic worth considering

I suspect that the success (or failure) of organizations without a physical moat in the AI era will correlate to the ability of their leaders to create and maintain environments with high velocity of ideas.

Those who do will reap the compound benefits of a scene. Those who do not will fall behind, their members stuck in a race to the bottom trying to individually solve the same problems.