Understanding the Dynamics of the AI Ecosystem with Pace Layers

When a sector goes too fast, it loses support

Without a doubt, the pace of the AI ecosystem is dizzying. Just processing it all is difficult enough. Scaffolding it, finding themes, and understanding the shape of it is nearly impossible.

Recently, Mike Migurski introduced me to Stewart Brand’s Pace Layers, a framework for organizing fields and categories by how fast they change. Brand writes:

Consider the differently paced components to be layers.  Each layer is functionally different from the others and operates somewhat independently, but each layer influences and responds to the layers closest to it in a way that makes the whole system resilient.

From the fastest layers to the slowest layers in the system, the relationship can be described as follows:

Fast learns, slow remembers.  Fast proposes, slow disposes.  Fast is discontinuous, slow is continuous.  Fast and small instructs slow and big by accrued innovation and by occasional revolution.  Slow and big controls small and fast by constraint and constancy.  Fast gets all our attention, slow has all the power.

In The Clock of the Long Now, Brand proposes six macro layers that represent a “healthy civilization”, as seen below:

Imagine: as these layers move at different rates, friction builds between them, slowing the upper layer and quickening the lower. This negotiation, translation, between the layers is constructive when their speeds are different, but in balance. When they’re not, things get weird.

Brand writes:

In a durable society, each level is allowed to operate at its own pace, safely sustained by the slower levels below and kept invigorated by the livelier levels above… Each layer must respect the different pace of the others. If commerce, for example, is allowed by governance and culture to push nature at a commercial pace, then all-supporting natural forests, fisheries, and aquifers will be lost. If governance is changed suddenly instead of gradually, you get the catastrophic French and Russian revolutions. In the Soviet Union, governance tried to ignore the constraints of culture and nature while forcing a five-year-plan infrastructure pace on commerce and art. Thus cutting itself off from both support and innovation, it was doomed.

The last 10 days have been a whirlwind of conferences: Foo Camp, Open Frontier, AI Engineering World’s Fair… Every night I’d come home and scribble down notes, hoping a structure or two would emerge to bring it all together.

I think Pace Layers is the best I’ve got:

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