Boredom, Chaos, & the Experimental Curve
As society turns and low activation energy and short-term boredom meets experimentation, will more chaos emerge?
Over the past few years, we have seen an acceleration of enabling tools like AI and further decentralization of sophisticated machinery (we can use this term loosely, ranging from local AI models and more powerful compute all the way to 3D printing and desktop DNA synthesizers in the future). At the same time we have repeatedly heard loud cries wondering how humans will occupy their time in this AI-dominated world. With this has come continual questions around the directionality of progress and experimentation and perhaps, the role of boredom.
"Given the very small "pro" factors and the very large "con", I would think it would be very easy to prevent anyone from doing it. Sensible people will refrain…"
The comment above is related to the proliferation/creation of Mirror Bacteria (a theoretical branch of synthetic biology that could create extinction-level threats through molecularly-reversed organisms immune to Earth's biological defenses1), and points to a core dynamic that we’ve been thinking a lot about at Compound:
What happens in science and society when the cost structures and friction of experimentation collapse almost entirely to ideation and design?
This has become top of mind as the traditional paradigm of research bandwidth costs shift from being dominated by execution towards one where the primary constraint is human creativity and direction-setting.2
With this (lack of) constraint it’s likely that humans take on a bifurcated path of agency: A small subset of high-agency individuals pursue truly novel directions, others accept the inertia and use-cases given to them by AI companies, and some transition from one party to the other due to short-term boredom3 or mental bandwidth increases.
The Mirror Bacteria post suggests that historically, the asymmetry between "pro factors" and "con factors" has created natural barriers to certain types of experimentation. Greater productivity leverage for high-agency individuals amplifies an existing truth: Human impact follows a power law distribution that grows increasingly extreme as technological capability expands, evidenced by discussions/the meme around the emergence of "single person billion dollar companies" and beyond.
We can perhaps look to prior scientists to understand how un-constraining bandwidth and thus opening the aperture for experimentation can lead to breakthroughs or unexpected outcomes. Eric Hoel describes an interesting dynamic in his piece while highlighting the differences between Einstein and Von Neumann.
In other words, the abstract machine of science is an open system. We can be rational about choosing between different hypotheses, or choosing between different ideas, or choosing between different experiments. But rationality does not actually tell you, by itself, what makes for a good hypothesis, a good idea, or an elegant experiment. Those choices include some strange blend of aesthetics, intuition, passion, and other irreducible qualities.
- Eric Hoel
Great scientists follow intuition and beauty, not rationality
Sometimes the best science happens when people don't fully understand or rationally weigh all the pros and cons but instead “pluck an idea from the gods and put it into human hands” as Hoel writes.
In an AI-enabled future, these "gods" become increasingly accessible while the "hands" become increasingly capable, accelerating us up the "fuck around and find out" (FAFO) curve.
While regulatory frameworks and institutional controls will attempt to adapt through technical and legal shifts, and better alignment of these superhuman AI agents, what we're really witnessing is a philosophical shift: The traditional barriers between rationality and experimentation erode as activation energy falls, driven by both technological progression and perhaps on the downside, deeper societal shifts toward nihilism, individualism, and radicalism.4
Tying this back to the beginning, the original comment on Mirror Bacteria reflects an older paradigm - one where we could clearly delineate between rational and irrational experimentation, between clear pros and cons. A paradigm where we as humans could better model likely and unlikely events and timelines.
As we talked about in our annual letter, "We expect that the world will only get weirder, and that seemingly long-tail outcomes are more likely in the long-term than many people appreciate."
In a world where bandwidth constraints continue to collapse and short-term boredom perhaps increases, we should expect not just more experiments, but increasingly non-consensus ones. The question isn't whether people will experiment, but instead when near-unlimited executional bandwidth meets human boredom, will we invite chaos?
There are a million reasons why this might not be true, read the post, but just take it at face value.
We continually repeat at Compound that in 2025 We Are Merely Creativity Constrained
This nuance of short-term is important as humans *will* always find ways to fill the time, but the temporary window is where experimentation can happen.
There’s a strong influence from Howe and Strauss’ Fourth Turning that has influenced this POV and I recommend you reading.