problems, it often takes only a couple of noisy data points to get something that’s a beautiful description of a phenomenon, because you’re putting in knowledge about how physics works. That’s in huge contrast to normal AI, which requires millions of training examples and is very sensitive to noise. By adding the appropriate background knowledge, you get much more intelligence. Similar to the physical-systems case, if we make neurons that know a lot about how humans learn from each other, then we can detect human fads and predict human behavior trends in surprisingly accurate and efficient ways. This “social physics” works because human behavior is determined as much by the patterns of our culture as by rational, individual thinking. These patterns can be described mathematically and employed to make accurate predictions. This idea of a credit-assignment function reinforcing connections between neurons that are doing the best work is the core of current AI. If you make those little neurons smarter, the AI gets smarter. So, what would happen if we replaced the neurons with people? People have lots of capabilities. They know lots of things about the world; they can perceive things in a broadly competent, human way. What would happen if you had a network of people in which you could reinforce the connections that were helping and minimize the connections that weren’t? That begins to sound like a society, or a company. We all live in a human social network. We’re reinforced for doing things that seem to help everybody and discouraged from doing things that are not appreciated. Culture is the result of this sort of human AI as applied to human problems; it is the process of building social structures by reinforcing the good connections and penalizing the bad. Once you’ve realized you can take this general AI framework and create a human AI, the question becomes, What’s the right way to do that? Is it a safe idea? Is it completely crazy? My students and I are looking