This is one of my favorite concepts in Daniel Dennett’s book Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking:
Universal acid is a liquid so corrosive that it will eat through anything! But what do you keep it in? It dissolves glass bottles and stainless-steel canisters as readily as paper bags. What would happen if you somehow came upon or created a dollop of universal acid? Would the whole planet eventually be destroyed?
Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, by Daniel C. Dennett, page 203.
I encountered his discussion in that book, but his wider exploration of it is in his larger work Darwin’s Dangerous Idea – Evolution and the Meanings of Life. He likened the theory of evolution by natural selection to such an acid, as it “eats through just about every traditional concept, and leaves in its wake a revolutionized worldview.”
I think the mental image of a substance that will literally eat through anything is an intriguing one. So far, it clearly only exists in our imagination and not in physical reality. As a concept it invites exploring and thought experimentation.
To sharpen it a bit, let’s unpack the expression just a little.
- The universality should here not be understood as literally anything and everything. It is both bounded within a system (though it may be a large one) and perhaps also limited to specific elements inside of it. The less limited, the more universal.
- Similarly, I think of the corrosive effect of the acid not strictly just a destructive one. However, it does cause change, transformation. It is destructive in the sense that what was there before is not longer present in the same. way.
With that we can see how it is descriptive of how different ways of thinking can profoundly modify how things work in a system, perhaps even eating away existing load-bearing foundations in the process.
Most ideas are additive. They fit into an existing framework, add a little here or there, perhaps modify or adjust what is there, but largely leaving the existing structure unchanged. Some ideas are clearly different. When they are introduced into a system (such as a field or an area of discourse), they do not just modify, but rather reorganize what they touch. Those are universal acids.
That corrosion is not a seamless process – transformation does come at a cost. Existing structures resist, old ideas have staying power. People are invested in and biased towards what they have known and gotten used to. If the newly introduced has the qualities of a universal acid here, then it does come with a measure of relentlessness though.
Arguably, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a universal acid affecting much of modern life. This appears clear, though we are just at the beginning of the process.
New technologies often allow producing new products or services that were not possible before. That is the case with AI. More importantly though, usage of AI increasingly transforms the nature of the work itself, i.e. how we go about building those products or providing those services.
This is clearly visible in software engineering, where people produce AI-enabled products and where the way work gets done is changing in profound ways. New tooling increasingly makes it possible for people who are not trained as software engineers to produce working software of impressive capability. Similarly, professional software development is increasingly coming to rely on AI-augmentation. The technical bar to entry is lowered, productivity gains in code production invite experimentation and constraints move to highlight the importance of clarity in understanding and sound decision making.
This is reflexive, too, in that AI is used to change existing AI, in the quest of bringing forth improved versions (and rendering obsolete the current ones) of it. It shares similarities with evolution in that regard. As AI improves, the process by which it is developed, along with supporting tools and infrastructure continues to change as well.
The acid eats through its container and supporting structures, helping build new ones in the process.
Universal acid – you can’t help but pause and wonder. I like the term for what it communicates. It highlights significance, while also drawing attention to material consequences and risk.