From [[Human Compatible, Stuart Russell]] > Intelligent behavior over long time scales requires the ability to plan and manage activity hierarchically, at multiple levels of abstraction—all the way from doing a PhD (one trillion actions) to a single motor control command sent to one finger as part of typing a single character in the application cover letter. Our activities are organized into complex hierarchies with dozens of levels of abstraction. These levels and the actions they contain are a key part of our civilization and are handed down through generations via our language and practices. For example, actions such as catching a wild boar and applying for a visa and **buying a plane ticket may involve millions of primitive actions, but we can think about them as single units because they are already in the “library” of actions** > [...] > There was a time when these actions didn’t exist as such—for example, to obtain the right to a plane journey in 1910 would have required a long, involved, and unpredictable process of research, letter writing, and negotiation with various aeronautical pioneers. Other actions recently added to the library include emailing, googling, and ubering. As Alfred North Whitehead wrote in 1911, **“Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.”** Engineers get this intuitively, because the rise in abstraction levels for a software engineer in the last five decades have been remarkable. We've moved from coding in assembly with punchcards to having isomorphic front-end services that connect directly to github, served to everyone in the world in a scalable way, with a few clicks. #published 2025-02-16