Okay — this is a radical idea. But the more I thought about it, I began to see that something needed to be done, a decisive action, a bold but discrete first step. So, I ‘discussed’ the idea with Google Gemini. Of course.
In olden times, before 2024, your ancestral self would sketch out a new idea using scrawled written notes and a lot of Google searches about various aspects and potentially relevant facts. Now that we have advanced beyond such primitive behavior, we simply ask Google Gemini to run around the web and summarize the whole thing in neat, bullet-pointed, grammatically perfect and (apparently) logical text.
Very handy. But a new skill is absolutely required — the acute and immediate detection of slop and hallucinations. That’s not so easy in highly technical matters — you have to know what you’re doing. But to be fair, the essence of that skill was required for pre-2024 idea development by scrawling and searching as well, albeit in a different sequence. Then, you crossed out a lot of just-written nonsense (“what was I thinking?”) and dismissed dead-end search results after a quick review. With Gemini output, it’s all dumped upfront and you refine the idea by removing the dross.
There’s a fair amount of slop and hallucination in the above PDF transcript (e.g., the split and move to Interior ‘has been discussed’ — WTF?) but a lot of the output appears useful and benign, at least as a guide for early thinking. I’ll leave it to the reader to decide — I left the transcript unedited.
Back to the idea itself, here’s a rationale for a split that I asked Gemini to ‘consider’ (page 3 of the PDF transcript):
I didn’t see any showstoppers in the silicon’s answers. So, perhaps more carbon-based thinking about this radical solution to WIFIA reform is warranted.