What I think
I love the idea and framing of this book. It’s a great way of looking at pathlessness through the lens of artificial intelligence and how neural nets behave and react.
It’s also an interesting way of thinking about how AI might shape our future and how we think about pursuing things. It very much aligns with my approach to life.
When I started it in March 2025, I wrote: “Strong start. This is how I approach my life. I have no plans past April right now.”
However, be warned: the book reads very academic at times, so it can be a little hard to read. But overall, a very good book.
What the book is about
Stanley and Lehman explore a problem with ambitious goals: we often cannot recognize the steps that would lead us to them. An experiment that looks irrelevant today may make a discovery possible later. If we judge every step by how closely it resembles the final result, we can reject the very things we need to discover.
Their alternative is to take interesting possibilities seriously. Explore, learn, and accumulate things that open up further possibilities. They call these stepping stones. The value of a stepping stone may only become clear after we’ve moved beyond it.
Highlights
Achievement as discovery
It’s useful to think of achievement as a process of discovery.
One exciting aspect of this vast set of all possible images is that some of the great masterpieces do not yet exist because no one has painted or drawn them yet. Put another way, these future masterpieces are not yet discovered.
Before anyone had explored the part of the great room filled with computers, no one could know what was even possible there.
The kind of book I wanted to write wasn’t actually written before.
Stepping stones
The problem is that the stepping stone does not resemble the final product.
It’s so bad that the objective can actually distract you from its own stepping stones!
often turns out that the measure of success—which tells us whether we are moving in the right direction—is deceptive because it’s blind to the true stepping stones that must be crossed.
Another way to look at the challenge of ambitious problems is to say that their solutions are more than one stepping stone away.
The trouble with objectives
In fact, objectives actually become obstacles towards more exciting achievements, like those involving discovery, creativity, invention, or innovation—or even achieving true happiness.
You can’t become rich simply by seeking a higher salary—getting a raise today doesn’t guarantee another raise will ever come in the future. There’s much we cannot achieve by trying to achieve it.
We don’t face a false choice between slavishly following objectives and aimless wandering.
Following what’s interesting
You can simply tell your friends that you know a good stepping stone when you see one, even if (like everyone) you don’t know where it leads.
The best way to get computation is not to force great minds to waste their lives pondering a distant dream, but to let the great minds pursue their own interests in their present reality.
Rather than thinking of the future as a destination, it becomes a road, a path of undefined potential.
we humans have a nose for the interesting
To be a treasure hunter, you have to collect as many stepping stones as you can, because you never know which one might lead somewhere valuable.