There’s something very interesting lurking down this metrological path that not enough people seem to be thinking about. AI as a measure of data opens up far more fascinating possibilities than AI as a thing to be measured.

If it sounds like I’m setting up a “data camera” mental model for AI, it’s because I am. But as you’ll see, that makes what’s going on more interesting, not less. Unlike traditional photography, which killed a whole world of tedious photorealistic painting, but like the Webb telescope, “data photography” reveals worlds within worlds we’ve never even suspected existed, let alone been able to see, in piles of data too large for us to ever hold in our heads.