AI, Publicly Available AI, Today, May See Associations Humanity Hasn’t

I asked ChatGPT 5 Pro (5P) a question that I truly didn’t think it could answer. I felt silly, honestly, to even ask the question, but I did. And it gave me an answer. An answer that I didn’t expect.

Then I asked another question, and another, and another, and it kept answering and kept blowing my mind.

For this article I share one of these question and answer sessions, and I ask a new question and share how 5P replied. 

AI pondering what humans can't see.

My first question: “What is one insight or association you can see that humans don’t seem to understand because it isn’t stated explicitly anywhere on the web?”

My first read of 5P’s answer, honestly, I thought it had “failed.” I didn’t get it. Until it explained it. Then my jaw dropped. It wasn’t the secret to cold fusion, but it was a comment about human society that I could instantly see, but had never thought about.

5P: “The round hay bale quietly rewired rural social capital.”

The explanation: “Before the 1970s, putting up hay with small square bales was a community choreography. Round balers collapsed that network into a single seat. We often diagnose rural civic decline as only economics, demographics, or media diets. But some of it was the calendar losing a recurring ritual of mutual dependence.

Pick an everyday tool, trace how it moved work from “together” to “alone,” and you will find downstream changes in how communities hold themselves together.

”It’s not Earth shaking, and I am sure some people have thought about it, but I grew up on a farm, witnessed the transition from square to round bales, spent 20 years in college and am a doctorally trained social scientist, and I had never thought about it.

I asked another question, one specific to a field of research that I know more about than most people.

My second inquiry: “Explain an association in the realm of behavioral economics that you see but you see no evidence of humans understanding because it isn’t explicitly stated anywhere.”

5P: “The Hassle-Exchange Rate (HER) - Claim. People carry a hidden, finite hassle budget—measured in minutes of bureaucracy, steps, forms, holds, returns, and tiny conflicts. As that budget gets depleted, they unconsciously convert money into hassle relief at a rapidly rising exchange rate. Sellers who understand this time‑varying rate can charge convenience fees precisely when acceptance is highest, and standard price‑elasticity models miss it.

Think of HER(t) as the dollars you’re willing to pay to avoid one more minute of friction at time t. When you’re fresh, HER is low (“I’ll do the mail‑in rebate”). After a morning of micro‑frictions, HER spikes (“Fine, $14 for priority shipping”). Importantly, HER isn’t just “value of time.” It explodes non‑linearly with cognitive load, deadline pressure, and conflict fatigue. Minutes aren’t fungible; a minute after your third customer‑support call is not the same minute as after breakfast.

Why this is an association (and not just “people dislike hassle”)

We routinely model willingness to pay (WTP) as a function of price, income, and stable preferences—then tack on “friction costs” as static overhead. The association here is stronger: hassle and money trade at a dynamic, state‑dependent rate, and that rate predictably drifts within a day and across contexts, creating systematic arbitrage opportunities.

If you want to measure it like a scientist

Instrument a simple model:

• Let HER(t) = a + b·H(t) + c·S(t) + d·F(t) where H(t) is cumulative hassle minutes today, S(t) is schedule tightness, F(t) is recent conflict count.

• Predict Pr(accept fee) with a logistic regression using fee, Δhassle, and HER(t) plus person fixed effects.

• The key interaction is fee × Δhassle × HER(t). A strong, positive coefficient means money–hassle trade truly depends on the current state, not just trait preferences.”

  
  

Again, 5P’s answer immediately made sense, but I had never thought of it before. Has anyone? I don’t know. Maybe, but it made me wonder what else 5P knows that 99.9999% of humans don’t.

For this article I asked a new question.

My new question: “I want to write an article for my website about how current publicly available AI may be able to see associations that humans haven’t realized. Give me an example of an association you have noticed that there is limited to no evidence that humans have noticed. When picking the association, pick one that is potentially very insightful and impactful.

5P: 1) Clock Parity Predicts Trust Compliance - When enforcement acts faster than appeals or refunds (asymmetric clocks), measurable civic trust and voluntary compliance decline across domains. The closer the appeal/refund time matches the enforcement/debit time (what I call clock parity), the higher the compliance and the lower the need for coercion. The model sweeps across policing, platforms, health billing, and courts suggests the asymmetry is not just annoying—it’s a predictor of downstream cynicism and rule‑breaking.

Again, very insightful and immediately understandable. Has anyone thought of it, probably, but I doubt there are many.

Knowing that publicly available AI is capable of this type of thing, right now, could potentially lead to significant short term scientific and policy advances that wouldn’t be possible, at least not as fast, without AI. 

How to ask AI this type of question:

Prompt recipe (use with any frontier topic):

1. “Give me 10 working hypotheses—latent associations that seem strong but aren’t widely named.”

2. “Score each for novelty plausibility and policy impact; flag any that might have obvious prior art.”

3. “For the top 5, propose a falsifiable test, a failure mode, and a minimal data sketch. Keep claims crisp and conditional.”

   
   

Red‑team prompts:

• “Explain why each hypothesis might be a spurious correlation.”

• “What incentives would this create if a bad actor used it?”

• “Where would the ethics fence go?”