# Brendan Cody-Kenny: Maybe AI's real edge isn't reasoning from scratch. It's lateral thinking across domains you'll never read into

Technical Due Diligence for Software M&A https://sub.xiliary.com/p/brendancodykenny

### 2026-10-06 reading #ai #cross-domain #lateral-thinking
Maybe AI's real edge isn't reasoning from scratch. It's lateral thinking across domains you'll never read into
- AI has read the internet, so it can pattern match across many, many domains very easily
- Example: fisheries population science solved a measurement-confound problem decades ago. Catch counts rise even as the real stock collapses because effort (boats, gear, sonar) improved alongside it
- The fix there (strip out the effort covariates, model the residual as the real signal) maps cleanly onto confounded measurement problems in totally unrelated fields
- Academia used to push cross-domain work deliberately, to break researchers out of their own bubble. AI can now do that same cross-pollination on demand

https://sub.xiliary.com/p/brendancodykenny/posts/52/maybe-ai-s-real-edge-isn-t-reasoning-from-scratch-it-s