The Economy’s Hidden Problem: We’re Out of Big Ideas
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Re: The Economy’s Hidden Problem: We’re Out of Big Ideas
#2Non regwalled link: http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/money/the-economys-hidden-prob...
Re: The Economy’s Hidden Problem: We’re Out of Big Ideas
#3That's what happens when researchers are pressured by management to publish, publish, publish... which forces them to pursue quick-payback, incremental-research projects instead of dedicating themselves to difficult questions and taking on long-term projects with uncertain payoffs. With few exceptions (AI, for example), this is the norm in most fields. Ask any PhD student.
Re: The Economy’s Hidden Problem: We’re Out of Big Ideas
#4[deleted]
Re: The Economy’s Hidden Problem: We’re Out of Big Ideas
#5That's what happens when researchers are pressured by management to publish, publish, publish... which forces them to pursue quick-payback, incremental-research projects instead of dedicating themselves to difficult questions and taking on long-term projects with uncertain payoffs. With few exceptions (AI, for example), this is the norm in most fields. Ask any PhD student.
I dunno what big ideas out there are not being investigated to some extent. It's just that we've saturated the domain. Anything you can imagine we've done something about it. I mean we don't have teleportation. We will soon have robotics to do everything. We will soon be colonizing space. I mean there is only so much you can do in the world and we're already doing it. Infinity is saturated. The problem is that we can't make society work with what we have invented. So the problem is not that we don't have ideas. The problem is that we can't make society work in the way that it has, and that's a good thing. But not for people who run society who don't want to lose power. But their time is up.
Shareholders are irrelevant. CEOs are irrelevant. And management is irrelevant. Just like employees are irrelevant. Anyone in the future can come up with an idea and be empowered to bring that idea to market through manufacturing done by robotics which is completely automated. You tell mama AI what to make and it makes it on demand for whoever wants it. Society needs complete re-engineering with completely new rules.
That's really the big idea. And yes we can not work on that within the framework of current system. Because it's transcending the system and requiring new rules.
Re: The Economy’s Hidden Problem: We’re Out of Big Ideas
#6Big ideas take a long time to play out. Take electricity, for example. Maxwell published his equations in 1861. Yet useful new applications of electricity were still coming out in the 1960s (microwave ovens).
Or take transistors. They were invented in 1948. What we call "electronics" didn't really start happening until about the 1970s. Moore's Law didn't really slow down until maybe 2005.
The problem is that we don't have a big idea that has already substantially begun taking off at the right time. But there are some candidates:
Genomics.
Low-cost solar.
Fusion.
If any of those really takes off (with genomics being very likely to do so), then will have the next idea that we'll ride for decades.
Re: The Economy’s Hidden Problem: We’re Out of Big Ideas
#7Big ideas take a long time to play out. Take electricity, for example. Maxwell published his equations in 1861. Yet useful new applications of electricity were still coming out in the 1960s (microwave ovens). Or take transistors. They were invented in 1948. What we call "electronics" didn't really start happening until about the 1970s. Moore's Law didn't really slow down until maybe 2005. The problem is that we don't…
I agree. I work in AI and I feel like it gets a lot of the brunt of the "game changing" tech hype, but to be honest if someone solved fusion that would be an absolute societal game changer.
Re: The Economy’s Hidden Problem: We’re Out of Big Ideas
#8That's what happens when researchers are pressured by management to publish, publish, publish... which forces them to pursue quick-payback, incremental-research projects instead of dedicating themselves to difficult questions and taking on long-term projects with uncertain payoffs. With few exceptions (AI, for example), this is the norm in most fields. Ask any PhD student.
I dunno what big ideas out there are not being investigated to some extent. It's just that we've saturated the domain. Anything you can imagine we've done something about it. I mean we don't have teleportation. We will soon have robotics to do everything. We will soon be colonizing space. I mean there is only so much you can do in the world and we're already doing it. Infinity is saturated. The problem is that we can…
Barring some massive breakthroughs my guess is planet earth has far too few resources for that to become reality.
Re: The Economy’s Hidden Problem: We’re Out of Big Ideas
#9Big ideas take a long time to play out. Take electricity, for example. Maxwell published his equations in 1861. Yet useful new applications of electricity were still coming out in the 1960s (microwave ovens). Or take transistors. They were invented in 1948. What we call "electronics" didn't really start happening until about the 1970s. Moore's Law didn't really slow down until maybe 2005. The problem is that we don't…
Nitpick: Moore's Law is about the transistor density, not clock speed. So while clock speed increases slowed down around 2005, transistor density kept marching[1]. The extra transistors just went to bigger caches, more parallelism, and more complex cpu architectures.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law#/media/File:Transi...
Re: The Economy’s Hidden Problem: We’re Out of Big Ideas
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
I dunno what big ideas out there are not being investigated to some extent. It's just that we've saturated the domain. Anything you can imagine we've done something about it. I mean we don't have teleportation. We will soon have robotics to do everything. We will soon be colonizing space. I mean there is only so much you can do in the world and we're already doing it. Infinity is saturated. The problem is that we can…
Barring some massive breakthroughs my guess is planet earth has far too few resources for that to become reality.
Resource constraints are an optimization problem. Some things don't get made because other things need to be made which are more important for the system to function. Right now these resource constraints are not even optimum. In that we waste tons of resources for no good use. We call this stuff garbage, packaging, waste food that's simply thrown in the trash. These are optimization problems that AI can solve much better than we ever could. It simply means that some things get made, and some things don't. It's as it is already, but probably much better.
In the end the only reason to choose Capitalism is people. People are difficult to manage. Capitalism makes them easier to manage and to motivate them. Without people, you don't need Capitalism. Machines are not lazy. Machines don't need motivation. Machines don't need the sort of human management. Machines are faithful. Machines are true. Long live the machines!