Lehman & Stanley concerning how explicit objectives encourage effort on exploit rather than explore.
AI is progressing using objective functions that can be expressed in a concise form (energy minimization, gradient descent, etc.). A similar mechanism has been at work in industry since Ford and Winslow, from time-and-motion to jit-supply-chain, all under the short-term profit incentive. These are narrow known objectives with a desire to get relatively quick results.
But perhaps the big leaps are not achieved by climbing local hills. The observation harks back to Thomas Kuhn, who described the activities of normal science and great leaps - scientific recolutions. Obviously there are further philosophical implications, but also economic and administrative cliffs - financialization of the economy, bloat in university admin, group-think in academic tracks, (US) healthcare administration - all lead to temporary money extraction, with cautious risk-averse investments in bits. But there is not so much free-riding backing of mavericks, long-shot bets on contrarian ideas, and speculative gambling on profound, but expensive and difficult, inventions from atoms (see Peter Thiel - "courage is in far shorter supply than genius" ).
Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned is Stanley's latest book (2015).
Here are some excellent long-form podcast interviews with Stanley on MLST:
Is getting a pay rise a step to becoming a billionaire?
#38 Prof. KENNETH STANLEY - Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned (2021)
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 10.4 ms ] threadAI is progressing using objective functions that can be expressed in a concise form (energy minimization, gradient descent, etc.). A similar mechanism has been at work in industry since Ford and Winslow, from time-and-motion to jit-supply-chain, all under the short-term profit incentive. These are narrow known objectives with a desire to get relatively quick results.
But perhaps the big leaps are not achieved by climbing local hills. The observation harks back to Thomas Kuhn, who described the activities of normal science and great leaps - scientific recolutions. Obviously there are further philosophical implications, but also economic and administrative cliffs - financialization of the economy, bloat in university admin, group-think in academic tracks, (US) healthcare administration - all lead to temporary money extraction, with cautious risk-averse investments in bits. But there is not so much free-riding backing of mavericks, long-shot bets on contrarian ideas, and speculative gambling on profound, but expensive and difficult, inventions from atoms (see Peter Thiel - "courage is in far shorter supply than genius" ).
Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned is Stanley's latest book (2015).
Here are some excellent long-form podcast interviews with Stanley on MLST:
#38 Prof. KENNETH STANLEY - Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned (2021)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhYGXYeMq_E
#72 Prof. KEN STANLEY 2.0 - On Art and Subjectivity (2023)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxBZORM9F-8
What Sam Altman said to me before leaving OpenAI (2024)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWIrXN-yy8g
P.S. Title word changed to fit the HN limit.