All of Lone Pine's Comments + Replies

Now is the best time in history to love and be loved. 💖
Lone Pine1y1

Do you think there is anyone you left out in this analysis?

Reply
1Tony Morley1yAbsolutely, so many people, so many stories. It's beyond challenging to fit a grand narrative into 1,500 words or less, and then pass it through professional editors. As I wrote I thought you myself, "this could be a feature length book in itself." Some of the story is clearly not the full story, but I stand behind the overarching narrative.
Bombs, Brains, and Science
Lone Pine1y2

In the chart "Trends in Nondefense R&D by Function", I just can't understand why we spend so little on energy research. We spend less on energy than on space. It just seems illogical to me.

Reply
AMA: Jason Crawford, The Roots of Progress
Lone Pine1y1

Without referring to other people's views or research, do you have a personal intuitive point estimate or spread on when we will have AIs that can do all economically important tasks?

Reply
1jasoncrawford1yI dunno… years is too short and centuries maybe too long, so I guess I'd say decades? That is a very wide spread though. And if you really mean all, I place non-zero probability on “never” or “not for a very long time.” After all, we don't even do all economically important manual tasks using machines yet, and we've had powered machinery for 300 years.
Why was progress so slow in the past?
Lone Pine2y2

I think this flows directly into why it seems intuitive that new ideas are getting harder to find. For example, all the obvious ideas in mobile apps were explored as businesses from 2005~2015, and it's hard to think of a genuinely new mobile app concept that isn't just a variation on an established business. 

If you were trying to, say, disrupt the taxi industry using computer technology in 1998, you would run into a big lack of infrastructure. Would people request a taxi from a website? Then people couldn't request a taxi without visiting a place such... (read more)

Reply
1jasoncrawford2yYes, I agree. But note that new breakthrough technologies open up whole new fields of ideas that are suddenly “easy to find”—as per your very example. So another way to look at the question is what affects the rate of growth in new fields.