All of Lone Pine's Comments + Replies

Lone Pine2y1

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

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1[comment deleted]2y
Bombs, Brains, and Science
Lone Pine2y2

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.

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AMA: Jason Crawford, The Roots of Progress
Lone Pine2y1

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?

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1jasoncrawford2yI 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)

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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.