Why should innovation proceed at a constant rate? As far as I can tell, the number of people thinking seriously about difficult technical problems is increasing exponentially. Accordingly, it looks to me like most important theoretical milestones occurred recently in human history, and I would expect them to be more and more tightly packed.
I don’t know how fast machine learning / AI research output actually increases, but my first guess would be doubling every 15 years or so, since this seems to be the generic rate at which human output has doubled post-industrial revolution. If this is the case, the difficulty of finding a fundamental innovation would also have to double every fifteen years to keep the rate constant (or the quality of the average researcher would have to drop exponentially, which is maybe less coincidental seeming)
The only reason I’d suspect such a coincidence is if I had observed many fundamental innovations equally spaced in time; but I would wager that the reason they look evenly spread in time (in recent history) is that an intuitive estimate for the magnitude of an advance depends on the background quality of research at the time.
Why should innovation proceed at a constant rate? As far as I can tell, the number of people thinking seriously about difficult technical problems is increasing exponentially. Accordingly, it looks to me like most important theoretical milestones occurred recently in human history, and I would expect them to be more and more tightly packed.
I don’t know how fast machine learning / AI research output actually increases, but my first guess would be doubling every 15 years or so, since this seems to be the generic rate at which human output has doubled post-industrial revolution. If this is the case, the difficulty of finding a fundamental innovation would also have to double every fifteen years to keep the rate constant (or the quality of the average researcher would have to drop exponentially, which is maybe less coincidental seeming)
The only reason I’d suspect such a coincidence is if I had observed many fundamental innovations equally spaced in time; but I would wager that the reason they look evenly spread in time (in recent history) is that an intuitive estimate for the magnitude of an advance depends on the background quality of research at the time.