lol, I think Jason Crawford was coming at this from the opposite perspective of “this is already happening in lots of places and it’s bad”, rather than as a how-to manual. (But, I too am interested in it as a how-to manual)
I have quipped that if you really wanted to slow down AI progress, you should create a Federal AI Initiative and give it billions of dollars in funding.
Or: “An old saw says that if the government really wanted to help literacy and reduce addiction in the inner cities, it would form a Department of Drugs and declare a War on Education.” (from Nanofuture by J. Storrs Hall, who also wrote Where Is My Flying Car?)
Yes. We did invite J. Storrs Hall to be a keynote speaker at the LessWrong Community Weekend in Berlin a while ago where his speech was basically the content of the Where Is My Flying Car? book before that was published.
I always thought Hall’s point about nanotech was trivially false. Nanotech research like he wanted it died out in the whole world, but he explains it by US-specific factors. Why didn’t research continue elsewhere? Plus, other fields that got large funding in Europe or Japan are alive and thriving. How comes?
That doesn’t mean that a government program which sets up bad incentives cannot be worse than useless. It can be quite damaging, but not kill a technologically promising research field worldwide for twenty years.
lol, I think Jason Crawford was coming at this from the opposite perspective of “this is already happening in lots of places and it’s bad”, rather than as a how-to manual. (But, I too am interested in it as a how-to manual)
I have quipped that if you really wanted to slow down AI progress, you should create a Federal AI Initiative and give it billions of dollars in funding.
Or: “An old saw says that if the government really wanted to help literacy and reduce addiction in the inner cities, it would form a Department of Drugs and declare a War on Education.” (from Nanofuture by J. Storrs Hall, who also wrote Where Is My Flying Car?)
Man, that Hall guy is great. Should invite him to the progress forum.
Yes. We did invite J. Storrs Hall to be a keynote speaker at the LessWrong Community Weekend in Berlin a while ago where his speech was basically the content of the Where Is My Flying Car? book before that was published.
Taking this as a serious proposal:
my guess is that it pays less well than industrial AI research for the most part
so probably it mostly ends up increasing the number of grad students + professors in AI
you could potentially use this to increase the noise:signal ratio in the field
this could also break conferences by flooding them with papers to review and decreasing the average quality of the reviewer pool
ideally this would happen before we get good AI tools for reviewing papers
I always thought Hall’s point about nanotech was trivially false. Nanotech research like he wanted it died out in the whole world, but he explains it by US-specific factors. Why didn’t research continue elsewhere? Plus, other fields that got large funding in Europe or Japan are alive and thriving. How comes?
That doesn’t mean that a government program which sets up bad incentives cannot be worse than useless. It can be quite damaging, but not kill a technologically promising research field worldwide for twenty years.