I would summarize a dimension of the difficulty like this. There are the conditions that give rise to intellectual scenes, intellectual scenes being necessary for novel work in ambiguous domains. There are the conditions that give rise to the sort of orgs that output actions consistent with something like Six Dimensions of Operational Adequacy. The intersection of these two things is incredibly rare but not unheard of. The Manhattan Project was a Scene that had security mindset. This is why I am not that hopeful. Humans are not the ones building the AGI, egregores are, and spending egregore sums of money. It is very difficult for individuals to support a scene of such magnitude, even if they wanted to. Ultra high net worth individuals seem much poorer relative to the wealth of society than in the past, where scenes and universities (a scene generator) could be funded by individuals or families. I’d guess this is partially because the opportunity cost for smart people is much higher now, and you need to match that (cue title card: Baumol’s cost disease kills everyone). In practice I expect some will give objections along various seemingly practical lines, but my experience so far is that these objections are actually generated by an environment that isn’t willing to be seen spending gobs of money on low status researchers who mostly produce nothing. i.e. funding the 90%+ percent of a scene that isn’t obviously contributing to the emergence of a small cluster that actually does the thing.
I would summarize a dimension of the difficulty like this. There are the conditions that give rise to intellectual scenes, intellectual scenes being necessary for novel work in ambiguous domains. There are the conditions that give rise to the sort of orgs that output actions consistent with something like Six Dimensions of Operational Adequacy. The intersection of these two things is incredibly rare but not unheard of. The Manhattan Project was a Scene that had security mindset. This is why I am not that hopeful. Humans are not the ones building the AGI, egregores are, and spending egregore sums of money. It is very difficult for individuals to support a scene of such magnitude, even if they wanted to. Ultra high net worth individuals seem much poorer relative to the wealth of society than in the past, where scenes and universities (a scene generator) could be funded by individuals or families. I’d guess this is partially because the opportunity cost for smart people is much higher now, and you need to match that (cue title card: Baumol’s cost disease kills everyone). In practice I expect some will give objections along various seemingly practical lines, but my experience so far is that these objections are actually generated by an environment that isn’t willing to be seen spending gobs of money on low status researchers who mostly produce nothing. i.e. funding the 90%+ percent of a scene that isn’t obviously contributing to the emergence of a small cluster that actually does the thing.
Thanks, this story is pretty helpful (to my understanding).