And that raises the question, even as we live through a rise in AI capabilities that is keeping Eliezer’s concerns very topical, why did Drexler’s nano-futurism fade...
One view I’ve seen is that perverse incentives did it. Widespread interest in nanotechnology led to governmental funding of the relevant research, which caused a competition within academic circles over that funding, and discrediting certain avenues of research was an easier way to win the competition than actually making progress. To quote:
Hall blames public funding for science. Not just for nanotech, but for actually hurting progress in general. (I’ve never heard anyone before say government-funded science was bad for science!) “[The] great innovations that made the major quality-of-life improvements came largely before 1960: refrigerators, freezers, vacuum cleaners, gas and electric stoves, and washing machines; indoor plumbing, detergent, and deodorants; electric lights; cars, trucks, and buses; tractors and combines; fertilizer; air travel, containerized freight, the vacuum tube and the transistor; the telegraph, telephone, phonograph, movies, radio, and television—and they were all developed privately.” “A survey and analysis performed by the OECD in 2005 found, to their surprise, that while private R&D had a positive 0.26 correlation with economic growth, government funded R&D had a negative 0.37 correlation!” “Centralized funding of an intellectual elite makes it easier for cadres, cliques, and the politically skilled to gain control of a field, and they by their nature are resistant to new, outside, non-Ptolemaic ideas.” This is what happened to nanotech; there was a huge amount of buzz, culminating in $500 million dollars of funding under Clinton in 1990. This huge prize kicked off an academic civil war, and the fledgling field of nanotech lost hard to the more established field of material science. Material science rebranded as “nanotech”, trashed the reputation of actual nanotech (to make sure they won the competition for the grant money), and took all the funding for themselves. Nanotech never recovered.
One wonders if similar institutional sabotage of AI research is possible, but we’re probably past the point where that might’ve worked (if that even was what did nanotech in).
One view I’ve seen is that perverse incentives did it. Widespread interest in nanotechnology led to governmental funding of the relevant research, which caused a competition within academic circles over that funding, and discrediting certain avenues of research was an easier way to win the competition than actually making progress. To quote:
Source: this review of Where’s My Flying Car?
One wonders if similar institutional sabotage of AI research is possible, but we’re probably past the point where that might’ve worked (if that even was what did nanotech in).