Michael Nielsen: belief

Transcript context

…Despite the fact that that is the case… Take deep learning. Obviously, this is an example of a new field where twenty-one-year-olds can make progress and it’s relatively new. Fifteen years or so since it got back into high gear. But already we’re in a stage where you need billions, tens of billions, or hundreds of billions of dollars to keep making progress at the frontier. There are a couple ways to understand that. One is that it actually is harder than the kinds of things the ancients had to do, or is more intensive at least. Second is it might not have been, but because our civilizational resources are so large, the amount of people is so large, the amount of money is so large, we can basically make the kind of progress it would have taken the ancients forever to make almost immediately. We notice something is productive and immediately dump in all the resources. But it’s also weird that there’s not that many of them. I feel like deep learning is notable because it is one big exception to the fact that it’s hard to think of other examples. I think that’s a consequence of the architecture of attention. At any given time, there’s always a most successful thing. If deep learning wasn’t a thing, maybe you’d be talking about CRISPR. Maybe we wouldn’t think about solving the protein structure prediction problem as a success of AI. Maybe we would have figured out how to do it with curve fitting, more broadly construed, and we’d just be like, “Wow, that took a lot of computing resources.” But protein structure prediction might be an enormously important thing. There is always our biggest thing. What you’re pointing at is more a consequence of the way in which attention gets centralized. It’s basically fashion, is what I’m saying. It’s not just fashion, but there is some dynamic there. There’s a very interesting and important implication of this idea. That the branching is so wide and so contingent and so path-dependent that different civilizations would stumble on entirely different technology stacks. There’s a very interesting implication that there will be gains from trade into the far, far future, which might actually be one of the most important facts about the far future in terms of how civilizations are set up, how they coordinate, and how they interface. There’s not this “go forth and exploit.” There are humongous gains to trade from adjacent colonies or whatever.…

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