Adam Marblestone: commitment

Transcript context

…Maybe the final question to go off on is, what was the most interesting thing you learned from the Gap Map? Maybe you want to explain what the Gap Map is. In the process of incubating and coming up with these Focused Research Organizations, these nonprofit startup-like moonshots that we’ve been getting philanthropists and now government agencies to fund, we talked to a lot of scientists. Some of the scientists were just like, “Here’s the next thing my graduate student will do. Here’s what I find interesting. Exploring these really interesting hypothesis spaces, all the types of things we’ve been talking about.” Some of them were like, “Here’s this gap. I need this piece of infrastructure. There’s no combination of grad students in my lab or me loosely collaborating with other labs with traditional grants that could ever get me that. I need to have an organized engineering team that builds the miniature equivalent of the Hubble Space Telescope. If I can build that Hubble Space Telescope, then I will unblock all the other researchers in my field or some path of technological progress in the way that the Hubble Space Telescope lifted the boats and improved the life of every astronomer. ” But it wasn’t really an astronomy discovery in itself. It was just that you had to put this giant mirror in space with a CCD camera and organize all the people and engineering and stuff to do that. So some of the things we talked to scientists about looked like that. The Gap Map is just a list of a lot of those things and we call it a Gap Map. I think it’s actually more like a fundamental capabilities map. What are all these things, like mini Hubble space telescopes? And then we organized that into gaps for helping people understand that or search that. What was the most surprising thing you found?…

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