Michael Nielsen

Their words

if a million dollars had been at stake, like would you have put the same effort in? And the answer is no. Um sort of invariably. Um like they've tried, but they haven't really tried.

Their words

there's sort of there's two types of work that tends to be involved in any kind of creative project. There's routine stuff and there you just want to avoid procrastination. You just want to like, you know, how do I get good at this or how do I outsource it and how do I do it as rapidly as possible? Um and just avoid you know, like getting into a situation where you're prolonging it. Um, and then there's high variance stuff where you actually you need to be willing to to you know take a lot of time.

Their words

and I don't think it's possible for one person to understand everything in depth. Lots of people understand broadly a lot of these ideas but they don't understand sort of everything in in the depth that is actually utilized. That's why there's these, you know, papers with with well over a thousand authors.

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So you kind of got these two separate things that just for historically contingent reasons had both sort of matured around sort of let's say 1980 or so.

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If you're not changing it, if there's some kind of stagnation there, if you're not changing those external sort of circumstances, yes, like you may start to get sort of diminishing returns again. But that doesn't mean there's anything intrinsic about the situation.

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I'm willing to buy it sort of low enough down when, you know, progress is relatively simple, um, but but higher up you start to get to shape the way in which you you do the exploration and it's interesting, you know, people we are starting to shape it in in in interesting ways.

Their words

Um, there's just too many interesting ways of combining things. There's too many sort of deep ideas waiting to be uh, discovered and when it you know, not only we, but but nobody ever is going to to discover most of them. So, choices about how to make how to do the exploration actually matter quite a bit.

Their words

and part of it is just power, I think. Like, once there's a sufficiently large power imbalance, um, very often, not always, but very often groups of people seem to to sort of shift into this other mode where they just seek to dominate.

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we've been gifted uh just this incredible variety of machines which we don't understand really at all and we just have to go and sort of try and understand them on a you know, one-by-one basis.

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if somebody, you know, is standing behind the dessert table and is replenishing, restocking the desserts and keeps kind of you know, adding adding new ones in, it may turn out that you know, a little bit later a much better desserts appear.

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And this looks to me like, oh, we're down at sort of the bottom of the tech tree. We've barely gotten started there.

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Ideas like public key cryptography are I mean, they're just incredibly deep um very non-obvious ideas uh which in some sense lay hidden uh already sort of in in the 1930s.

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People will sometimes talk about um you know, a theory of everything as a potential goal for for physics. And and then there's this presumption somehow that physics is done once you get there. And of course, this is this is not true at all if you think about computer science.

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So certainly one thing that a lot of them seem to be bottlenecked on is now having interesting ideas and in particular having interesting design ideas.

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And so you sort of you've you've pursued very similar ideas. It's been very successful in one case and it's been completely and utterly unsuccessful in the other case. And I think I mean a priori, you can't tell which of these is the thing to do. And you actually need to do both.

Their words

Um and so, it's not a big leap to realize, "Oh, we have a big problem here." Um and so, you know, that's kind of the that's the forcing function there. It's it's you've realized that your old explanation is not sufficient. You need something new.

Their words

And I think the like the third and the most interesting possibility is no, that like they're they're a new type of object in some in some sense. They should be taken very seriously as as explanations, but where in the past we haven't had the ability to really do anything with them.

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if you don't have at least sort of tens or hundreds of millions of years, uh evolution just starts to look like a nonstarter.

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and in some sense Darwin's genius wasn't in having that idea. It was understanding just how central it was uh to to to biology.

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the point is that where we always get bottlenecked is where the the previous processes and and and heuristics don't apply. Right? Like that's almost sort of definitionally what causes the bottlenecks.

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And like, this idea that people have that that that Newton was um sort of the the first modern scientist is is somehow wrong. He I mean, it's there's some truth to it, but he really had this very different way um of of looking at the world that was part sort of superstitious um and part modern. It was a funny hybrid.

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And so, you have what seem like three very different disconnected phenomena all being explained by this one set of ideas.

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his expertise seems to be getting in the way. He knows so much, he understands so much, um and then he's not able to let go of these these things.