Comment by ActorNightly 6 hours ago
The bigger problem today is that there is simply nothing more left to research. Everything that is being worked on are at most optimizations, which allways have a dollar spent vs dollar returned amount on them.
that patently ridiculous, we're just getting started
Really? What is so innovative?
LLMs are just better google. In the past, you used to google shit, and copy paste from stack overflow, now you just skip the middle man and go directly to Chat GPT. Anyone that has been programming for a while can attest to that the answers aren't any better, its just more efficient to iterate on them now.
AI hasn't even begun to be solved yet. Everyone is focused on feedforward transformer architecture that is never going to replace the imperative processing of actual intelligence.
Smartphones are pretty much solved, as they have replaced a lot of the need for in person interaction (which by extension means transportation). The last decade has been all about monetizing smartphones.
Wearables aren't transforming society at all.
3d printing and home fab is still too niche and expensive for most people, and you can't really make it cheaper and more accessible.
Electric vehicles largely suck. Self driving is mediocre.
We literally went through a pandemic and people got richer because they had to stay at home and not spend money on things like daycare or gas or car maintenance, without losing any productivity.
Hell, the state the US is in currently is largely explained by the fact that most all the problems in society have been solved to the extent that people have to invent bogeymen and elect a demented felon into office on the promise of solving those problems.
This is a very surface level analysis like saying that the automobile was just an iterative improvement over a horse. Or a computer is just a better abacus. Fundamental research is all about diving into the weeds and finding new problems to solve. It's true that some of the "low hanging fruit" no longer exists (you won't see someone like Euler or Newton who's names pop up all over the place), but I can promise you that real gains are being made on a lower level. These small gains in fundamental research snowball into bigger advancements. As an example, the transformer architecture used by LLMs was first published in 2017.
Automobile was improvement over the horse because things needed to get places. To improve on current automobile will require either massive government investment and regulation in the sense of flying cars, or full electrification with paradigm shifts in transportation, like induction charging roads or battery hot swaps or whatever else. The modern Corolla Hybrid is pretry much the peak optimal point of transportation.
What do humans need right now to improve their lives substantially?
oh, I was thinking about science. material science is doing some pretty cool things. quantum is getting interesting. we're just starting to really get a handle on reverse engineering the cell. battery chemistry. whether or not we're going to see practical fusion it seems likely that we'll see knockoffs. I just saw an ad yesterday that Avalanche is planning on selling waste (I mean useful quasi-stable elements). not just that but the non-sexy science (I met a guy yesterday and we talked about how a lot of his colleagues got the axe. he's working on characterizing the response of skin tissue to uv damage. that doesn't sound that sexy, but wouldn't it be nice to know?)
yeah, mostly forget about computers, we're still just coming to grips with the fact that we stopped doing largely innovative work decades ago. my bet is its going to go back to being interesting pretty soon. we are having a lot of interesting discussion about cognition though :)