In the chart “Trends in Nondefense R&D by Function”, I just can’t understand why we spend so little on energy research. We spend less on energy than on space. It just seems illogical to me.
Lone Pine
Karma: 3
Without referring to other people’s views or research, do you have a personal intuitive point estimate or spread on when we will have AIs that can do all economically important tasks?
Because… to the moon?
Glad to be here!
I think this flows directly into why it seems intuitive that new ideas are getting harder to find. For example, all the obvious ideas in mobile apps were explored as businesses from 2005~2015, and it’s hard to think of a genuinely new mobile app concept that isn’t just a variation on an established business.
If you were trying to, say, disrupt the taxi industry using computer technology in 1998, you would run into a big lack of infrastructure. Would people request a taxi from a website? Then people couldn’t request a taxi without visiting a place such as a PC cafe. There would be no way to process payments. There would be no way to track drivers using GPS—which did exist, but there were no internet-connected wireless GPS devices. In fact, how would you communicate with the drivers? By cell phone? Would you hire human dispatchers? What’s the value add on top of phone-dispatched taxis then?
Clearly, there was a right time to start a computer-enhanced taxi service, and that time was 2005~2015. By 2015, the idea had been had.
Do you think there is anyone you left out in this analysis?