[ExI] ‘The game has changed.’ AI triumphs at solving protein structures

[Samantha Atkins]

What incentive do programmers have?  I was in the heart of Silicon
Valley starting in the 70s in what led up to the Homebrew Computer
Club.  I was in SF then and living in the Haight.  A bunch of hippies
became techno-hippies as fast as the first rudimentary do it yourself
computer building kits or even xeroxed instructions became available.  
Computer Power to the People was our motto, dream and chant.   And our
crowd along with our pocket protector non-hippy engineering geek
siblings changed the face of the world.   

That revolutionary fervor and power is not at all death.  Look to Open
Source - to massive mutual several interest cooperatives and their power
beyond more closed systems.  Yes there are rent takers and some of them
threaten the abundance that can come from such technology.  Yes there
are those that want to protect their relative position of wealth and
power against forces of revolutionary change. But the incentives are
very much alive.

I did commercial software for four decades and it can indeed suck the
joy and the promise and the incentives out if they are not continuously
refreshed.  Doing something technically really cool that gets owned and
used for things you don't believe in is deadening.

Money?  We have all the tools to spin up a mere idea into an online SaaS
or other business with extremely little working capital and a cohort or
two that has the dream. 

We are awash in incentives.

- samantha


On 12/2/20 1:38 PM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote:
> Suppose the increasing ability of AI is like a classic curve:  at
> first positively accelerated, then negative, slowing down gradually. 
> Just where on the curve is it now?  Sure, it's a wild guess.  If that
> curve is true, then we can expect more breakthroughs in the next 20
> years than we have had in the last 20. 
>
> The Nobel Prize comes with a nice piece of change.  Just what other
> cash incentives do programmers have?  Maybe we need big important
> prizes to recognize just how important this work is. There are
> certainly enough billionaires around to do that.
>
> I can't say that I really understand the process.  Is it the
> programmers who get the credit, or the people who told the programmers
> what to program?  Or did the AI partly program itself? Anyone know?
>
> bill w
>
> On Wed, Dec 2, 2020 at 1:29 PM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat
> <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> <mailto:extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>> wrote:
>
>     On 02/12/2020 14:43, bill w asked:
>>     Do y'all think that this is the best thing AI has ever done?  bill w
>
>     So far, yes.
>
>     But it won't be the best thing it ever does.
>
>     -- 
>     Ben Zaiboc
>
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>
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