Generative AI technologies like GPT and DALL-E could allow a "creator economy for worldbuilding" to exist.
getting so good at life you get by without a job, you're just in demand and people want you around unblocking them, performing miracles and shit
The foundations of modern physics were laid rapidly, by a small group of brilliant people collaborating loosely and autonomously, in a few decades in the early 20th century. It bothers me that we haven't seen our understanding of nature advance so quickly after WWII. So I've been thinking about what the necessary conditions may be to create such a rapid, creative environment for discovery and progress. Here is my current hypothesis:
- A small group of the best people
- working in close collaboration and communicating frequently, but pursuing their hypotheses independently
- on a few, well-known important problems onto which their entire field is focused.
I hypothesize that similar conditions were true for computing in the late 60's/early 70's and similar conditions may be true now for ML. Loose collaboration between independent leaders across a focused field.
How might we create and nurture such conditions?
Lex Fridman's recent interview with Brendan Eich reminded me of Flash, which seemed relevant to my recent writing about inventing new software materials and laws of physics when designing interfaces. I've heard Flash, especially the interactive animation editor, praised so often for its interface innovations/interface metaphors. I should look into it more.
I think I would pay up to $20/mo for a service that would take a Twitter handle or email address of a stranger, and based on some cursory Google searches and Internet sleuthing, gave me a few-paragraphs summary of who that person is, and why they might (or might not) be interesting. I have some friends who are very good at this, but it strikes me as the kind of thing that may not be too difficult to automate and scale with language models.
Our brains (visual systems, language centers, etc.) are capable of perceiving, internalizing, and thinking in terms of a vastly larger set of primitives than we currently use them for, and we probably give them credit for.
Having a Twitter presence is like living in the SF Bay Area — great for bootstrapping a network and reputation, but once you have that set, probably not necessary, and fine to move away given all the downsides.
Question to think about, from the Interact retreat:
What are the most likely organizational (institutional), cultural, and IP regimes under which a given kind of invention or innovation is most likely to be created and succeed?
It seems like people in Silicon Valley have assumed that the answer is "a venture-backed company" more than it is the answer in reality. But PC also posits that companies are underrated as a large-scale long-term changemaking instrument because of its unique autonomy, not beholden to few investors but to changeable customers.