I remember hearing from some old salty in the oil business that geologists are the wrong people to ask about peak oil. They always understimated future discoveries. The ones that tended to get it right were finaciers and investors.
The idea is that geologists have their noses down in the details of practical, useful knowledge that they have or can get. Financiers don't really know anything, just that wells have been found in the past. They just model things like exploration money, the rate and quality of new finds, oil prices, production costs...
There could be somethng similar here. The real technology people see mostly problems. All the stuff that would need to be solved, that they have no idea how to solve. The fact that we don't even know what intelligence is. The frauds making audacious claims.
Outsiders see drones, self driving cars, spam filters, google search, chess, face recognition, translation, chatbots^. They see that voice recognition now works. I reckon medical diagnosis might do something soon. In any case, it seems that pone way or another, these add up to something. ...just as a hunch.
Obviously I don't know the answer and this whole comment is based on an anecdote that may not even be true. Still, I don't discount the possibility that the unwashed masses are right.
This reminds me of the inspiration for the name of Taleb's "green lumber fallacy". From Wikipedia:
The term green lumber refers to a story by authors Jim Paul and Brendan Moynihan in their book What I Learned Losing A Million Dollars, where a trader made a fortune trading lumber he thought was literally "green" rather than fresh cut.[26] "This gets at the idea that a supposed understanding of an investment rationale, a narrative or a theoretical model is unhelpful in practical trading."[27]
The protagonist makes a big discovery. He remarks that a fellow named Joe Siegel, one of the most successful traders in a commodity called "green lumber," actually thought that it was lumber painted green (rather than freshly cut lumber, called green because it had not been dried). And he made it his profession to trade the stuff! Meanwhile the narrator was into grand intellectual theories and narratives of what caused the price of commodities to move, and went bust. It is not just that the successful expert on lumber was ignorant of central matters like the designation "green." He also knew things about lumber that nonexperts think are unimportant. People we call ignorant might not be ignorant. The fact is that predicting the order flow in lumber and the usual narrative had little to do with the details one would assume from the outside are important. People who do things in the field are not subjected to a set exam; they are selected in the most nonnarrative manner—nice arguments don’t make much difference.[25]
I remember hearing from some old salty in the oil business that geologists are the wrong people to ask about peak oil. They always understimated future discoveries. The ones that tended to get it right were finaciers and investors.
The idea is that geologists have their noses down in the details of practical, useful knowledge that they have or can get. Financiers don't really know anything, just that wells have been found in the past. They just model things like exploration money, the rate and quality of new finds, oil prices, production costs...
There could be somethng similar here. The real technology people see mostly problems. All the stuff that would need to be solved, that they have no idea how to solve. The fact that we don't even know what intelligence is. The frauds making audacious claims.
Outsiders see drones, self driving cars, spam filters, google search, chess, face recognition, translation, chatbots^. They see that voice recognition now works. I reckon medical diagnosis might do something soon. In any case, it seems that pone way or another, these add up to something. ...just as a hunch.
Obviously I don't know the answer and this whole comment is based on an anecdote that may not even be true. Still, I don't discount the possibility that the unwashed masses are right.
^just kidding