[eli_gottlieb]

>I've seen this same line of criticism before of the way in which AI systems have been generally designed for decades and to me it rings true. Things like the Turing award arguably lead researchers astray. Essentially, the crux of the argument is that most people focus on climbing trees to achieve success when the real goal is reaching the moon or they build better springs when the real goal is achieving flight. [1] Both show some short-term improvements on certain heuristics, but they are obviously the wrong approach if you want serious breakthroughs.

Basically, we incentivize researchers to work on the most near-term solvable problems, rather than the most difficult problems where we understand how to check for a solution -- let alone to work on developing the solution-properties we can check, to get past wholesale conceptual confusions.