[nonethewiser]

It makes me think of Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. To be fair I never finished the book but one thing really stuck out.

He describes how scientific revolutions aren’t really incremental progress on previous theories. Think Galileo’s theory earth revolved around the sun - that destroyed the conventional understanding of astronomy (and maybe even physics?). After these revolutions there is a flood of “normal” science that fills in the gaps based on these new big axioms.

Now, blockchain nor AI are scientific revolutions by Kuhn’s meaning of the term. They are certainly “normal” operating within the established domains of statistics, computer science, cryptography etc. But I think they are an analogs . Major breakthroughs were made that gave us AI and blockchain and then afterwards there is a flood of (probably decreasingly small) extensions or applications of them.

I guess my point is that I don’t feel like anything is broken or there are bad incentives. Thats just how innovation works. You have massive progress followed by decreasingly useful work. And certainly in the case of AI there is more large scale progress to be made.

[yencabulator]

Except in one of those, we get steam engines, electricity, space travel, and what not, and in the other we get biz bros getting rich quick by scamming people with cryptocoin Ponzi schemes, deepfakeporn, and election fraud robocalls. Plenty of bad incentives there, not at all convinced it all should count as "innovation" even if it is new.