100 sats \ 1 reply \ @elvismercury OP 9 Mar \ parent \ on: Incentives and coordination to solve hard problems mostly_harmless
Ha! Yes. This is an extra-hard problem, I think, because:
a) economic incentives are not only generally useless for vitally important classes of endeavor, but counter-productive to it, and
b) we have no good way of non-economic incentive-design that our civilization can manage anymore -- religion being both perverted and largely ineffectual to current sensibilities; and nothing else seriously on offer.
R&D labs are mostly motivated by these non-extrinsic incentives too as far as I can tell. If a stable financial life is harder to achieve now than it was in the golden age of R&D labs, maybe we are scrambling too much to pursue intrinsic things. That's probably my bias though.
Another view: the hard problems, absent AI, were so hard R&D couldn't reliably spinoff extrinsic things so we stopped building R&D labs.
This is sort of consistent with one of Theil's theories for why we are stagnating.
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