A human scientist takes decades to train, and more years to reach the frontier of their research field by diligent reading and conversation. This is the 'burden of knowledge', and it's commonly believed to be one reason ideas have been getting harder to find — by the time human scientists can get up to speed, they're often so old that their ideas are no longer novel. AI just annihilates this constraint — it can assimilate the entire literature and reach the frontier of research extremely quickly, and it can also tell human scientists where the frontier lies without forcing them to discover that for themselves.
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Our picture of the universe has changed more in the last hundred years than it has in all of human history. We live in this time where it's hard to imagine how much our picture of the universe has changed. But no matter how much our picture of the universe has changed, it's so almost incomprehensibly different than the universe that the ancients who built this amphitheater were thinking about.
The Origins Podcast
The concept of head protection was just merely growing your hair long and then putting a stocking cap on top to hold it in place.
Throughline
I took a garbage bag, put it over my head, and I walked out onto the stage, thinking they were going to throw tomatoes at me; I might as well make light of it. But I have to say, even though it was a very tough time, some of the conversations that we had with students at that time were some of the best conversations I've ever had — even now with AI — about the change in technologies, things being fan-driven, and the disconnect that can occur sometimes between an industry and the people who are out there driving change in the industry.
Mitch Glazier — Decoder with Nilay Patel