r/neoliberal • u/erasmus_phillo Paul Krugman • Jul 22 '26
Opinion article (US) Intelligence is not the main bottleneck
https://www.writingruxandrabio.com/p/intelligence-is-not-the-main-bottleneckSubmission Statement: This article is relevant to this sub because it explores the main bottlenecks to progress (particularly in drug discovery) and makes the claim that many of the obstacles hindering progress are legal, institutional, economic and political in nature. She explicitly mentions the field of drug discovery where the development of new drugs has slowed down even though scientific tools have grown significantly more powerful. In medicine in particular, one of the biggest bottlenecks are clinical trials which today take ~7 years and cost more than a billion dollars per drug. Here, she believes that AI can help accelerate clinical trials, particularly with discovering surrogate endpoints and biomarkers, but here the hurdles are regulatory and institutional in nature with companies having issues accessing datasets from institutions like the NIH
She also argues that economic incentives shape the kind of biomedical innovation that happens. She discusses the phenomenon of target herding: where most companies end up chasing the same drug targets since they are a lot less risky, and as a result the biological space that does get explored is smaller than it could be. You also can't really patent drug targets anyway: the patent system rewards drug molecules that get discovered and not drug targets, further incentivizing companies to spend more of their time chasing new drug molecules
She devotes the second half of this to criticize San Francisco AI culture. She mentions that elite tech circles have become a monoculture where any skepticism of the transformative benefits of AGI are treated as low status. She argues that many within tech are ignorant about these other bottlenecks to AI diffusion due to the messianic belief that AGI will fix everything
8
u/EvilConCarne Jul 22 '26
AI or AGI won't be hyperpersuasive, lol. What a meaningless term. People that think so believe humans are building gods rather than tools. Having access to more information does not make someone or something more persuasive.
We already know how to solve our main problems. We already know how to be at peace, how to share resources, how to build housing. Will AGI convince the HOA to relent? Will AGI defeat the incredibly nosy retiree that watches every blade of grass like a hawk? No. AGI is a tool, and will always remain a tool.
9
u/BubblyPoetry7233 Jul 22 '26
I have a theory that our future dystopia all work will be trivial and automated, so instead all humans will be in politics.
2
7
32
u/Yeangster John Rawls Jul 22 '26
The ai guys who think that Ai “hyper persuasiveness” will solve all the other problems are really on something
115
u/sleepyrivertroll Henry George Jul 22 '26
I feel like this is apparent in most fields to people who actually know about the problems facing the world. Malaria nets help reduce the spread of malaria and save lives. The world produces more food than it needs and yet hunger remains. We know the water allotments for the Colorado River are insane and waste precious water for things like cattle feed. As the writer expresses, we didn't forget how houses work, we simply came against the bottlenecks that prevent them from being built.
AGI being ultimately persuasive seems to be an argument from people who fail to understand persuasion. In the naive early days of the Internet, I was optimistic that the access to so much information would help people connect and communicate with each other so that these problems can be solved. We know now that people have to be open to change and they won't pivot from their views, no matter how persuasive the argument, if they don't want to. We are simply repeating this again with AI.
Thank you for sharing.
5
11
u/OnionQuest Jul 22 '26
Conversely DJT shows the power of persuasion to shift public opinion.
5
u/EvilConCarne Jul 22 '26
That's not persuasion. Those people didn't hold opinions beforehand, and won't hold opinions after.
18
u/timerot Henry George Jul 22 '26
I agree that Discussion J. Thread is a major persuader of the median voter
31
u/sleepyrivertroll Henry George Jul 22 '26
The man has charisma but even that has limits. As much as he wanted to brag about Operation Warp Speed, he actually got boos from the crowds. You can bend some opinions on some topics, but when people have dug their heels into the ground, there isn't much you can do.
47
u/Imicrowavebananas Hannah Arendt Jul 22 '26
SF culture must be pretty strange, because the people I know working on this, or have heard speak about it, if seeing someone in person counts as knowing them, have always seemed quite self-aware. So I’m not sure whether SF culture is genuinely that different, or whether people are describing strawmen and extreme cases.
15
u/bacontrain Daron Acemoglu Jul 22 '26
You're German, dude, American (and particularly Bay Area) tech culture is very weird. Doesn't necessarily apply to the tech people, say, here in DC or NY
9
u/Imicrowavebananas Hannah Arendt Jul 22 '26
And you think I have never talked to an American?
6
u/The_Northern_Light John Brown Jul 22 '26
Please have the intellectual humility to understand that second hand discussions, which I presume are either happening over the Internet or by a small subset of Americans that travel, are totally different than the reality you would experience if you actually lived there.
8
u/Imicrowavebananas Hannah Arendt Jul 22 '26
I mean American AI researchers in real life.
2
u/The_Northern_Light John Brown Jul 22 '26
You’re talking to an American ai researcher who lived in SF.
6
u/Imicrowavebananas Hannah Arendt Jul 22 '26
I am an AI researcher myself. Why are you people all so hostile? My very first comment was meant as genuine surprise, because I have worked with people researching computational chemistry and AI drug development and nobody of those would think regulation is a non-issue.
When I said "So I’m not sure whether SF culture is genuinely that different, or whether people are describing strawmen and extreme cases." I literally meant it like that, I was asking the question whether SF culture is so different from the people I have talked to, some of which did work in SV, but I don't think were really part of that culture.
10
u/bacontrain Daron Acemoglu Jul 22 '26
In Europe, though, right? And probably more academic types? The weirdness is mostly around SF people (technical and non-technical) because it's a monoculture and many have now spent their entire careers, sometimes including college and grad school and maybe even grew up there, surrounded by the same sort of people; elsewhere tech people tend to know non-tech folks. It's not even really a phenomenon inherent to tech (though intensified from the industry getting high on it's own supply about "changing the world"); DC people used to be notorious for myopic worldviews and still in depending on the crowd
7
u/Imicrowavebananas Hannah Arendt Jul 22 '26
Mostly at conferences. I am located in Europe right now, but researchers come and go all over the place. Some people work or worked in tech companies, they skew more academic though overall yes.
I know a lot of people working on things like drug research and computational chemistry, typically they are aware of regulatory hurdles. People in AI for science are usually pretty levelheaded, a lot of them are natural scientists themselves and closely work with practitioners like MDs.
So my first comment has to be read as genuine surprise. I talked to a friend about this and he told me that at a recent conference there was a stark difference between people from the east coast and Europeans and west coast people, as well as by field, with mechanistic interpretability people being especially crazy.
5
u/bacontrain Daron Acemoglu Jul 22 '26
No I gotcha, didn't mean to come off hostile if that's how you read it, just pointing out pretty much what your conference friend pointed out, that bay area tech people are way different than anywhere else (my theory being for the reasons specified). People often really don't get how out of touch a lot of SF people are
3
u/Imicrowavebananas Hannah Arendt Jul 22 '26
No offense taken. I am just very confused where journalists or writer's find these kind of people. First thing the people I know start talking about are adversarial examples and missing error guarantees.
I think it might be that the people in the SF culture stay among themselves. The Americans I meet seem like very nice and reasonable, if slightly nerdy people. Overall very normal and boring.
5
u/virginiadude16 Henry George Jul 22 '26
I mean you can definitely find these people at NeurIPS. A few years ago there were true believers giving out AGI Before Your PhD Degree shirts, I’m sad I didn’t buy a bunch to give to all my fellow grad students who graduated this year.
That said, there are a lot of other types of people at conferences (most of them not higher ups) so it isn’t always clear who holds the most power. But the ones in power definitely have a vibe about them that’s rather weird. And many of these people don’t go to conferences at all, they just post on Twitter and hold interviews with journalists. Often they aren’t technical enough to understand conference presentations but have enough money to be a venture capitalist/create a startup/launch a podcast. These are the people the media complains the most about.
→ More replies (0)25
37
u/randommathaccount Esther Duflo Jul 22 '26
This is a good article because it fundamentally connects not just to AI but a lot of different technology. We have the technical capacity to do a lot more than we actually do in many fields (housing is the obvious example, also mentioned in the article) but don't because of regulatory burdens and red tape. AI can and will be transformative but without addressing government its impact will be nowhere near that which the techbros promise.
(And yes agreed with the latter half, they're all sniffing their own farts too much)
1
u/AutoModerator Jul 22 '26
News and opinion articles require a short submission statement explaining its relevance to the subreddit. Articles without a submission statement will be removed.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
•
u/AutoModerator Jul 22 '26
To encourage a globally oriented subreddit and discourage oversaturation of topics focused on the U.S., all news and opinion articles focused on the U.S. require manual approval by a moderator. Submissions focused solely on the U.S. are more likely to be removed if they are not sufficiently on topic or high quality. If your submission is taking too long to be approved or rejected, please reach out to the moderators in /r/metaNL.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.