Comment by espadrine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by espadrine | Hacker News Reader

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Demis Hassabis of Deepmind echoes a similar sentiment[0]:

> I still think there are missing things with the current systems. […] I regard it a bit like the Industrial Revolution where there was all these amazing new ideas about energy and power and so on, but it was fueled by the fact that there were dead dinosaurs, and coal and oil just lying in the ground. Imagine how much harder the Industrial Revolution would have been without that. We would have had to jump to nuclear or solar somehow in one go. [In AI research,] the equivalent of that oil is just the Internet, this massive human-curated artefact. […] And of course, we can draw on that. And there's just a lot more information there, I think, it turns out than any of us can comprehend, really. […] [T]here's still things I think that are missing. I think we're not good at planning. We need to fix factuality. I also think there's room for memory and episodic memory.

[0]: https://cbmm.mit.edu/video/cbmm10-panel-research-intelligenc...

His view of the Industrial Revolution is completely wrong.

Societies pre-IR had multiple periods where energy usage increased significantly, some of them based specifically around coal. No IR.

Early IR was largely based around the usage of water power, not coal. IR was pure innovation, people being able to imagine and create the impossible, it was going straight to nuclear already.

Ironically, someone who is an innovator believes the very anti-innovation narrative of the IR (very roughly, this is the anti-Eurocentric stuff that began appearing in the 2000s...the world has moved on since then as these theories are obviously wrong). Nothing tells you more about how busted modern universities are than this fact.

Has the narrative moved on? The historian and blogger Bret Devereaux presents a view on a 2022 blog post that seems to back up what the Deepmind CEO is saying.

> The specificity matters here because each innovation in the chain required not merely the discovery of the principle, but also the design and an economically viable use-case to all line up in order to have impact.

https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...

Societies pre-IR had multiple periods where energy usage increased significantly, some of them based specifically around coal. No IR.

That's a straight up misstatement of the parent argument - the parent argued that coal was necessary, not that coal sufficient. True or not, the argument isn't refuted by the IR starting with water power either.

And pairing this with "anti-woke" jabs is discourse-diminishing stuff. The theory that petroleum was a key ingredient of the IR is much older than that (I don't even agree with it but it's better than "pure innovation" fluff).

It isn't a misstatement, it is (as I explained) a common argument that falls within Marxist/materialist viewpoints such as Robert Allen's account of global IR, it was the dominant viewpoint when this guy was at uni, you often hear people in the UK of that age saying this stuff (I know, I studied economic history during this time) but the field has continued to progress since then. Water energy wasn't a "starting", it was the IR. Coal didn't come until significantly later (and the major issue with materialist history is also what happened in the 20th century, you had multiple countries attempt and fail to industrialise using this idea that energy intensity was the only thing that mattered, the biggest issue with anti-Eurocentric theory is that it was designed to explain a 40-year period around the end of the 18th century and completely fails to generalize).

What is anti-woke? You realise that stuff existed before zoomers starting saying everything was woke/anti-woke. Eurocentrism is a school of thought within economic history, it is nothing to do with wokeism...I have no idea how these two things are related apart from you trying to relate it to something you understand, i.e. pop culture.

"Pure innovation" fluff is the dominant theory today, McCloskey's books are the most important ones in this school. To call this "fluff" suggests ignorance rather than the superiority that you seem to be trying to portray.

Petroleum wasn't a key ingredient of IR...at this point, I am assuming you know nothing about basic aspects of economic history because petroleum wasn't widely used as a fuel until the 1930/40s (again, you seem intent on talking about things that you know rather than the actual subject).

I am very curious on what you mentioned, but not able to comprehend. Can you ELI5? Are you saying fossil fuel based industrial revolution is not as significant as it was or we could have directly jumped to a higher level fuel?

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