> I have no faith in the basement dwelling loner making significant contributions to AI.
Why not? There's a strong history of individuals outside of academia making large contributions to science.
Why not? There's a strong history of individuals outside of academia making large contributions to science.
The few who make novel contributions are not representative.
People working in groups building on the success and knowledge of others make the vast majority of meaningful contributions in all fields.
But most basement dwellers don't go to that much effort.
No, not really. "We" academics get cliquey because of the intellectual prerequisites to our work, not because we're trying to form a closed conspiracy for domination of the academic world. If someone can demonstrate findings but has unusual institutional affiliations, we'll give them exactly our normal treatment (ie: skepticism in proportion to how thoroughly they're proving our hypotheses wrong, mixed with enthusiasm for having something interesting to talk about).