🔮 Discovery; foundational AI; learning & cost of energy production; nuclear fusion++ #376

Hi, I’m Azeem Azhar. I convene Exponential View every week to help us understand how our societies and political economy will change under the force of rapidly accelerating technologies. Today’s edition is quite rich, so find a comfy spot and settle in.

If you are reasonably new to this wondermissive, then a great way to get the baseline of my thesis is to buy my book Exponential (called The Exponential Age in America.) If you like audiobooks, give it a shot. I’m the narrator! 😄

The near future

🧶 The burden of knowledge
Harder, smaller, slower, strugglier: this is the state of scientific research, suggests Matt Clancy. It is a deeply thoughtful piece. Perhaps one anchor weighing discovery down is the burden of knowledge:

If you need more and more knowledge to make a discovery of a given size, then you can probably expect discoveries of a given size to require more time or manpower to bring about.

My view is that there may be structural reasons (in current academia) that are reducing the …