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DavidGross's avatar

Software geek for 20+ years. BS in CS with minor in AI. My gut reaction on reading this post, FWIW:

Creating an em strikes me as a Very Hard Problem. My money is on it not happening, period. That said, if it were to happen, the various problems solved along the way to making an em a reality would make the idea of using an em to do software engineering ridiculous. Instead, you'd branch off some of these intermediate innovations to make software-engineering-specific AI applications that wouldn't be very em-like. Asking how you'd use an em to do software engineering is like asking how much hay you'd need to feed a horseless carriage.

FWIW: I'm currently working with a company that deals with cutting-edge Hard Problems involving huge amounts of data distributed all over the place and used by tons of people and managed by an ecosystem of a gazillion feisty bits of difficult software that nobody really understands in the aggregate. A lot of their work these days is going in to trying to make the status of this ecosystem more easily processable by the human neurological system through creative data visualization techniques... in other words, trying to finesse the boundary between human brain data-processing ability and computer big-data.

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Geoff Brown's avatar

I think the most fundamental change to software tools in this scenario will be a focus shift from tactical economic activities to the optimization of experimentation, discovery and simulation methods.

I think this would be the nexus of the battle between EM's. This could even lead to evolutionary differentiation between EM's.Any real advances beyond speed will still be constrained by the experimental environments the EM's can create. Especially as the multivariate complexities of the simulations grow exponential or slower yet if the carbon/hydrogen system can't be modelled accurately, then discovery will still have a analog speed limit.

I think a core focus of EMs might be to either minimize serendipity or quantify the optimal randomness required to create sufficient serendipity to create answers to primary research questions.

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