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>The hour before the Kitty Hawk flight, the two most informed people in the world on the topic of heavier than air flight were a pair of bicycle retailers and m
by xamuel 3y ago
>The hour before the Kitty Hawk flight, the two most informed people in the world on the topic of heavier than air flight were a pair of bicycle retailers and manufacturers named Wilbur and Orville.
Actually, this is quite false. There were many people working on flight with massive credentials and massive funding. That the Wright brothers beat them is part of what makes the story of the Wright brothers so interesting.
- ben_w 3y agoThat the other teams were better funded and yet failed, says to me the Wright Brothers were better informed. That society didn't know this at the time is indeed relevant to AI development, and the analogy would be that the next big thing might come out of some minor research team that most people dismiss instead of the biggest and most well known groups… a bit like how Google's LaMDA was making headlines before ChatGPT surprised everyone. It's certainly still possible today that some random individual has a crucial insight that gives them an edge over the big names, yet even those big names know far more than me. Which is rather annoying, because I'd be interested in taking the opportunity of having been laid off to switch from iOS to AI. (If anyone reading this is hiring people in Berlin, contact details on my website. Plus side of hiring me: I'm relatively cheap in that field, and enthusiastic about the possibilities).
- IncreasePosts 3y agoNow, imagine if the people who were beaten by the Wright brothers had set up a regulatory system 20 years before their first flight, which instituted a bunch of rules and requirements that made it impossible for the Wright brothers (or anyone) to actually achieve flight.