>Given that virtually every researcher is focused on AI, now is the opportunity to make progress on any other topic. >While everyone is researching AI, the sof

>Given that virtually every researcher is focused on AI, now is the opportunity to make progress on any other topic. >While everyone is researching AI, the software systems that quietly run our society continue to fail in ways that are neither rare nor surprising. >In the 2021 book Think Again, organizational psychologist Adam Grant claimed, "Thinking like a scientist involves more than just reacting with an open mind. It means being actively open-minded. It requires searching for reasons why we might be wrong, not for reasons why we must be right, and revising our views based on what we learn." Whether it is through this scientific approach or through random perturbations, we can't get stuck in local maxima. I agree with this, sometimes the mainstream is pretty good, getting better, and so well-loved that its growth is "meta-sizing", but the most promising thing for more brilliant people to work on is something completely different.