VCs at the Singularity Summit
Steven Jurveston and Peter Thiel gave presentations today. I found these to be very interesting perspectives.
Thiel’s theorized that the increase in frequency and magnitude of boom and bust cycles are a prelude to the Singularity, which would be a sustained boom driven by radical increases in productivity. Something to watch.
Jurveston’s main thesis was that AI created by evolutionary algorithms would have a strong competitive advantage over attempts to use traditional design. Some of the advantages include lack of brittleness and speed of implementation. Once you go down the evolution path, you diverge from the design path, because reverse engineering an evolved system is either very difficult or impossible. One idea I had while listening to this is that you can evolve subsystems with well defined I/O and connect the subsystems into a designed overall architecture.