Sublime

Deepak Pathak looks at the success of deep learning and sees one glaring weakness: each system—be it for machine translation, or object recognition, or even game playing—is purpose-built.

Perhaps, rather than painstakingly trying to hand-code the things we care about, we should develop machines that simply observe human behavior and infer our values and desires from that.

Could such an organization be patterned on biological concepts and methods? [...] What if we quit arguing about the structure of a new institution and tried to think of it as having some sort of genetic code?

Skunk Works creator Kelly Johnson was a visionary on at least two fronts—designing airplanes and organizing genius. Johnson seemed to know intuitively what talented people needed to do their best work, how to motivate them, and how to make sure that the desired product was created as quickly and as cheaply as possible. In time, Johnson wrote down t

Instead, the typical small business owner is only 10 percent Entrepreneur, 20 percent Manager, and 70 percent Technician. The Entrepreneur wakes up with a vision. The Manager screams “Oh, no!” And while the two of them are battling it out, The Technician seizes the opportunity to go into business for himself. Not to pursue the entrepreneurial dream