Given my experience with complex technology (software), I think it's rather likely that a generation ship will reconfigure while traveling.
Maybe we will build a ship that's just enough to bring them to a place with lots of resources. Then, it will be rebuild with those resources for the final journey. Or even new ships might be build out of existing ones to adapt for varying conditions.
Similar to biological life on earth.
Pretty much all scenarios for accelerating to cruise speed and decelerating at the other end involve very high density fuels produced using a significant fraction of the energy of the Sun. You're not going to be able to stop in the middle of empty space where there is absolutely nothing in order to reconfigure and refuel.
History often has cases where the surrounding context/infrastructure/market/culture just wasn't suitable for an invention to take off--so it fails--and then somebody 5-100 years later tries something almost the same thing and it becomes a wild success and they get all the credit for it.
For example, look at the AT&T Picturephone from ~1964. [0] Even if someone from today time-traveled with the benefit of ~60 years of economic and technological hindsight... do you think a strategy of "just keep investing--somebody has to" would been enough to make the video-phone a widespread and profitable thing in any reasonable timeframe?
I'm pretty sure you'd go quite bankrupt first, just trying to stay solvent while making hundreds of other enabling-inventions and cost-savings in a wide range of fields while completely replacing global infrastructure.
Moreover, technology is created as spillover effect from investments in other areas (That aren't speculative). CUDA is only possible because Nvidia was supported by gaming revenue for a decade. Without CUDA, there is no alexnet, and no deep learning boom will happen if we are still on CPUs or google's proprietary TPUs.
I hate it and I hate the arrogance of essays like this. They dive deeply into entirely missing the point.
Also makes you think.
Someone pointed out that they would have been better off waiting for about 40 years of Moore's law to happen, then building a computer and running the same calculation in about 2 years.
In general once a machine can do something (and AI is a machine) it quickly becomes no longer a highly valuable activity.
For example, being a portrait painter around the time cameras were invented.
So if there's a project that you think AI will do for you, just keep in mind that by the time AI gets there the effective value of that activity will have greatly diminished and you are unlikely to get out of it what you would if you do it today.
If you wait, you may find you've been reduced from highly trained master of fine art to just another guy who says "say cheese" and pushes a button.
The value of problems is not fixed.
The space version is an interesting comparison though, because while the value of space exploration would increase with speed of travel (due to being able to make use of resources across greater distances), the value of any technological accomplishment decreases as they become easier.
On the other hand, if you're doing code review poorly, and it's just a waste of everyone's time, then you're far better off just dropping them altogether than spending money on an AI system to do poor code reviews for you.
I think this analogy is best suited for training models. Even if you had access to OpenAIs datasets right now, I don't think it would make sense for you to train them, except if you are a 500B+ company. Training costs will likely go down with time though, so at some point this might change.
AI investment in SOTA though I have no idea how you time that but I am guessing early is better.
Well duh, but first find all those coefficients and then come back and we'll talk yeah?
I have so many problems with this line
