Comment by Jean-Papoulos
12 hours ago
>While this underlying RT, found in a jumbo phage, had been identified in previous studies, Claude appears to be the first to notice the system’s defining features—an associated array of non-coding DNA sequences and an additional accessory protein of unknown function.
So they investigated an already known thing. Not exactly "discovering a new system"... Anyone with money to throw at this already-known thing would have gotten those results I assume.
I feel this is overly pessimistic. Perhaps see it this way then; it is now easy and cheap to throw money at a Thing.
Society is bottlenecked by the limited amount of experts it can muster. That is increasingly less the case.
[dead]
Isn't it the whole point?
Throwing money at a problem was expensive, it's a lot less expensive now
Money and people and realizing in advance that this particular thing is worth concentrating upon, out of a thousand or maybe a million other opportunities.
Even the people parameter is a serious limitation, in all sorts of domains. An example: we have a huge stash of ancient cuneiform tablets from the Middle East, but most have not been read yet because there are very few people who are able to read them.