Q: So what does the future of the X Prize look like?
Diamandis: We are looking at a wide range of X Prize ideas that we’re excited about. I’ll just name a few.
One in the life sciences area that I’m very interested about is an artificial intelligence physician, called an AI Physician X Prize, and this would be for design of an AI physician that can speak and listen in natural language and can diagnose a patient as good or better than a panel of 10 board certified doctors. It’s a very measurable, objective test. And it’s An X Prize that Ray Kurzweil and I have worked on defining together, and one that we’re looking for a benefactor or corporate sponsor to underwrite.
My reaction to prizes is that they are often a bad way of getting paid for your efforts. For prizes to work as well as they claim, there must be a whole bunch of people with the exact opposite attitude—who are probably mostly getting screwed by their biases in this area.
I think the recent trend towards prizes like X-prizes and Netflix and Executable Papers is pretty interesting. I agree that it’s a bad way to get paid, and for Netflix at least it probably represented a great low-cost method of getting R&D done.
However, there’s obviously a lot more going on than that. In some spheres, academia being one, money isn’t really the object. Fame and prestige are more important. Winning or sharing a prize like Netflix would probably be worth more in academic career development terms than the cash itself, at least if you’re starting from a comfortable financial position.
So I like to think of the trend towards prizes as being a small step on the way towards a post-scarcity world. In the future, if things work out well, no-one will really need money for food and banal things like that. People who produce creative goods will be competing purely for recognition. Iain Banks writes SF about this, as do many others of course.
There are people who would disagree about how to get humans to do their best. But for those who agree that money is the honey, the action is over at the X-prize foundation.
My reaction to prizes is that they are often a bad way of getting paid for your efforts. For prizes to work as well as they claim, there must be a whole bunch of people with the exact opposite attitude—who are probably mostly getting screwed by their biases in this area.
I think the recent trend towards prizes like X-prizes and Netflix and Executable Papers is pretty interesting. I agree that it’s a bad way to get paid, and for Netflix at least it probably represented a great low-cost method of getting R&D done.
However, there’s obviously a lot more going on than that. In some spheres, academia being one, money isn’t really the object. Fame and prestige are more important. Winning or sharing a prize like Netflix would probably be worth more in academic career development terms than the cash itself, at least if you’re starting from a comfortable financial position.
So I like to think of the trend towards prizes as being a small step on the way towards a post-scarcity world. In the future, if things work out well, no-one will really need money for food and banal things like that. People who produce creative goods will be competing purely for recognition. Iain Banks writes SF about this, as do many others of course.
A single-shot prize does not create ongoing ‘runaway’ incentives to improve. Once it is clear who will get the prize, everyone else goes home.
A regularly scheduled civil-discourse tournament has no finish line, so there is always a reason to continue becoming stronger.