On the other, they may also “expand the playbook” is the sense of opening up
the set of problems that can be feasibly addressed, and radically altering scientific and technical
communities’ conceptual approaches and framing of problems. The invention of optical lenses
in the 17th century had important direct economic impact in applications such as spectacles. But
optical lenses in the form of microscopes and telescopes also had enormous and long-lasting
indirect effects on the progress of science, technological change, growth, and welfare: by making
very small or very distant objects visible for the first time, lenses opened up entirely new
domains of inquiry and technological opportunity. Leung et al. (2016), for example, evocatively
characterize machine learning as an opportunity to “learn to read the genome” in ways that
human cognition and perception cannot.
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