The fundamental drivers of economic growth in the past 250 years have been technological innovations. The most important of these general-purpose technologies include the steam engine, electricity, information technology, and now artificial intelligence (AI). The First Machine Age, formally known as the Industrial Revolution, was when humans overcame the limitations of muscle power. We are now approaching the early stages of the Second Machine Age, in which humans are overcoming the limitations of mental capacity. The essence of AI is learning.

Could it work as a concept? I'm picturing an AI based simple game, maybe something where you're competing to "evolve" AI by giving it various tasks to learn from, different "goals", maybe some kind of level cap for how many generations you are allowed to compete with others (so that it's fair). As an example, maybe something along the lines of a battlefield for 10000th generationers, where the winner would be the one who gave the best training parameters (eg maybe the majority of the training was focused on moving and hiding, as opposed to attacking, where the user sets up the training scenarios and percentages of the evolution for each). And to extend this, I'm wondering if something exists that utilizes what the individual "machines" have learnt, so that people playing the game would contribute to a larger scale project. Or, alternatively, allowing users to "opt in" to use their computer down time for calculations on a larger separate project.