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Problems that attract smart people

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Re: Problems that attract smart people

#81

Post by digging »

v64 wrote: post #68
PuppyTailWags wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It still doesn't occur to me that the 1-3% smartest people in the world would be attracted to LLM/AI just because they're intelligent. The most intelligent people I know are variously uninterested in AI because AI threatens many of their beloved interests in which the confluence of their intelligence can be expressed, i.e creative activities like music, composition, visual art, interactive works like games, and writi…

Perhaps I'm outing myself as a so-called unintelligent person here, but I don't see how AI is a threat to creative hobbies of mine like music and writing. AI isn't going to stop me from sitting down at the piano or writing a short story. There will always be people in the world better at those things than me, so what difference does it make if an AI may or may not be better at them too? And if I can't tell the differ…

> AI isn't going to stop me from sitting down at the piano or writing a short story. There will always be people in the world better at those things than me, so what difference does it make if an AI may or may not be better at them too?

The threat is that it will no longer be viable to make money from creative works. A completely trivial and laughable concern if you don't live in a society that believes you have to "earn a living".

Re: Problems that attract smart people

#82

Post by digging »

nightpool wrote: post #56
kgwgk wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I don’t have the required level of literacy but I understand « The smartest people I know personally and that I'm aware of generally » as the union of the « know personally » and « aware of generally » sets.

In most understandings of English, "and" is used as the conjunction operator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_conjunction (set intersection). If you were expressing a disjunction (a union), you'd use "or" or "as well as" or something similar. Obviously it's possible to eventually puzzle out from context what OP meant, but I made the same mistake as the person you're replying to when reading the comment quickly.

> In most understandings of English

This seems a reach to me. I think your confusion is not unfounded and is not uncommon, but I think it's also extremely (and moreso?) common to read the sentence as the author intended. It took me 0ms to puzzle out the meaning because the intended meaning was the natural assumption of my brain.

Besides that, it seems a bit absurd to me to say that "and" and "as well as" have entirely distinct meanings. They're not totally interchangeable, but there is overlap.

Re: Problems that attract smart people

#83

Post by v64 »

digging wrote: post #81
v64 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps I'm outing myself as a so-called unintelligent person here, but I don't see how AI is a threat to creative hobbies of mine like music and writing. AI isn't going to stop me from sitting down at the piano or writing a short story. There will always be people in the world better at those things than me, so what difference does it make if an AI may or may not be better at them too? And if I can't tell the differ…

> AI isn't going to stop me from sitting down at the piano or writing a short story. There will always be people in the world better at those things than me, so what difference does it make if an AI may or may not be better at them too? The threat is that it will no longer be viable to make money from creative works. A completely trivial and laughable concern if you don't live in a society that believes you have to "…

> The threat is that it will no longer be viable to make money from creative works.

Although I see a comparison to previous technologies replacing human jobs, I'm willing to put that point aside and focus solely on AI.

Will AI generated content be cheaper? Will AI content be more interesting and engaging than anything a human could create? If there is no economic demand for human generated artwork, then should it still be viable to make money from it? Is there reason to believe the people who remain in the art market won't be able to make more money by occupying niches that AI art doesn't serve, or by selling to "hipsters" or "luddites" who are anti-AI art? It used to be the only way to make real money through art was having a patron. Perhaps there will be wealthy people who will still be willing to patronize human artists.

Historically, we are in a special place in history where average people can make a living through creative work, but it's not at all an easy industry to break into, even today, and it has always been competitive and everchanging, just as art itself. Economics aside, people have always produced art for intrinsic purposes, and they will continue to do so even when the profit motive is gone.

Re: Problems that attract smart people

#84

Post by corbulo »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #13
michaelt wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on how you think technology relates to democracy. If you think this is the modern-day equivalent of a printing press, it's vital to avoid this being in the hands of only one or two multi-billion-dollar corporations with a history of morally questionable moves. If you think privacy rights and freedom from surveillance are critical to democracy, you want your smart speaker or video doorbell to do all its pro…

The washing machine is one of the biggest game changer in the world, allowing people to suddenly have, like a noble used to have, the equivalent of a servant to do a tremendously costly chore. Without the slavery part. I think AI has the same potential: filling administrative work, walking the complexity of an information overloaded world, keeping up to date with laws you can't ignore but have no way to know about, p…

Washing machine but for office work is a great analogy.

You lost me at iPhone for AI. I think I know what you mean but it can be expressed better.

Re: Problems that attract smart people

#85

Post by PuppyTailWags »

v64 wrote: post #68
PuppyTailWags wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It still doesn't occur to me that the 1-3% smartest people in the world would be attracted to LLM/AI just because they're intelligent. The most intelligent people I know are variously uninterested in AI because AI threatens many of their beloved interests in which the confluence of their intelligence can be expressed, i.e creative activities like music, composition, visual art, interactive works like games, and writi…

Perhaps I'm outing myself as a so-called unintelligent person here, but I don't see how AI is a threat to creative hobbies of mine like music and writing. AI isn't going to stop me from sitting down at the piano or writing a short story. There will always be people in the world better at those things than me, so what difference does it make if an AI may or may not be better at them too? And if I can't tell the differ…

It makes it so that the actual intellectually interesting analysis of art, when viewed through the lens of an LLM, becomes a cognitively simple to understand puzzle of matching prompts to effects. There's not a lot of interesting conversation to ask about color theory or composition.

The interesting stuff is asking what is an artist trying to convey or explore within the nuances of the medium they are working with: why does neon genesis rebuild movies use live action camera techniques and what does that do to the overall themes of the work? Why does one painting use the texture of the paint instead of the color theory of the paint as a message conveyor? How is the use of reflective or matte surfaces communicating an environment in an installed art piece?

Furthermore, of the very smart people I know, the intellectually stimulating stuff is kind of bizarre, and avenues of finding this stuff or funding this stuff is being drowned out by comparatively understimulating works. Artists usually fund their more unusual pursuits with the commercial work that MidJourney/Stable Diffusion targets.

Re: Problems that attract smart people

#86

Post by v64 »

PuppyTailWags wrote: post #85
v64 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps I'm outing myself as a so-called unintelligent person here, but I don't see how AI is a threat to creative hobbies of mine like music and writing. AI isn't going to stop me from sitting down at the piano or writing a short story. There will always be people in the world better at those things than me, so what difference does it make if an AI may or may not be better at them too? And if I can't tell the differ…

It makes it so that the actual intellectually interesting analysis of art, when viewed through the lens of an LLM, becomes a cognitively simple to understand puzzle of matching prompts to effects. There's not a lot of interesting conversation to ask about color theory or composition. The interesting stuff is asking what is an artist trying to convey or explore within the nuances of the medium they are working with: w…

> There's not a lot of interesting conversation to ask about color theory or composition. The interesting stuff is asking what is an artist trying to convey or explore within the nuances of the medium they are working with

For some, this is an important aspect of art appreciation, and I would expect those people to continue to gravitate toward human produced art. For other people who don't have that background, and don't think about those things, the difference won't be relevant to them, and they'll judge the end product based on their own personal and arbitrary criteria. What's interesting about an artwork to one person makes it banal to another, and no amount of academic study or criticism will change peoples' tastes.

Let's not forget that often creators themselves aren't always actively thinking about composition, texture, color, etc, and part of the work for them can be as black box out of their subconscious as the creation of a neural network.

Similar to people being fooled by white wine dyed red, I think we'll also have critics who remark on how absolutely human a work of art has to be due to X/Y/Z, only for it to be revealed to be an AI work. That I think encapsulates a lot of what I look forward to in terms of the debate over what exactly about art is human-specific and what it means for something, human or not, to have artistic capabilities.

Re: Problems that attract smart people

#87

Post by lambic2 »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #80
lambic2 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

|Amazing, but very basic. After playing around with ChatGPT for a few hours I have a hard time seeing how someone could objectively call it "basic".

The nokia 3310 was amazing. But compared to what we have today, it's very basic. Same for chatgpt.

Right but by that definition every thing in the universe is and will always be basic. The word becomes meaningless.

Re: Problems that attract smart people

#88

Post by mturmon »

jamesgill wrote: post #70

Like Paul Graham, I'm in my 50s. Unlike Paul Graham, I've never been confident that I can identify what a 'smart' person is. The only thing I know for sure is that it rarely has anything to do with what people like to call 'intelligence'.

My problem and shame has been the false negatives I have. I meet people with great potential all the time - who have done more, or know more, or think more deeply about something than others. And it's apparent to me - they're going to do great stuff.

My problem is that there are also plenty of people who don't trigger that sense in me, but that have gone on to do really great stuff all the same. So I try to be humble about my assessments.

I agree that whatever separator line there is, it's not 'intelligence', maybe more like intelligence * drive * longevity, and I may be keying in on the first factor but not others.

Re: Problems that attract smart people

#89

Post by PuppyTailWags »

v64 wrote: post #86
PuppyTailWags wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes it so that the actual intellectually interesting analysis of art, when viewed through the lens of an LLM, becomes a cognitively simple to understand puzzle of matching prompts to effects. There's not a lot of interesting conversation to ask about color theory or composition. The interesting stuff is asking what is an artist trying to convey or explore within the nuances of the medium they are working with: w…

> There's not a lot of interesting conversation to ask about color theory or composition. The interesting stuff is asking what is an artist trying to convey or explore within the nuances of the medium they are working with For some, this is an important aspect of art appreciation, and I would expect those people to continue to gravitate toward human produced art. For other people who don't have that background, and d…

I'm just pointing out, in my anecdotal experience, that the smartest people I know don't have interest in AI because of the way AI clashes with the things they find the most intellectual stimulation from. None of what you said really addresses any of that, and I really have no interest in debating the subjectivity of AI art on the internet, as there's nothing about it that hasn't already been said.

Re: Problems that attract smart people

#90

Post by dredmorbius »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #45

The single smartest person I know (an actual genius, mensa, gifted schools, etc) works in a crappy web agency and he's chronically underpaid. Tons of smart people I know are doing mediocre jobs. The fact someone is tackling hard problems doesn't make them the smartest people in the room, you need a combination of risk taking and smart in life.

See the story of William James Sidis:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_James_Sidis>

Child prodigy, IQ assessed between 250 and 300, contemporary, classmate, and friend of Norbert Wiener (father of cybernetics, also a child prodigy), and ended up ... making a life's work of studying bus transfers. As in the tickets, not commute patterns themselves.

Several HN submissions though no substantive discussion: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=William%20James%20Sidis>

Sidis Archives: https://www.sidis.net/>

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