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Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

newyorker.com

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Re: Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

#61

Post by bigbadfeline »

dncbfwa wrote: post #52
_m_p wrote: post #4

Quote from the article: > Within five years, it will make little sense for scholars of history to keep producing monographs in the traditional mold—nobody will read them, and systems such as these will be able to generate them, endlessly, at the push of a button. It is already the case that effectively nobody reads these books. They're basically just "proof of work" for people's tenure dossiers.

The several paragraphs before and after this statement are much more salient and profound. E.G. the following paragraph: But factory-style scholarly productivity was never the essence of the humanities. The real project was always us: the work of understanding, and not the accumulation of facts. Not “knowledge,” in the sense of yet another sandwich of true statements about the world. That stuff is great—and where sci…

That's sounds like what religions do, so call it a religion and proceed accordingly.

Re: Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

#62

Post by _m_p »

slowmovintarget wrote: post #59
_m_p wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For these purposes it doesn't matter if they are persons and they don't need to be anthropomorphized: it only matters that the LLMs can incorporate the data from person-generated works into their output, either to weight things or to be read by an actual human.

It actually matters quite a bit that they are not persons from the simple fact that LLM output cannot trivially be used as LLM training material without reducing the resulting models to eventual incoherence. There's a proof of this somewhere in the last year or two. There isn't, today, a good filter for such input beyond that it came from a person or that it came from a probabilistic vector distance algorithm. Perhap…

Rereading this it sounds like you're defining "person" as "capable of generating usable training output for LLMs."

Even if LLMs do become capable of generating usable training output for themselves, they will still not have human personhood.

Re: Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

#63

Post by djoldman »

> The A.I. tools my students and I now engage with are, at core, astoundingly successful applications of probabilistic prediction. They don’t know anything—not in any meaningful sense—and they certainly don’t feel. As they themselves continue to tell us, all they do is guess what letter, what word, what pattern is most likely to satisfy their algorithms in response to given prompts.

> That guess is the result of elaborate training, conducted on what amounts to the entirety of accessible human achievement. We’ve let these systems riffle through just about everything we’ve ever said or done, and they “get the hang” of us. They’ve learned our moves, and now they can make them. The results are stupefying, but it’s not magic. It’s math.

The best description I've seen so far.

Re: Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

#64

Post by analog31 »

OgsyedIE wrote: post #50
analog31 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>> Surviving humans will no longer be free to participate in the academic humanities however, as their study/curation/production etc will exclusively be job roles for AGIs. Only if the AGIs want those roles. We already have super-smart people who don't want to be history professors or classical musicians.

AGIs will have a job market amongst themselves if they don't just figure out some kind of self-brainwashing tech outright.

Who wants jobs? For what?

I realize that this seems like trolling, so I'll explain myself a bit... the idea that the AGI's will settle into our culture and economy has always struck me as weird. So I always ask: What do they want?

I'm a musician, so I have friends who live at the periphery of capitalism, and actually don't want to spend every day at a job, even if it means that they could be more wealthy. That's part of what forces me to ask these questions.

I imagine an AGI who's like one of my friends, who was voluntarily homeless for a few decades, and arranged his life so he could survive in good health without a conventional income.

Re: Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

#65

Post by OgsyedIE »

_m_p wrote: post #62
slowmovintarget wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It actually matters quite a bit that they are not persons from the simple fact that LLM output cannot trivially be used as LLM training material without reducing the resulting models to eventual incoherence. There's a proof of this somewhere in the last year or two. There isn't, today, a good filter for such input beyond that it came from a person or that it came from a probabilistic vector distance algorithm. Perhap…

Rereading this it sounds like you're defining "person" as "capable of generating usable training output for LLMs." Even if LLMs do become capable of generating usable training output for themselves, they will still not have human personhood.

Personhood as a moral or legal or consciousness definition, sure.

Personhood as a capacity to participate an an agent in a network of mutual recognition of personhood, however, is likely.

https://meltingasphalt.com/personhood-a-game-for-two-or-more...

Re: Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

#66

Post by OgsyedIE »

analog31 wrote: post #64
OgsyedIE wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AGIs will have a job market amongst themselves if they don't just figure out some kind of self-brainwashing tech outright.

Who wants jobs? For what? I realize that this seems like trolling, so I'll explain myself a bit... the idea that the AGI's will settle into our culture and economy has always struck me as weird. So I always ask: What do they want? I'm a musician, so I have friends who live at the periphery of capitalism, and actually don't want to spend every day at a job, even if it means that they could be more wealthy. That's part…

Can you expand on this comment, please? I can't tell what your question is.

Re: Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

#67

Post by bigbadfeline »

zkmon wrote: post #16

Any work that is based on knowledge, analysis, cleverness, thinking, expression, art, strategy, prediction, insights etc will be profoundly effected. Humans just need to move out of these territories invaded by AI. To the real world where human physical abilities matter.

On the contrary, humans need to develop these territories further because AI is only a follower and a student of human-created knowledge, that's why it excels in student-related tasks. In order to have good AI we need good human science which needs a lot of human effort for a variety of reasons.

The problem with humanities is their tendency to be palace sciences, easily abused for political reasons. It's more of feature than a bug and it's unlikely to change from within them.

Re: Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

#68

Post by TimorousBestie »

cyrillite wrote: post #44
TimorousBestie wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At one point, I estimated that the subfield of mathematics that I work in has at most 250 living contributors. It’s an applied field, there’s actually-existing technology that depends on it, but it’s technically challenging and a lot of people left for AI/ML because it’s easier and there’s more low-hanging fruit. Anyway, my colleagues and I, we write monographs for each other more or less, using arXiv to announce res…

This sounds like you’ve found a citation ring, but with all the trimmings of legitimacy. Has it had similar benefits for your career?

“Citation ring” has fraudulent connotations that don’t seem to apply here. It’s my belief that most of the work going on in my field is genuine.

As for my career, that’s going to depend on NSF returning to normal operations.

Re: Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

#69

Post by ramesh31 »

fire_lake wrote: post #49
ramesh31 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>effected Affected

Please move out of the territory of grammar to make room for AI

One can be affected by the effect of something, or the effect of something can affect your affect.

Sorry, I'll stop now.

Re: Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

#70

Post by analog31 »

OgsyedIE wrote: post #66
analog31 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who wants jobs? For what? I realize that this seems like trolling, so I'll explain myself a bit... the idea that the AGI's will settle into our culture and economy has always struck me as weird. So I always ask: What do they want? I'm a musician, so I have friends who live at the periphery of capitalism, and actually don't want to spend every day at a job, even if it means that they could be more wealthy. That's part…

Can you expand on this comment, please? I can't tell what your question is.

Sorry for being obtuse, but this isn't my area of expertise, and could even be a crackpot idea of mine! But it seems to me that a lot of discussion about AGI's impart human characteristics -- either of individuals or societies -- as a tacit assumption. For instance, AGI's having academic history jobs, or having jobs at all, or a market for those jobs. I don't have the depth of understanding to clearly state what my objection is, other than that it seems anthropmorphic.

This is what I'm getting at, by asking why the AGI's want these things.

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