121–130 of 283 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The scale of it is certainly different, if nothing else We have never before seen every single profession disrupted to this degree, not even the introduction of the personal computer introduced such a dramatic shift
(in recent memory). Surely the industrial revolution was a much larger disruption.
It is no small feat to put in words that we are losing something almost as quickly as we are gaining something. The undertone, despite leaning into nostalgia boils down to losing control and this uneasiness I feel growing daily. It is already shocking to a certain degree seeing very young people not being able to use a computer in the narrow sense because all they ever learned was touch interfaces and apps. Curated c…
> It is already shocking to a certain degree seeing very young people not being able to use a vehicle in the narrow sense because all they ever learned were the mechanical controls of the so-called automobile. We could do this forever.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't you think there is a difference from "knowing how it works" and "reproducing every aspect of it at the level of the state of the art" ? Also, your example seems flawed if you restrict to a certain product. Can I build a compiler from scratch? Yes. Can I reproduce in a year a compiler with LLVM/GCC performance level? No. Can I build a compiler from scratch in a year from a room if I need to starting mining from…
Not really, at least not in this discussion. An assembly programmer gets logic gates, a C programmer gets assembly, etc etc. And each one can say to the one above "well you don't really get it if you can't bang out some meaningful work". Otherwise idk what we're even talking about here. Having a vague understanding of something isn't "knowing how it works".
I think a fair bar for "from scratch" is stopping at the point they need an expensive fab process (or how else will they reproduce the workings of semiconductors?)
You can know how your entire farm’s water system works. But a city?
Somewhere in between those extremes, you just have to let go.
A shame that Pangram flags this as AI. https://www.pangram.com/history/c0a9cde2-7a5c-4588-83a3-0269...
Competence Does Not Mean What You Think it Means. Please don't fucking tell people that AI is competent. It is not and it cannot ever be because it is not alive .
AI can't be a competent person , but inanmate things can be competent. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/competence
The issue with this is that we don't know how it works. Generally speaking, we know how the level of abstraction that we were born with works. We might have some understanding of one or two previous levels, but that decreases the farther down you go. We might understand the next level, and some of the next after that, but eventually people will be making things that we don't have the context to understand without hav…
I do think there's something to be said for the big difference in the current abstraction layer jump - the loss of determinism. It is meaningfully different.