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Artificial Intelligence: Ars Notoria and the Promise of Instant Knowledge

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Re: Artificial Intelligence: Ars Notoria and the Promise of Instant Knowledge

#31

Post by novocainn »

mannanj wrote: post #13
dimbletimbers wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the connection is pretty clear: people have always wanted to know things without having to learn them.

I think the underlying motivation may be straw manned or misrepresented as only that. Do you use AI? Do you build anything with it technically? I do. I don't want to know things without learning them, I want to produce things of value and that solve important problems, and if I can do that rather than the alternative (not do it, because of competing focuses, limited time and energy, etc) I would go with the option of…

[dead]

Re: Artificial Intelligence: Ars Notoria and the Promise of Instant Knowledge

#32

Post by [deleted] »

drivebyhooting wrote: post #30
titanomachy wrote: post #15

I don’t know much about medieval universities, but maybe this thing was popular because the subjects are sort of vague and subjective? Like maybe a powerful placebo could make you feel you’ve improved at “eloquence” or “dialect”, but it certainly wouldn’t make you able to compute wavefunctions for quantum mechanics. It’s pretty hard to imagine people trying something like this to learn the material for a present-day…

And yet, knowing how to calculate a wave function helps little with leading a happy life, finding and maintaining good relationships, talking to children, etc. The more secular we become, the more “gospel” we reject, the more we leave behind, the more …critical thinking… we have to do. If it’s gonna take until you’re 40+ years old to have it figured it out, then truly what was gained by rejecting dogma?

[deleted]

Re: Artificial Intelligence: Ars Notoria and the Promise of Instant Knowledge

#33

Post by titanomachy »

drivebyhooting wrote: post #30
titanomachy wrote: post #15

I don’t know much about medieval universities, but maybe this thing was popular because the subjects are sort of vague and subjective? Like maybe a powerful placebo could make you feel you’ve improved at “eloquence” or “dialect”, but it certainly wouldn’t make you able to compute wavefunctions for quantum mechanics. It’s pretty hard to imagine people trying something like this to learn the material for a present-day…

And yet, knowing how to calculate a wave function helps little with leading a happy life, finding and maintaining good relationships, talking to children, etc. The more secular we become, the more “gospel” we reject, the more we leave behind, the more …critical thinking… we have to do. If it’s gonna take until you’re 40+ years old to have it figured it out, then truly what was gained by rejecting dogma?

Yeah I’m pretty keen on contemplative practices and stuff in general, I just don’t think anyone today would make the mistake of thinking that this thing would help them ace their STEM degree.

Re: Artificial Intelligence: Ars Notoria and the Promise of Instant Knowledge

#34

Post by mannanj »

pixl97 wrote: post #23
mannanj wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the underlying motivation may be straw manned or misrepresented as only that. Do you use AI? Do you build anything with it technically? I do. I don't want to know things without learning them, I want to produce things of value and that solve important problems, and if I can do that rather than the alternative (not do it, because of competing focuses, limited time and energy, etc) I would go with the option of…

>I don't want to know things without learning them I lives in this world, but we live in a society. While you may diligently learn, there will be 10+ more that won't and will use the AI like an oracle. It then comes up how much damage will become of this. And we're not even in the era of rampant agentic AI spreading itself around and the fun and neat problems that will cause.

What's the necessary thing here that people need to "learn" to prevent the hypothetical AI damage scenario you are talking about?

Re: Artificial Intelligence: Ars Notoria and the Promise of Instant Knowledge

#35

Post by pixl97 »

mannanj wrote: post #34
pixl97 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I don't want to know things without learning them I lives in this world, but we live in a society. While you may diligently learn, there will be 10+ more that won't and will use the AI like an oracle. It then comes up how much damage will become of this. And we're not even in the era of rampant agentic AI spreading itself around and the fun and neat problems that will cause.

What's the necessary thing here that people need to "learn" to prevent the hypothetical AI damage scenario you are talking about?

Eh, well, stop building AI.

We're not going to do that, so it's pretty much unavoidable.

If I had to make a "most probable guess" of what the future looks like, we'll have some kind of AI mess caused that will cost billion of dollars. This will get governments up in a tizzy about their dangers, while still being hopelessly addicted to them in military and tracking their citizens. Most people think that governments will attack the models being built, but I don't think so, they want powerful models mostly for themselves. So they'll go after the next best thing. Hardware. What exactly that looks like, I'm not sure, but the big clusters of the machines will have to be registered and licensed. Likely the models will have to be encoded to run on particular hardware and getting caught with an unencoded model would be considered an illegal munition, like we did with cryptography in the past.

Re: Artificial Intelligence: Ars Notoria and the Promise of Instant Knowledge

#36

Post by inigyou »

nullstyle wrote: post #24
hankbond wrote: post #16

I like the idea that what is demonic about this piece is that it steals productive attention. Its use takes the energy that would otherwise be spent learning something useful (by the author's estimation) and redirects it to practicing something incomprehensible. The original required existing knowledge to practice, such that it filtered out those who were not already devoting their life to study. The time people spen…

Vibing out slop and then developing that into something notslop can be one way to learn the actual domain.

Can, but do people do that?

I'm reminded of a story of a professor who visited a programming class taught by another professor who was teaching kids about binary and registers and stuff which was boring, and the visiting professor showed the kids how to write 10 PRINT "HELLO YOURNAME!": GOTO 10 which they'd never seen before and got them all excited to learn more about computers. That's the good kind of slop leading into learning.

Re: Artificial Intelligence: Ars Notoria and the Promise of Instant Knowledge

#37

Post by nullstyle »

inigyou wrote: post #36
nullstyle wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vibing out slop and then developing that into something notslop can be one way to learn the actual domain.

Can, but do people do that? I'm reminded of a story of a professor who visited a programming class taught by another professor who was teaching kids about binary and registers and stuff which was boring, and the visiting professor showed the kids how to write 10 PRINT "HELLO YOURNAME!": GOTO 10 which they'd never seen before and got them all excited to learn more about computers. That's the good kind of slop leading…

> Can, but do people do that?

Yes, of course they are. Not the people who are vibe-puking feed-content to try and make a quick buck; The people that are hustler first, craftsperson second. But there are plenty examples of it being done better if you start following projects. A simple example: https://github.com/simonw/tools/commits/main/

Its worth remembering that the word we use for what we do is _development_, and the vast majority of software running right now is undergoing continual development. I swear, there must be whole generation of coddled-coders out there who have never had to work on a legacy codebase, and these chuckleheads must be the source of most anti-clanker sentiment.

In 2013 I started working for couchsurfing, a company that was trying to go from a volunteer-coded and operated web app to a "proper" startup with an engineering team and a set of phone apps to go along with the application. The legacy codebase was worse than anything claude or codex will produce these days; It was a true cronenburg horror of php and mysql filled with a decade of twists, turns, dead and hidden features. Every step of that development project involved de-slopping, and none of it had been produced by AI.

Re: Artificial Intelligence: Ars Notoria and the Promise of Instant Knowledge

#38

Post by hankbond »

nullstyle wrote: post #24
hankbond wrote: post #16

I like the idea that what is demonic about this piece is that it steals productive attention. Its use takes the energy that would otherwise be spent learning something useful (by the author's estimation) and redirects it to practicing something incomprehensible. The original required existing knowledge to practice, such that it filtered out those who were not already devoting their life to study. The time people spen…

Vibing out slop and then developing that into something notslop can be one way to learn the actual domain.

It's true, and I use LLMs for the vast majority of my development work. The thing I greatly disagree with the anti-LLM crowd is that they often act like usage of LLMs necessitates skill decay. I have learned so much more using LLMs than at any point in my career.

Slopping out something as a way to get to a proof of concept for user feedback is a blessing. It really helps you go from a vague idea to a much clearer understanding of what you do and don't want to build. Scrapping the code from that prototype and then rebuilding it slowly and durably is now happening from a much more informed perspective.

I think what I see as the demonic aspect is the lure of no longer needing to do the slow and durable work.

Re: Artificial Intelligence: Ars Notoria and the Promise of Instant Knowledge

#39

Post by mannanj »

pixl97 wrote: post #35
mannanj wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the necessary thing here that people need to "learn" to prevent the hypothetical AI damage scenario you are talking about?

Eh, well, stop building AI. We're not going to do that, so it's pretty much unavoidable. If I had to make a "most probable guess" of what the future looks like, we'll have some kind of AI mess caused that will cost billion of dollars. This will get governments up in a tizzy about their dangers, while still being hopelessly addicted to them in military and tracking their citizens. Most people think that governments wi…

Am I hearing this right:

- people will use AI bad

- because people will use AI bad, stop building it

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