I feel increasingly anxious reading this. Machine research shouldn’t be merged into mainline of human knowledge.
Knowledge is knowledge, as long as it can be proven true.
proving false is also useful
Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science
541–550 of 1001 posts
Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science
#542Earlier quoted context omitted.
Asking questions about policy and values and pushing to have those resolved in positive ways is about as far away from denial as you can get. It’s possibly the only useful thing an ordinary person can do. What a lot of people want to do, and I’m not saying that you’re one of them, is to assume that a positive outcome is impossible and either do nothing or loudly yell that the world is ending. Neither is particularly…
The AI companies themselves, who are highly motivated to sell AI as overall positive for society, notwithstanding some security/etc risks, and who have economists on the payroll to think about things like this, do not seem to have found any possible positive outcome to present. Shane Legg (DeepMind co-founder), one of the more intelligent and thoughtful people you'll find in the industry, could only offer "it's a tou…
do not seem to have found any possible positive outcome to present
See "Machines of Loving Grace" by Dario Amodei: https://darioamodei.com/essay/machines-of-loving-grace.
Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science
#543Earlier quoted context omitted.
Grad students on zero pay solve problems like this everyday. What exactly is your point here?
Everyday? Which 10 problems were solved by mathematics grad students in the past 10 days? OK I’ll grant that it’s not your obligation to be my search function (despite you making the wild assertion in the first place), so instead can you just point us to the latest grad student solved problem of this level that you know of?
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Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science
#544Earlier quoted context omitted.
you are working on coding. they are working on things like "creative writing" remember that gpt 4o was popular among those who had ai as a romantic partnet?
Well that's on purpose lol. OpenAI does not want you falling in love with their chatbot and have been deliberately training it to be less romantic.
There have been several cases of suicide and self-harm related to 4o, AI psychosis is a real risk and will probably be in the DSM
Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science
#545People argue whether we are at y-5, y, or y+5, meanwhile we seem to be on a y=2^x exponential that keeps delivering more and more impressive results. The most interesting question to me is what will be consumed by the exponential like math seems to be undergoing, and what won’t. Writing has been quite stubborn, but I’ve noticed Fable to be quite a big step up there. How about politics? Will we develop new ways to let…
>Will we develop new ways to let people express their own values in democracies, or will we get much better at manipulation?
Yes.
Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science
#546Earlier quoted context omitted.
Asking questions about policy and values and pushing to have those resolved in positive ways is about as far away from denial as you can get. It’s possibly the only useful thing an ordinary person can do. What a lot of people want to do, and I’m not saying that you’re one of them, is to assume that a positive outcome is impossible and either do nothing or loudly yell that the world is ending. Neither is particularly…
The AI companies themselves, who are highly motivated to sell AI as overall positive for society, notwithstanding some security/etc risks, and who have economists on the payroll to think about things like this, do not seem to have found any possible positive outcome to present. Shane Legg (DeepMind co-founder), one of the more intelligent and thoughtful people you'll find in the industry, could only offer "it's a tou…
UBI probably is the positive outcome, though it may not seem like it to begin with. Initially it will likely be stigmatised and under-resourced, but as a larger proportion of people move out of work and onto UBI that stigma will drop and the resources should grow.
Eventually UBI will be the norm, and if the living standards of a person on UBI is as good as yours or mine today, that will be an enormous win for everyone. It’s like pensions, once these were only for the elderly poor, now they’re a right for everyone in most developed countries.
It’s also interesting that for most of human history leisure time was the point of life, and only in recent modernity has work come to be the meaning of someone’s existence.
UBI has to be commensurate with production being automated. That’s a big logistical problem, if you think building datacenters is a challenge try bringing about radical abundance, but even so it’s not insurmountable. It just needs to be taken on as project and not seen as an impossibility.
So much of this is not about what is possible so much as what people believe is possible. We can do anything if we try.
Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science
#547Earlier quoted context omitted.
And what does taking it seriously entail?
The human zoo where the top ~250,000k humans live in a "human utopia" and the AI provides while mostly focusing on whatever it decides it's own goals are. Humanity survives (but we reading this probably don't), the AI treats the living humans like the Emperor's favorite pets (probably a pretty good life), and then the AI does whatever else it deems important.
To what kind of goal that an ASI might decide to pursue would "a quarter billion happy, healthy, free people" be the most efficient solution to?
Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science
#548People argue whether we are at y-5, y, or y+5, meanwhile we seem to be on a y=2^x exponential that keeps delivering more and more impressive results. The most interesting question to me is what will be consumed by the exponential like math seems to be undergoing, and what won’t. Writing has been quite stubborn, but I’ve noticed Fable to be quite a big step up there. How about politics? Will we develop new ways to let…
We will get much better at manipulation and better at people “writing” things to justify their own feelings.
What’s new about LLMs is that you can scalably manipulate people individually. It used to be that you could either have scale (speeches, tweets, interviews, website, etc.) or individual engagement (replying to mail/tweets/town hall questions.)
Now you can pull the history and preferences of an individual, then shape a message—in real time—to them, specifically. You can have conversations on social media with a single person and shape your message specifically to them.
Part of this can be good (you talk about what they care about, where 90% of broadcast messaging might not apply) and part of it can be bad (manipulation.)
My guess is that, in the US, the right will cynically adopt manipulation to great effect and the left will take a moral stand against shady practices and lose elections.
Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science
#549Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Whilst current models can't 'intuit That's how they are finding these solutions though, unless we are just going to label intuition as something only humans can do. Like a submarine being unable to swim or whatever that example is.
Some of them... The two places were seeing lots of movement are: * Updates to lower/upper bounds. In many cases, these kinds of problems are the deep-math equivalent of calculating more digits of pi. Yes, if you throw time at it you'll break the record, but it may not be terribly worthwhile. * Finding counter examples which disprove conjectures. This is really useful, and helps offset some positivity bias on the huma…
"It's just brute-forcing the search space."
Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science
#550Replace philosophers for mathematicians and Douglas Adams was spot on again. Whilst current models can't 'intuit' and come up with conjectures, they can certainly disprove some of them very quickly through the kind of grind that humans can't do. I suppose there really are some mathematicians out there today, whose last few years of study, have just been up-ended by this. -- "Yes we are," insisted Majikthise. "We are…
> they can certainly disprove some of them very quickly through the kind of grind that humans can't do
Of course computers can grind in a way that humans can't. But now we have systems that convert the human-comprehensible ideas into a computer's plan of attack, in a way that greatly expands the frontier of ideas thus treatable.