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Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

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Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#661

Post by [deleted] »

throwaway27448 wrote: post #634
sothatsit wrote: post #535

People 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…

Sigmoidal, not exponential. It would be insane to assume an exponential curve

[deleted]

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#662

Post by bryan0 »

throwaway27448 wrote: post #634
sothatsit wrote: post #535

People 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…

Sigmoidal, not exponential. It would be insane to assume an exponential curve

this gets more nuanced because "the sigmoids won't save you": https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-sigmoids-wont-save-you

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#664

Post by sodapopcan »

Chance-Device wrote: post #406
c7b wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what does taking it seriously entail?

In the near term handling the transition. Jobs will be lost, careers ended, people won’t be able to reskill quickly enough. At the same time AI is an enormous opportunity to uplift living standards, but nobody has the logistics of this figured out. We need to figure out how to restructure the global economy. How does UBI work internationally, if the AI companies are taking revenue in the US? What’s the tax base for i…

Everything you're saying is oddly simultaneously specific and hand-wavy at the same time. I say this because I'm not sure a lot of these things are solvable or, if they are, it's going to take lifetimes. For example:

> How do we replace the work ethic that tells us we are our jobs and idleness is immoral?

For many people it has nothing to do with morality, it's hardwired into their instincts. They want to work, and they will work.

For a lot of us who are not excited about this future it's that no one is trying to answer all the questions you laid out. Instead we have the disgusting people at the helm purposefully spreading doomerism and saying, "We'll figure it out." I think it's pretty problematic (to say the least) to care more about technological advancement than how that advancement is actually shaping up to effect people in the short term. But I know many people don't care, especially those who believe they won't be among the affected.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#665

Post by orangecat »

mekael wrote: post #656
Chance-Device wrote: post #625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I think people will demand to not live in poverty. Capitalism allows people to escape poverty by personal effort. An AI future won’t allow it by any means other than collective effort, so that’s what we’ll do.

That will entail an immense amount of violence to be undertaken by the working class against those in power, unless you think they'll gladly give up all of their ill gotten gains out of the goodness of their black little hearts.

In fact I don't think that rich people are cartoon villains who enjoy watching the poors starve. If AI leads to greatly increased productivity, then at existing tax rates there will be more than enough to provide good living conditions for people who can't find jobs.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#666

Post by sodapopcan »

azinman2 wrote: post #479
bubblemoth wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What pressure is there to push for any of these changes? I see AI advocates discussing the concept of UBI, but I can't imagine a world where the United States would ever pass this sort of legislation. I mean, congress can barely pass a budget each year. If you are correct, I expect corporations to reap massive profits while most Americans try to find a way to survive in a world where they are obsolete.

I also don’t understand why UBI is desirable. Putting everyone on welfare means everyone is poor. This won’t end well, and it’s certainly not the case that 99% of the population will let a tiny number of people remove their income in favor of pennies for all. Political violence will come first, easily.

No idea why anyone would downvote this, it's true. As someone else pointed out "b = basic." And does anyone think it will adjust with inflation?

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#667

Post by watutalkinbout »

evenhash wrote: post #408
DrBazza wrote: post #96

Replace 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…

> Whilst current models can't 'intuit' and come up with conjectures People keep saying this. Why? Surely the AI can complete the prompt “Generate new research questions based on these observations”? When I read the reasoning traces of coding models they are constantly asking themselves questions and attempting to answer them.

LLMs traverse an assembled surface of human knowledge.

You can't find things on a map that aren't there, but maybe you can draw a route nobody used before.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#668

Post by 5555watch »

jiggawatts wrote: post #620
5555watch wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the illustration that the models are working on a convex hull of known information. Filling gaps with linear combinations of known facts and results. They can't exit the hull until the "intuition" starts spawning points outside the convex hull.

Neural nets can extrapolate past their training data, and there is no reason to think LLMs don’t inherit this capability. The extent to which they are able to do this is the more interesting question!

The extrapolation can also be a learned skill, especially in math. How many papers took result X, extended it to Y using known building blocks, and applied to Z.

By the way, convex hull permits extrapolating past the training data. LLM won't invent a new word that could not be defined by a sequence of known words. Just if it's meaningless and fully random/hallucinated, the new knowledge won't work with other known information blocks (breaks convexity).

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#670

Post by scns »

lettergram wrote: post #553
tyre wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. I think that statement may itself highlight how prevalent manipulation is. I fully anticipate all groups to continue maximal manipulation they can. One thing with LLMs is that it'll be a far less unified view, so a "divide and conquer" strategy is…

It is way harder to manipulate people to do the right thing i think.
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