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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

#911

Post by [deleted] »

Chance-Device wrote: post #269
matteoraso wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have had to deal with getting their jobs automated away for centuries. None of this is new, and perhaps reminding ourselves of this is the best way to cope.

I understand your sentiment, but I think this really is something different. This isn’t a craft going away, or even an industry being replaced, it’s potentially everything we do. It’s the ground being pulled away beneath people’s feet, everyone, everywhere all at once. I think the vacuum it leaves in people’s lives needs to be filled with something, and I haven’t heard any good ideas about this or how the transition…

[deleted]

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#912

Post by naasking »

Peaches4Rent wrote: post #902
naasking wrote: post #888

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but there is little evidence this had a meaningful effect on votes.

Don't think that it matters if it was effective. There's a reason attempted murder is a crime even if it was unsuccessful

It does matter though. If you want to murder someone by hitting them with a plushie, you're not going to get charged with attempted murder because it's not possible that that would ever work. There must be justification that the choice will have the intended effect.

We should not be gung-ho to give the government more power to regulate speech.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#913

Post by isaacfrond »

samuelknight wrote: post #891
MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #883

It didn't come up with a counterexample for the P versus NP problem, I wonder if they just didn't ask about it...

You can't come up with a counterexample for P != NP because there isn't a formula to disprove. For P = NP you would propose a general algorithm to convert all NP problems into P in P time, and an AI could then find a counterexample which would disprove that particular method. To demonstrate P != NP you need to prove that no possible algorithm can convert any NP into P which is much harder than providing a counterexam…

The paper does not resolve P versus NP, but it does make an important advance in a closely related area. To prove that P ≠ NP, it would be enough to show that every algorithm for an NP-complete problem requires superpolynomial time. We cannot prove anything remotely that strong. For explicit NP-complete problems in unrestricted computational models, we cannot even prove superlinear lower bounds. There is therefore an enormous gap between the lower bounds we can prove and the superpolynomial bounds we would need.

VP and VNP are closely related algebraic analogues of P and NP. Here the paper proves new lower bounds for computing the permanent, a VNP-complete polynomial, in particular models of arithmetic computation: roughly (n^2\log\log n) arithmetic gates for unrestricted division-free circuits, and (n^4/\log n) size for the more restrictive formula model. These are still polynomial bounds, so they do not separate VP from VNP. But lower bounds on the resources needed to compute explicit functions are exactly what would ultimately be required for such a separation, and meaningful lower bounds of this kind are exceptionally rare.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#915

Post by [deleted] »

naasking wrote: post #912
Peaches4Rent wrote: post #902

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't think that it matters if it was effective. There's a reason attempted murder is a crime even if it was unsuccessful

It does matter though. If you want to murder someone by hitting them with a plushie, you're not going to get charged with attempted murder because it's not possible that that would ever work. There must be justification that the choice will have the intended effect. We should not be gung-ho to give the government more power to regulate speech.

[deleted]

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#916

Post by applicative »

Peaches4Rent wrote: post #902
naasking wrote: post #888

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but there is little evidence this had a meaningful effect on votes.

Don't think that it matters if it was effective. There's a reason attempted murder is a crime even if it was unsuccessful

It isn't so clear there is a reason for the crime of 'attempt', or what or how good the reason is. The Star Chamber, which cooked it up, is universally condemned as oppressive. You might say they anticipated science fiction tyranny, when they invented the world's first thought-crime: they were able to make a crime of 'conspiracy' because they imagined that the speech of the conspirators was an 'outward act'; inevitably its glorious future was e.g. to jail the left wingers in the McCarthy period.

The point of view that says 'there is a reason we punish attempts' has difficulty explaining why we punish 'success' _even more_. There is a sort of bad concience about it. The paradoxes are discussed in a characteristically brilliant and twisted work 'The Punishment that Leaves Something to Chance' by David Lewis, one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th c. It nominally defends the law of attempt but can as well be read as a catastophically destructive parody of it. https://andrewmbailey.com/dkl/Punishment_Chance.pdf

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#917

Post by rayiner »

tyre wrote: post #749
lettergram wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

In US politics, the right is far, far better at winning elections than the left. This isn’t about personal preference. It’s objective political science. Look at the most contentious issues in the US: abortion, climate change, taxing the wealthy, gun control, Affordable Healthcare Act. The Democratic Party platform is aligned with national polling on every one. Every one of those issues has >60% support with voters an…

None of those are single issues, and the political fault lines are in the sub-issues. For example, while most Americans support "gun control," only 20% of Americans support a ban on handguns: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1645/guns.aspx. That figure has been trending steadily downward--from 38% in 1999 to 20% in 2024. That makes it much easier for Republicans to hold the line on that issue: portray all gun control efforts as a step towards confiscating handguns. That's hard for Democrats to defend against because most of the candidates, staffers, etc., who actually run the party probably are in that 20% who wants to ban handguns. That's simply logical, because handguns are used in the overwhelming majority of homicides committed with guns. It makes very little sense to have "gun control" without banning handguns.

The same thing for "taxing the wealthy." 59% of Americans think their own taxes are too high: https://news.gallup.com/poll/707951/americans-tax-views-rema.... And the difference isn't as big between parties as you think--49% of Democrats think their taxes are too high. So Democrats are in a position where they have to advocate for raising taxes on "the wealthy," without scaring any of their own voters into thinking that includes them.

Even a blind squirrel could find these nuts. Apart from that, republicans are ridiculously inept. For example, 2024 was the first time they spent real money trying to go after immigrant voters and minorities, and they made huge gains. But the on-the-ground operation disappeared after the election. Meanwhile, democrats are in these minority neighborhoods 365 days a year pushing their message.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#918

Post by KajMagnus »

richardfey wrote: post #838
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…

> 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.) Side note: it's manipulation either ways because you chose what to talk about, with a goal in mind.

Actually, no. "Manipulation" is a negatively loaded word, and you wouldn't use that word if f.ex. someone helpfully & truthfully helps others see they've misunderstood sth.

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#919

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

azan_ wrote: post #834
arbitrary_name wrote: post #816

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so why do we have the poverty and inequality today? why do they spend the money they do on the things they do? they are not altruists and they never will be. they could change millions of lives today, but most do not. pure naivete.

Poverty and inequality keeps declining all the time thanks to economic growth.

In some countries, especially less developed ones, poverty levels are declining, but in the US the trend seems to be the opposite. The middle class is being gutted and descending into survival mode if not poverty, while the top few percent become obscenely rich at their expense.

In any case historical trends are really irrelevant to the discussion, which is about the impact of AI, which threatens to take away almost ALL the jobs (this is what Dario's essay is assuming), which has no historical precedent. Some people like to bring up previous waves of job automation such as the industrial revolution, but the difference there is that automation took some jobs but created others. In the case of AI, AI will also be taking the new jobs that it creates.

If AI takes all the jobs - which is what the people like Dario who are creating it assume will happen - then it seems "UBI" is indeed the logical conclusion (other than those able to make a living working for themself, or via self-sufficiency), but this is not going to be utopia where we are all idle rich practicing our hobbies. What it really means is a welfare state, where formerly proud people capable of supporting themself become dependent on government handouts. What comes to mind is the movie "Soylent Green", not utopia.

I'm not sure how anyone imagines this would actually work. Is there any private enterprise left at all, or are all the means of production (AI datacenters and robotic factories) all controlled by the state. Instead of distributing Soylent Green, the state distributes UBI-scrip, essentially food-stamps, that can be exchanged at state stores for provisions?

Seriously, how could this actually work ?

An alternate future, no more optimistic, at least in the short term, but perhaps more realistic, is that in the fairly near future when unemployment and public pain becomes high enough, we reach a tipping point, and the pitchforks come out. Eventually the government concedes that AI is no more conducive to the public good than nuclear weapons, and heavily regulates it, banning the use of AI to replace jobs. This may sound extreme, but surely not a fraction as extreme at the UBI-based welfare state that Dario Amodei is fantasizing about as the best possible outcome (that is compatible with himself becoming enormously wealthy).

Re: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

#920

Post by analoger »

Legend2440 wrote: post #504
fhfncjcc wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The models are frequently getting worse at items that they aren’t being benchmarked for — and that’s happening more and more over time! Other people in other fields aren’t idiots, they are accurately perceiving the fact that these models are being hyper optimized for our industry, and are becoming less capable in other domains over time. Models of the same scale are massively worse at writing a broad variety of style…

Proof? In my experience modern models are better at all tasks than models from two years ago, especially complex multi-step tasks.

Data 'compression' collapse. People publish AI generated slop on the internet -> next generation of AI is trained on that data -> the lossy/fuzzy training make the output worse -> rinse and repeat.
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