421–430 of 545 posts
AI gives ‘weights’ to things depending on its own priorities or corporate interests. Our brain gives the weights to various facts depending on personal insights. (X is painful, Y is more effort but less painful etc etc)
In a real world scenario these both can act in complimentary ways and AI just supplements the human working memory at the end of the day.
I suspect that a lot about what we call being very intelligent is ultimately out-remembering people around us. I think of all the times in my software career when I did something that others considered very high performance, it either came down to either having more energy than others at tackling a problem they thought was more trouble than it was worth, or just bringing back random knowledge from previous jobs or se…
There is an ability to hold ideas in the mind simultaneously. Some can hold a great deal more than others. It can be exercised, but is definitely bound by genetics. If you want an example of someone at the near peak of human ability, check out Jon Von Neumann. Then there is an ability to peer deeply into complex problems and somehow find the simplest truths that make sense of it all. Think of Einstein. Both are incre…
The physicist Eugene Wigner, who knew both John von Neumann and Albert Einstein, wrote that no one he had encountered possessed a mind as “quick and acute” as von Neumann’s. Von Neumann could absorb vast amounts of information, follow extraordinarily complicated arguments and move between mathematical fields with astonishing speed. Yet Wigner still regarded Einstein’s understanding as deeper, more penetrating and more original. Von Neumann may have had the greater raw intellectual processing capacity, but Einstein was more likely to reconceptualize the problem itself.
Present-day AI appears more like a machine-amplified version of the first set of abilities than the second.
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We sort kids into the smart and non-smart labels when they are young, and those labels tend to stick, even when what we're measuring isn't raw intelligence but just variance in childhood development that wash out in the long term. I don't think either group is well served by this.
No we don't. Public schools are incentivized not to help high performers. It actually hurts their metrics and budget. The widespread gifted/talented experience in public school ended in the late 90s. The actual intelligence segregation is self-selected. PMC parents live together in the same neighborhoods. Whether you believe in genetic or social factors, the smart kids come from here. In the 80s and 90s there was an…
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Humanoid robots are obviously more than marketing. The entirety of human civilization is human shaped. Making robots that are human shaped is easier and more efficient than redesigning and rebuilding everything that exists.
> Making robots that are human shaped is easier and more efficient than redesigning and rebuilding everything that exists. In the last 100-200 years, that has been proven wrong at every single step.
Anyway, it's true that replacing an automated production line with a crowd of generalist robots doesn't make sense. Generalist humanoid robots are intended to replace the remaining human workers.
I suspect that a lot about what we call being very intelligent is ultimately out-remembering people around us. I think of all the times in my software career when I did something that others considered very high performance, it either came down to either having more energy than others at tackling a problem they thought was more trouble than it was worth, or just bringing back random knowledge from previous jobs or se…
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I'm in a similar boat. I end up re-learning the same things over and over again. I found a solution recently. "Critical mass." If I just don't see something frequently enough, my brain keeps deleting it. So, if there's a fact you have trouble remembering, try memorizing it 100 times in one day. That's "inefficient", as far as memory goes, but it'll do the trick! And I like solving problems once and then moving on. (A…
I find my memory is very selective. I wanted to get in touch with a coworker from five years ago: I had to look up his name on linkedin. My wife texted me "Hotlips died" and with no effort I texted back, "Oh no, Loretta Swit or Sally Kellerman?" Mind you, I haven't watched MASH the TV show in forever, and I haven't seen MASH the movie since my parents took me when it first came out. I have zero reason to remember Lor…
Anki kept flagging my relatives birthdays as "leeches!"
I found it kind of hilarious and infuriating that the software I used to remember things tells me "this thing is hard for you to remember so you should just give up."
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They were testable, no?
Not taking either side here - but surely a lot of cosmological phenomena couldn't be testable/verifiable at the time they were theorized either? (thinking of black holes for example - they were theorized way before we had observations. And presumably a lot of particle physics can similarly be theorized before we built the technology to experimentally verify them)
String theory has nothing even theorized that would allow us to prove it.