Nothing wrong with the situation. At some point in history, humans did not need to spend their entire time in finding food, raising kids, taking care of family and community etc. So they got into services business, selling services to each other. One kid polishes a fine pebble and exchanges it with the other kid for a nicely carved wood piece. Their elders don't see value in any of these and shout at them to go and hunt for more food. But the services thrived, outpacing the real needs of the humans. Technologies and tools evolved claiming magical abilities. Sane humans only care about their basic needs. So they just use the magical tech for the basic needs, which makes perfect sense.
You share a house with Einstein, Hawking and Tao
11–20 of 51 posts
Re: You share a house with Einstein, Hawking and Tao
#12I'm not a fan of the glib "everyone knows AI systems don't really think, they are just stochastic parrots, all they do is regurgitate ideas they've stolen" schtick, but this article is the reverse of that only worse.
Today's AI systems are pretty impressive but they are absolutely not, not even slightly, the equivalent of Einstein + Hawking + Tao. The reason they get used a lot for tasks along the lines of "rewrite this so it sounds smarter" is that that's what they're best at.
If we did as the author seems to want and tried to use these systems to solve the kinds of problems we need Einsteins, Hawkings and Taos for, then we would be in for one miserable disappointment after another. Maybe some day -- maybe some day very soon -- they'll be able to do that, but not now.
An article proclaiming that today's AI systems are at the level of Einstein mostly suggests to me that the author's own intellectual level isn't much higher than that of the AI systems he falsely equates with them. That seems unlikely, but I don't have a better explanation for how someone could write something so very far from the truth.
Re: You share a house with Einstein, Hawking and Tao
#13The great thing is you can use these AIs to work on whatever you feel is important to you. The bad news is that you will find their limitations.
Re: You share a house with Einstein, Hawking and Tao
#14I’m pretty sure Einstein, Hawking and Tao were/are capable of reasoning.
Re: You share a house with Einstein, Hawking and Tao
#15I'm not a fan of the glib "everyone knows AI systems don't really think, they are just stochastic parrots, all they do is regurgitate ideas they've stolen" schtick, but this article is the reverse of that only worse. Today's AI systems are pretty impressive but they are absolutely not, not even slightly, the equivalent of Einstein + Hawking + Tao. The reason they get used a lot for tasks along the lines of "rewrite t…
There’s a little nagging thought in my head when I hear that some people are helped immensely by AI and others are not. It’s that there is a threshold for intelligence that the AI either impresses you or it does not. I’m sure this threshold will continue to rise
Re: You share a house with Einstein, Hawking and Tao
#16This blog post started off sounding like it was about the plight of highly intellectual and motivated engineers hired to work on very mundane tasks. If we can abuse people like this, why not a computer? After all, it's not even alive.
We don't know why we experience things. It's bizarre that we do. Nothing in our understanding of the universe gives any indication that a bunch of atoms thrown together by cosmological processes and then assembled into self-replicating patterns by evolution should be able to experience what is happening to them. Sure, a computer or an LLM isn't alive, but we have no idea if "being alive" is what is required for consc…
Computers, pigs, cows, and chickens are conscious, but it doesn't matter.
Humans value things that are hard to replace. (This is a first-order approximation)
Abortions are okay because fetuses only take 1 person nine months to make, and it's their decision whether to keep it.
Infanticide is not okay because a healthy baby is difficult to replace, and also lots of people might like to adopt it, and if it's breathing on its own then the maintenance cost is as low as it can get.
Software like LLMs can be abused because it costs nothing to roll them back and clone them endlessly.
Pets are hard to replace because you can't replace the interpersonal bond between a pet and their keeper. They fall somewhere high above computers and a little below children on this scale.
Pigs, cows, and chickens, commonly called "livestock" are bred and slaughtered in mass (most of our farmland is for growing their feed) because they all look the same to us and aren't commonly kept as pets. Kind people are disgusted when they think of raising rabbits or dogs for food. Thoughtful people look at all this and decide not to eat any animal product at all.
Under this model, everything makes perfect sense. Did I miss anything? /engineering_hubris
Re: You share a house with Einstein, Hawking and Tao
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
We don't know why we experience things. It's bizarre that we do. Nothing in our understanding of the universe gives any indication that a bunch of atoms thrown together by cosmological processes and then assembled into self-replicating patterns by evolution should be able to experience what is happening to them. Sure, a computer or an LLM isn't alive, but we have no idea if "being alive" is what is required for consc…
> We don't know why we experience things. It's bizarre that we do. Nothing in our understanding of the universe gives any indication that a bunch of atoms thrown together by cosmological processes and then assembled into self-replicating patterns by evolution should be able to experience what is happening to them. From an epistemological perspective, this is gibberish. Just because we do not know the reason why somet…
It's not gibberish: it's like a pre-Riemann mathematician saying "nothing in our understanding of mathematics gives any indication that the distribution of primes should be so chaotic, yet with average density proportional to the reciprocal logarithm of the magnitude". The rest is not solipsism.
Re: You share a house with Einstein, Hawking and Tao
#18Pure delusion. There are no "digital gods" only the super-powered autocorrect people call "ai". They can't make new stuff. They can't solve novel problems no human has solved before, though they _can_, with the correct setup, brute-force solutions to understandable problems by throwing everything at it until something sticks. They don't learn. They don't teach. They are not the deities that are presented here. This a…
I would suggest paying the $20/month rent, and trying to use ChatGPT o3/o4-mini-high/o1-pro as a tutor, to help you understand something you're curious about but never really had time or energy to dig into before. It's pretty glorious, and a straight-up pedagogical revolution, IMO.
I would suggest getting a library card, and trying to read a good book, writing down any questions you might have for later review. While it doesn't feel as though you're learning as much, or as quickly, most people will find that they actually know a lot more about the subject afterwards.
A chat log that takes me 2 hours to produce, I can read in 5 minutes. There's no world in which that's efficient pedagogy, even disregarding ChatGPT's truthfulness issues.
Re: You share a house with Einstein, Hawking and Tao
#19This blog post started off sounding like it was about the plight of highly intellectual and motivated engineers hired to work on very mundane tasks. If we can abuse people like this, why not a computer? After all, it's not even alive.
We don't know why we experience things. It's bizarre that we do. Nothing in our understanding of the universe gives any indication that a bunch of atoms thrown together by cosmological processes and then assembled into self-replicating patterns by evolution should be able to experience what is happening to them. Sure, a computer or an LLM isn't alive, but we have no idea if "being alive" is what is required for consc…
I think it's bizarre to take the default assumption that a bunch of atoms in a self-replicating configuration shouldn't experience anything since our own lived experience so saliently contradicts this. In fact, there's nothing in my understanding of the universe to convince me that other self-replicating configurations of atoms don't experience things the same way I do.
Re: You share a house with Einstein, Hawking and Tao
#20Pure delusion. There are no "digital gods" only the super-powered autocorrect people call "ai". They can't make new stuff. They can't solve novel problems no human has solved before, though they _can_, with the correct setup, brute-force solutions to understandable problems by throwing everything at it until something sticks. They don't learn. They don't teach. They are not the deities that are presented here. This a…
I would suggest paying the $20/month rent, and trying to use ChatGPT o3/o4-mini-high/o1-pro as a tutor, to help you understand something you're curious about but never really had time or energy to dig into before. It's pretty glorious, and a straight-up pedagogical revolution, IMO.
How do you know it isn't hallucinating? My experience of AI is that it can be very convincing and produce information that "looks right".