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Just A New Fractal Detail In The Big Picture (2015)

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Re: Just A New Fractal Detail In The Big Picture (2015)

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that is true, just from observing the difference between humans. Really intelligent mathematicians can do work that a weaker mathematician would never accomplish if they spent their whole life on it. And the average person could probably not even understand it given years. There seem to be vast differences in ability between humans, despite all of us having 99.99% the same DNA and same brain structure.…

I agree that AI can do marvels in math, but math quickly departs from reality (like string theory) and being able to prove things about some beautiful intricate mathematical structure most of the times doesn't help you much with the world of matter. I recommend Culture novels written by Iain M. Banks. There are vastly powerful AIs but they spend as much time as they can afford in "Infinite Fun Space" which is basical…

>being able to prove things about some beautiful intricate mathematical structure most of the times doesn't help you much with the world of matter.

Mathematical ability is just an example. The same abilities that apply to math also apply to engineering, programming, etc. A superintelligent AI would be able to do unbelievable things to "the world of matter". Because the main requirement for manipulating matter is intelligence, discovering better designs and technologies.

> Hackers are successful not because they are ungodly smart. They are successful because they have the will to look for and exploit vulnerabilities. Intelligence, again, doesn't help all that much. I don't think people who wrote stuxnet were able to do this because they were of superior intelligence.

I find this assertion unbelievable. Even average hackers have significantly above average IQ. I can't find the statistics right at the moment, but many STEM degrees have above average IQ. The best is physicists which had an average IQ of 130. An average person can barely figure out how to operate their email client, they won't be building stuxnet anytime soon.

>Super-intelligence won't help you with stock market because it's purely random game.

It is not. People make fortunes with just slightly better statistical models, or slightly better information. Traders spend millions to fly drones and helicopters over oil tanks and parking lots, to get a slight edge over others.

>It's hard to engineer because it's so damn small, not because it's complex. To build nanotech you'll need to build tools to build tools to build tools to build nanotech. You could do all that but even if you are 1000 times smarter, reality has a speed limit. You can't take a shovel of sand from the beach and build CPU, no matter how intelligent you are. You have to build fab first.

But we could potentially bootstrap nanotechnology really quickly from existing biology. There are already labs that will make proteins on demand from DNA. The problem is it's just so complicated.

Re: Just A New Fractal Detail In The Big Picture (2015)

#152
post #106

Tim Urban points out in his AI article that it might be dangerous to expect that the AI that we know now would still be the same AI we will have in the very near future http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolu... "So as AI zooms upward in intelligence toward us, we’ll see it as simply becoming smarter, for an animal. Then, when it hits the lowest capacity of humanity—Nick Bostrom uses the term “th…

I'm not afraid of AI because intelligence has diminishing returns. 1000 times smarter entity might be only 2 or 3 times better at predicting the future than human is. So 1000 times smarter superhuman AI maybe could tell weather two weeks ahead instead of one. And the physical world is inherently like weather, chaotic in mathematical sense. Our upper hand against even very dumb animals doesn't come from our intelligen…

> Our upper hand against even very dumb animals doesn't come from our intelligence. It comes from thousands of years of infrastructure that we built to amplify ourselves.

Their dumbness is what prevents them from using our infrastructure.

> That's some reasons why I think run-away AI won't be dangerous to us unless we let it build or take over our physical world which won't happen given our current caution towards subject.

Given how infrastructure is constantly being taken over by people who shouldn't be able to, I fail to see where you see any caution.

Also, the primary threat from AI IMO is not some "increased intelligence" in and of itself, but the lack of fatigue, the much greater bandwidth (you can only know so many people well, a machine isn't really limited in the number of people once it has the ability), and that machines might have a lower drive to resist being used against people than people have (which already is too low).

Re: Just A New Fractal Detail In The Big Picture (2015)

#153

As a curious software engineer, I have a basic familiarity on where heating oil comes from (I remember my first sci-pop book with a section on basics of oil processing), where nuts are grown, basics of food industry supply chains, and every other example covered. My knowledge might be rudimentary and without much detail, but I try to cover all bases, and when I discover some area of human knowledge I genuinely know n…

Curiosity in general is probably a fundamental part of human nature.

But you have to make a call at what point you stop trying to understand everything about everything. Thomas Young, the early 19th Century scientist has been famously described as "The Last Man Who Knew Everything" - the sum of human knowledge moves on so vastly that it is simply physically impossible to have an in-depth knowledge of every possible subject.

I don't think he's saying that he knows absolutely nothing about these subject (I'm sure he's probably got a rough idea that the oil probably came in a big oil tanker for example).

But there's over 5 billion articles on Wikipedia, and at some point you've got to decide that you haven't got time to understand how the Four Hu (to take the first random topic I found) came about because you're spending time thinking about how AI works or whatever.

Re: Just A New Fractal Detail In The Big Picture (2015)

#154
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that Global Civilization is nothing but living!

I read a comment on HN a while back arguing that today's companies are essentially human-powered AIs. It made me think quite a lot -- large companies especially take a lifeform of their own. They tend to mostly care for themselves. Actions are taken "for the company" without any one person being actively aware of why. Higher-ups have some form of backdoor access to the direction the company takes; a symbiotic relatio…

I was thinking about this fascinating topic recently in the light of Brexit.

The EU has traditionally been more supportive of the rights of indivduals as opposed to those of companies and other organisations, in the belief that companies emerge from human behaviour and even though they operate in their own (ie commercial) environment, they exist to serve the population.

The US has by contrast given companies more freedom to operate, in the belief that by doing so they provide an environment for individuals to fulfil themselves. I fully believe a post-Brexit UK government will go the same way.

I think the key term here is "motivation". If the motivations of the company and individual align, all's well. If not, who's going to cover your back?

Re: Just A New Fractal Detail In The Big Picture (2015)

#155
post #99
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many larger systems are more than the sum of their parts. Enough that you could consider the grouping it's own entity. Ant hills are the canonical example because individual ants are recognizable as 'animals', but the function of an anthill clearly relies on a complex interaction between more simple ants. Just as we are made of tiny organisms, bigger systems could be considered to be made of us.

Hofstadter wrote a nice piece on how an ant colony could be thought to be an entity in itself. My favourite quote pasted from an online source: Anteater: "I reject holism. I challenge you to tell me, for instance, how a holistic description of an ant colony sheds any more light on it than is shed by a description of the ants inside it, and their roles, and their, interrelationships. Any holistic explanation of an ant…

Holism is inescapable. An ant is a holistic thought. When you talk about the parts of an ant hill you don't talk about the atoms in the ants. You talk about the ants. In that same way when you want talk about the ecosystems that contain ant hills you don't talk about individual ants. An anteater relates to the whole ant hill. The relationships a thing has are just as significant to what it is as the things it's composed of. Reductionism can only look inside things.

Re: Just A New Fractal Detail In The Big Picture (2015)

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that AI can do marvels in math, but math quickly departs from reality (like string theory) and being able to prove things about some beautiful intricate mathematical structure most of the times doesn't help you much with the world of matter. I recommend Culture novels written by Iain M. Banks. There are vastly powerful AIs but they spend as much time as they can afford in "Infinite Fun Space" which is basical…

>being able to prove things about some beautiful intricate mathematical structure most of the times doesn't help you much with the world of matter. Mathematical ability is just an example. The same abilities that apply to math also apply to engineering, programming, etc. A superintelligent AI would be able to do unbelievable things to "the world of matter". Because the main requirement for manipulating matter is inte…

> main requirement for manipulating matter is intelligence

Rather, it's knowledge. And to get more knowledge you need to manipulate matter. Pure intelligence is useful up to a point but the you need to go out and get more data. That's the limiting factor I think of. The only thing you can do with just intelligence is math (that can have some use later on) and philosophy (that's totally useless).

> The best is physicists which had an average IQ of 130.

Incredible amount of people have IQ over 130. If that was key factor to writing stuxnet there'd be new one each day.

> An average person can barely figure out how to operate their email client, they won't be building stuxnet anytime soon.

IMHO that's mostly because they lack knowledge and any reason to care. You really don't need IQ above 130 to do technical things and having IQ of 150 or even 200 doesn't help you all that much, it seems, with pushing boundaries of human capacity. Progress is made mostly by fairly common intelligent people talking to each other.

> It is not. People make fortunes with just slightly better statistical models, or slightly better information.

And they lose fortunes with significantly better statistical models, and better information (up to but excluding insider trading). When you sum up everything it's as random as it gets. Take a look at Warren Buffet bet against hedge funds.

In all fairness additional information could help, but data is not information and where good models are unavailable and processes are chaotic you are almost just as likely to infer correct information from data as incorrect.

> But we could potentially bootstrap nanotechnology really quickly from existing biology. There are already labs that will make proteins on demand from DNA. The problem is it's just so complicated.

For me it looks more like building multi-core CPU in times of Blaise Pascal. Foundation theory is here, even some tech, but we have no idea how much technicalities lie ahead of us to figure to get to our dreams.

Re: Just A New Fractal Detail In The Big Picture (2015)

#157
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that AI can do marvels in math, but math quickly departs from reality (like string theory) and being able to prove things about some beautiful intricate mathematical structure most of the times doesn't help you much with the world of matter. I recommend Culture novels written by Iain M. Banks. There are vastly powerful AIs but they spend as much time as they can afford in "Infinite Fun Space" which is basical…

> being able to prove things about some beautiful intricate mathematical structure most of the times doesn't help you much with the world of matter. How about discovering a flaw in human crypto systems? > Super-intelligence won't help you with stock market because it's purely random game. Humans can't reliably exploit the stock market, because we're competing against other humans. It's not that there are no patterns,…

> How about discovering a flaw in human crypto systems?

Very good point.

As for stock market I'm fairly confident that there won't be strategies that AI can figure out that people won't catch on as fast as any other strategy. I think that's because stock market has very narrow API, and more complex strategies would involve piling up operations, doing multiple steps. Every problem that involves any probabilistic element (or uncertainty) quickly becomes unpredictable as number of steps grows. I don't believe AI can be better at stock market than us because it's a simple game of chance.

Re: Just A New Fractal Detail In The Big Picture (2015)

#158
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that AI can do marvels in math, but math quickly departs from reality (like string theory) and being able to prove things about some beautiful intricate mathematical structure most of the times doesn't help you much with the world of matter. I recommend Culture novels written by Iain M. Banks. There are vastly powerful AIs but they spend as much time as they can afford in "Infinite Fun Space" which is basical…

The stock market isn't just a purely random game though - it's based on the expected earnings of the companies, so if you can come up with a better estimate than everyone else by combining information better, you can make money. The reason it's hard for humans to make money this way is because everyone else is doing the same thing, so any advantage is short-lived.

Pseuodo-random generators are not purely random - they are based on a seed and an algorithm. For stock market nobody can have a clue what the algorithm is and what meaning the seed has in it.

The reason nobody can predict the next value is that at some point something unpredictable happens that can wipe out all your previous gains and some more.

Market can remain insane (meaning not behaving according to a model) longer than you can remain solvent.

Re: Just A New Fractal Detail In The Big Picture (2015)

#159
post #15

He's addressing one aspect of AI that can be disturbing to some people, specifically becoming reliant on the expertise of others in your day-to-day life and thus becoming less independent. If your biggest issue with the concept of AI assistants is that they might have insights about you that you yourself don't have, I could see this article making someone feel better about it. For me at least, that's not the primary…

The problem with habit reinforcement is that you've simply created a feedback loop. "You like [music type]? Here are more bands/artists of [music type]." It looks like an innocent service. But it's devastating to real exploration, because it makes it much less likely you'll ever discover Band/Artist Z whom you'd never normally listen to but love anyway. This is why thoughtless customer profiling is a dumb idea, and c…

Hence random mutations in genetic algorithms. And other similar functionalities

Re: Just A New Fractal Detail In The Big Picture (2015)

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>being able to prove things about some beautiful intricate mathematical structure most of the times doesn't help you much with the world of matter. Mathematical ability is just an example. The same abilities that apply to math also apply to engineering, programming, etc. A superintelligent AI would be able to do unbelievable things to "the world of matter". Because the main requirement for manipulating matter is inte…

> main requirement for manipulating matter is intelligence Rather, it's knowledge. And to get more knowledge you need to manipulate matter. Pure intelligence is useful up to a point but the you need to go out and get more data. That's the limiting factor I think of. The only thing you can do with just intelligence is math (that can have some use later on) and philosophy (that's totally useless). > The best is physici…

>The only thing you can do with just intelligence is math (that can have some use later on) and philosophy (that's totally useless).

We already have vast amounts of knowledge on the internet. I can download all of wikipedia in an hour, and fit it on a flash drive. Most of the world's scientific papers and books are digitized and available.

The limiting factor is no longer knowledge. It's the ability to absorb knowledge. To be able to instantly find an obscure paper from 1930 that's relevant to your current thought, or know some random fact from some article you read years ago, etc. That's something AIs would have a huge advantage over humans at.

>Incredible amount of people have IQ over 130. If that was key factor to writing stuxnet there'd be new one each day.

Stuxnet wasn't written by one person. It was probably a huge team of intelligent people, who worked possibly for years.

But who says an AI can't be equivalent to a group of humans? If it has enough computing power, it could make copies of itself. And unlike humans it can communicate thoughts and plans instantly to it's other "selves".

And who says it has to work at the same speed humans work. Human brains run at maybe 100 hz. AI's built out of silicone could work thousands of times faster. Doing the same work, just in much shorter time.

>And they lose fortunes with significantly better statistical models, and better information (up to but excluding insider trading). When you sum up everything it's as random as it gets. Take a look at Warren Buffet bet against hedge funds.

Look it's simple math. If you can predict prices 1% more accurately than anyone else, then you can make a huge amount of money in the long run. Stock prices aren't random. They are determined by real events, mainly how much profit the company makes.

>but we have no idea how much technicalities lie ahead of us to figure to get to our dreams.

That's the point though. A superintelligent AI could figure out exactly what those technicalities are, and find the shortest route to that tech. If you went back in time to Blaise Pascal, if you took the right books and plans from the future, you could get them to CPUs in mere years. We could advance technologically much faster than we are, the limiting factor is the speed of invention, which is slow.

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