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Life is more than an engineering problem

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Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#211

Post by munksbeer »

digbybk wrote: post #194
daveguy wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same way that we know interpolation of a linear regression is not the same as the deeply complex navigation of reality we do as living things.

I notice that often in these debates someone will make the comparison between a low level mechanism driving LLMs, and a high level emergent behavior of the human mind. I don't think it's deliberate - we don't fully understand how the brain works so we only have emergent behaviors - but how can you be so certain that deeply complex navigation of reality can't emerge from interpolation of a linear regression?

> but how can you be so certain that deeply complex navigation of reality can't emerge from interpolation of a linear regression?

That was pretty much my question. Why are people so certain on the topic.

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#212

Post by the_af »

Ted Chiang probably has an uphill battle convincing people here of his take, precisely because he thinks the engineering approach may be wrong. Or in his words:

> Arguably the most important parts of our lives should not be approached with this attitude. Some of this attitude comes from the fact that the people making AI tools are engineers viewing everything from an engineering perspective, but it’s also that, as a culture, we have adopted this way of thinking as the default.

I tend to agree with Chiang, but he is preaching to the anti-choir here. Even though many HN-ers seem to like his fiction (and why wouldn't they, Chiang is top of the cream!), they will probably chafe at the idea some problems cannot and shouldn't be approached from a pure engineering side.

I remember the -- now rightfully ridiculed -- phase of startup entrepreneurship which became a meme: "I found a problem, so I created an app to solve it" (where the "problem" was something like "world hunger", "homelessness", "poverty", "ending war", etc).

That Chiang is also criticizing capitalism and wealth accumulation as a primary driver will probably win him no friends here.

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#213

Post by ninetyninenine »

martin-t wrote: post #208
ninetyninenine wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Nobody needs to be rich enough to own a 747, in order to justify making one My argument is not about the justification to making or owning a 747. It's the justification for how is it realistically possible for ONE person to own enough wealth to buy a 747 EVEN when his own intrinsic abilities are not great enough to build a 747. This is orthogonal to society pooling together wealth and building a 747 AND orthogonal t…

Yesterday I had a very similar argument. Maybe I haven't been paying attention until now but this is the first time I see somebody else summarize it so clearly. I've come to the conclusion that value (you call it wealth) is created by work. Yet the fastest way to get rich is to own already created value (a fixed amount) and use that to buy power/influence (e.g. buy a company) to take a cut from value created by other…

There’s a famous book on it called Capital by Thomas Picketty. It’s one of the first economic books to approach a subject utilizing a data driven approach. It’s actually published not as a text book but as popular non fiction.

The story is more complicated than just rewarding people for work. You must make them work togetheron public works that don’t directly benefit them. But people usually tend to work together only when they’re paid a salary and this can only happen if there’s a leader and huge incentives for someone to take that leadership role.

The incentive for that leadership role is the ownership of human capital.

It’s the idea of becoming dirt rich is what drives people to do startups and form corporations.

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#214

Post by emtel »

layer8 wrote: post #180
emtel wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, the first example I found was when I was trying to find a way to write a rust proc macro that recursively processes functions or modules and re-writes arithmetic expressions. The best way to do this, it turns out, is with `VisitMut` or `fold`. I cannot find any results discussing these approaches with google, but ChatGPT (4) suggested it within the first couple refinements of a query. Another recent example from…

I found the following as the first Google result for “rust proc macro AST rewrite” (and I don’t know much about Rust”): https://users.rust-lang.org/t/using-macros-to-modify-ast-to-... And I found the following for “different future same rust struct” (first search attempt): https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65587187/how-to-instanti... I’m not saying that LLMs can’t be useful for stuff like that, but they haven’t bee…

okay? I didn't find any of those when I was looking originally. I certainly wouldn't claim that you can't find this information with google, just that I wasn't able to.

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#215

Post by bjelkeman-again »

acchow wrote: post #171
weego wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counter point: what is it about scraping the Internet and indexing it cleverly that makes you believe that would lead to the the creation of the ability to reason above it's programming? No one in neuroscience, psychology or any related field can point to reasoning or 'consciousness' or whatever you wish to call it and say it appeared from X. Yet we have this West Coast IT cultish thinking that if we throw money at i…

The assumption is that since there is already a neural network that “got there” (our brains), we should be able to achieve the same thing synthetically. We just need to figure out how to train that network.

It may be possible to argue that current work in AI leads to some definition of intelligence, which apparently often is equaled to consciousness by some.

My take it is just unaware intelligence like in Peter Watts’ book Blindsight. A terrific read and a quite scary prospect.

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#216

Post by Rury »

sleepytree wrote: post #85
abecedarius wrote: post #68

Chiang makes some insightful points, e.g. about what we mean by magic. Then I come to > [LLMs] can get better at reproducing patterns found online, but they don’t become capable of actual reasoning; it seems that the problem is fundamental to their architecture. and wonder how an intelligent person can still think this, can be so absolute about it. What is "actual" reasoning here? If an AI proves a theorem is it only…

If I write a book that contains Einstein's theory of relativity by virtue of me copying it, did I create the theory? Did my copying of it indicate anything about my understanding of it? Would you be justified to think the next book I write would have anything of original value? I think what he is trying to say is that LLMs current architecture seems to mainly work by understanding patterns in the existing body of kno…

> LLMs current architecture seems to mainly work by understanding patterns in the existing body of knowledge ...

>But it is clear humans are capable of creativity and reasoning that are not reducible to mere pattern matching and this is the sense of reasoning that LLMs are not currently capable of

This is not clear at all. As it seems to me, it's impossible to imagine or think of things that are not in someway tied to something you've already come to sense or know. And if you think I am wrong, I implore you to provide a notion that doesn’t agree. I can only imagine something utterly unintelligible, and in order to make it intelligible, would require "pattern matching" (ie tying) it to something that is already intelligible. I mean how else do we come to understand a newly-found dead/unknown language, or teach our children? What human thought operates completely outside existing knowledge, if not given empirically?

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#217

Post by est »

the_af wrote: post #100
est wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> master of analogies analogy, in other words, embeddings?

No, analogies and embeddings are not exactly the same. Analogies in language are not a math function. As Ted Chiang comments on the article, this kind of reasoning ("the brain is like $CURRENT_TECH") is flawed.

well, embedding comes with certain loss as well.

If you believe our brains use "language" to think, then I would assume analogies play an important part in reasoning.

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#218

Post by d4mi3n »

glenstein wrote: post #186
d4mi3n wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waters are often muddied here by our own psychology. We (as a species) tend to ascribe intelligence to things that can speak. Even more so when someone (or thing in this case) can not just speak, but articulate well. We know these are algorithms, but how many people fall in love or make friends over nothing but a letter or text message? Capabilities for reasoning aside, we should all be very careful of our perception…

>we should all be very careful of our perceptions of intelligence based solely on a machines or algorithms apparent ability to communicate. I don't think that's merely an irrational compulsion. Communication can immediately demonstrate intelligence, and I think it quite clearly has, in numerous ways. The benchmarks out there cover a reasonable range of measurements that aren't subjective, and there's clear yes-or-no…

> Where there's an open question is in whether you're commingling the notion of intelligence with consciousness

I’m absolutely commingling these two things and that is an excellent point.

Markov chains and other algorithms that can generate text can give the appearance of intelligence without any kind of understanding or consciousness.

I’m not personally certain of consciousness is even requisite for intelligence, given that as far as we know consciousness is an emergent property stemming from some level of problem solving ability.

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#219

Post by d4mi3n »

kmmlng wrote: post #169
d4mi3n wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waters are often muddied here by our own psychology. We (as a species) tend to ascribe intelligence to things that can speak. Even more so when someone (or thing in this case) can not just speak, but articulate well. We know these are algorithms, but how many people fall in love or make friends over nothing but a letter or text message? Capabilities for reasoning aside, we should all be very careful of our perception…

This seems like the classic shifting of goalposts to determine when AI has actually become intelligent. Is the ability to communicate not a form of intelligence? We don't have to pretend like these models are super intelligent, but to deny them any intelligence seems too far for me.

My intent was not to claim communication isn’t a sign of intelligence, but that the appearance of communication and our tendency to anthropomorphize behaviors that are similar to ours can result in misunderstandings as to the current capabilities of LLMs.

glenstein made a good point that I was commingling concepts of intelligence and consciousness. I think his commentary is really insightful here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42912765

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#220

Post by borski »

martin-t wrote: post #208
ninetyninenine wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Nobody needs to be rich enough to own a 747, in order to justify making one My argument is not about the justification to making or owning a 747. It's the justification for how is it realistically possible for ONE person to own enough wealth to buy a 747 EVEN when his own intrinsic abilities are not great enough to build a 747. This is orthogonal to society pooling together wealth and building a 747 AND orthogonal t…

Yesterday I had a very similar argument. Maybe I haven't been paying attention until now but this is the first time I see somebody else summarize it so clearly. I've come to the conclusion that value (you call it wealth) is created by work. Yet the fastest way to get rich is to own already created value (a fixed amount) and use that to buy power/influence (e.g. buy a company) to take a cut from value created by other…

Reminds me of this famous tweetstorm: https://x.com/naval/status/1002103360646823936?s=46&t=WBeGlu...
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