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Isaac Asimov: The Last Question (1956)

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Re: Isaac Asimov: The Last Question (1956)

#211

Post by prerok »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #155
_diyar wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have to talk to LLMs?

According to HN, every employer, and general social chatter, apparently yes.

Well, speaking from what I hear and see, employers want you to start using it so that you can be more productive. They've been sold this tool and want you to learn it so that your output will grow.

That's not an unfair take, I think. Again, just IME, they expect too much because the tool is oversold: it does not deliver that well. And we always hear, this new model is so much better, it's tiring.

I think we should all learn to use LLMs but we should still carefully review what they did. And that is what the employers don't quite get: the review still takes a lot of time. So, gains are not 10x but more like... 10%? Maybe 50 for boiler plate. Still gains are there, I guess.

Re: Isaac Asimov: The Last Question (1956)

#212

Post by utopcell »

ChocMontePy wrote: post #150

It has similarities to a very, very short story by Fredric Brown published two years before. It was called 'Answer' and is only 252 words long: https://www.roma1.infn.it/~anzel/answer.html

Good. So we have a super short story and a short story. Someone should write a book now.

Re: Isaac Asimov: The Last Question (1956)

#213

Post by andyjohnson0 »

hungryhobbit wrote: post #196
andyjohnson0 wrote: post #194

I'm going to make myself unpopular here, but I've never understood the perennial gushing about this story on hn. The writing is okay, but the ending is kind of trite (especially given the author's humanist beliefs. And there's much too much exposition. Convince me I'm wrong.

Context matters. The first guy to write X is a luminary. The next 50 people to write variations of X start falling along a spectrum, from luminary to hack. After that, everyone except children have been exposed to X, and anyone writing about it seems trite. I suspect you've read a lot of works derived from Asimov, and now the original seems trite (when you read it after all the stuff derived from it). But the work re…

The triteness was more in the ending than the overall exposition. Humans create computer, computer creates universe->humans.

> I suspect you've read a lot of works derived from Asimov

You're probably right, although the transitive chain of derivation is necessarily long. Clarke - probably not derivative. Blish and Cherryh (some), Stapeton, Lem, Heinlein (the juveniles, as a kid), Baxter, Banks, Gibson, Ken MacLeod, Charles Stross, Peter Watts... I dunno.

I did grind through the Robot books as a child, and the Foundation books that he wrote. But just because they're foundational (no pun intended) doesn't stop them feeling stuffy and dated now.

(And as an aside, it strikes me now that Clarke's The Nine Billion Names of God is kind of the anti-particle to The Last Question.)

Re: Isaac Asimov: The Last Question (1956)

#215

Post by Forgeties79 »

prerok wrote: post #211
Forgeties79 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to HN, every employer, and general social chatter, apparently yes.

Well, speaking from what I hear and see, employers want you to start using it so that you can be more productive. They've been sold this tool and want you to learn it so that your output will grow. That's not an unfair take, I think. Again, just IME, they expect too much because the tool is oversold: it does not deliver that well. And we always hear, this new model is so much better, it's tiring. I think we should al…

> they expect too much because the tool is oversold: it does not deliver that well.

And unfortunately a lot of people will say it’s their reports’ fault for not properly utilizing it (even as they barely use it) because otherwise they would have to admit that they bought a tool without any plan for how to deploy it. So regardless of what is or isn’t a fair take, the results are the same. We are burdened with utilizing a thing whether it is useful or not and the results are generally not what is measured, but rather “are you using it?”

I’m just glad I work at a company that has more reasonable expectations and has been very slowly, thoughtfully rolling it out to individuals at the company and assessing what is and isn’t good for. They are interested in getting me in line, but as somebody in video production to be perfectly honest the use case for Claude is a bit tricky to navigate. We don’t write a lot of scripts and I already have bespoke software for organizing/maintaining footage that isn’t on a subscription basis. The work I’m also doing doesn’t call for these speed-editing solutions that generate tik tok chaff. All our stuff is hours long and it’s high volume. Any video-centric AI service costs an arm and a leg.

I do think it could be useful for writing some terminal scripts and such, but as far as a daily tool we are still scratching our heads and thinking about it. But it’s nice to be able to do that without somebody saying “why aren’t you using it?” every meeting.

Re: Isaac Asimov: The Last Question (1956)

#216

Post by utopcell »

triceratops wrote: post #86
us-merul wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I looked this up on Wikipedia. It seems that he was working as an instructor (not a professor) of chemistry; since he was making more money as a writer during that time, he slowed down or stopped his research. Doesn’t seem to have been an intentional choice so much as how things happened to turn out.

> he was working as an instructor (not a professor) No he eventually became a full professor too. "He began work in 1949 with a $5,000 salary(equivalent to $68,000 in 2025), maintaining this position for several years. By 1952, however, he was making more money as a writer than from the university, and he eventually stopped doing research, confining his university role to lecturing students.[g] In 1955, he was promot…

> In 1955, he was promoted to tenured associate professor. In December 1957, Asimov was dismissed from his teaching post, with effect from June 30, 1958, due to his lack of research.

I thought the whole point of getting tenure is that you can't get fired.

Re: Isaac Asimov: The Last Question (1956)

#217

Post by prerok »

parineum wrote: post #162
gwerbin wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citation needed. Sometimes? Sure. Almost always? Questionable assertion.

Food, clothing, electronics... Over the longer term and adjusted for inflation of course. Any manufactured good that isn't supply constrained really. Either the products have gotten cheaper (food) or the product has become significantly better at a similar price point (cars) and, often times, both (televisions).

Sorry, what?

Food is much more expensive, like 30% here in Europe, much faster growth than inflation. And before you state that food is accounted for in inflation: economists are doing some dirty tricks here by finding subpar replacements.

Cars are also much more expensive for the same quality, far surpassing inflation.

I will concede TVs and electronic gadgets, though.

Re: Isaac Asimov: The Last Question (1956)

#218

Post by fl4regun »

gwerbin wrote: post #152
fl4regun wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah that distinction is pretty important, and in general that guy I believe IS making the point - if you can not control it with guaranteed outcomes - you cannot control it.

You can't control it any more than you can control a draw from a deck of cards, but you can absolutely control the deck of cards that you choose to draw from.

magicians can probably make you change your mind on the former

Re: Isaac Asimov: The Last Question (1956)

#219

Post by fl4regun »

wat10000 wrote: post #173
fl4regun wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah that distinction is pretty important, and in general that guy I believe IS making the point - if you can not control it with guaranteed outcomes - you cannot control it.

That's silly. My car is not absolutely guaranteed to turn left when I turn the steering wheel left, but you wouldn't say I can't control my car on that basis. Steering an LLM with a prompt is way less reliable than steering a car with a steering wheel, but there's still control. It's just not absolute.

if your car doesn' turn left when you turn the steering wheel left, the problem is that the car is broken, if an LLM does something unexpected after you gave it instructions, that's possible when the LLM is functioning entirely correctly.

Re: Isaac Asimov: The Last Question (1956)

#220

Post by amdivia »

CGMthrowaway wrote: post #37

>INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER Boy, it sure would be nice if real LLMs were capable of giving an answer like that.

Exactly!!

I've been trying to work on a new LLM code editor that does just that. When you instruct it to do something, it will evaluate your request, try to analyze the action part of it, the object, subject, etc, and map them to existing symbols in your codebase or, to expected to be created symbols. If all maps, it proceeds. If the map is incomplete, it errors out stating that your statement contained unresolvable ambiguity

I think there is a real benefit here, and it might be the actual next beneficial grounded AI sustainable use in programming. Since I the current "Claude code and friends" are but a state of drunkenness we fell into after the advent of this new technology, but it will prove, with time, that this is not a sustainable approach

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