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Isaac Asimov: The Last Question (1956)

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Re: Isaac Asimov: The Last Question (1956)

#231

Post by ponector »

jfaulken wrote: post #140
temp0826 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Living in South America a bit really showed me this. I think it's a cultural thing here but someone will always give you an answer, even if it's wrong, confidently . It was hard for me at first- I am usually the first person to say "I don't know" (often followed by "but let's slow down and find a good solution").

This was similar to my experience running a software team in India (I'm an American) a couple decades ago. I had to learn not to ask yes/no questions because the answer would always be yes.

From real life: - Is it done? - Yes! But not yet!

Re: Isaac Asimov: The Last Question (1956)

#232

Post by charonn0 »

If you enjoy this story, you might enjoy the short unpublished novel, "The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect"[1] by Roger Williams. A story where 1990's humans invent a 3-laws-compliant super AI that accidentally "ascends" humanity. We become as gods, or the Q Continuum, but remain a grievously savage child race. Not to spoil it, but the ending also has a broadly similar shape to The Last Question.

I say you might enjoy it, because this story has graphic depictions of deviant sex and gruesome violence, to a disturbing degree at points. But I argue that it's not gratuitous; it's the logical conclusion of Rule 34 being applied to the situation. Even so, you don't want to read this if you are sensitive to themes like rape, murder, incest or abuse.

[1]: https://archive.org/download/prime_intellect/prime_intellect...

Re: Isaac Asimov: The Last Question (1956)

#234

Post by parineum »

elictronic wrote: post #230
parineum wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Housing is supply constrained and not tied to labor costs in a significant way. It largely is tied to the price of land in it's location. It's not going to get noticeably cheaper with cheaper labor and materials. Although, I can tell you that the products that one uses in a home have gotten cheaper (fixtures, flooring, etc) with a few exceptions, copper wiring and pipes for instance. Housing doesn't really fit into t…

“housing is not tied to labor costs in a significant way”. ~30% of new construction is labor. ~50% of repair is labor. Have you ever dealt with home repair or building or are you just regurgitating whatever the LLM told you.

> ~30% of new construction is labor.

And what percentage of a house's price is the building?

> ~50% of repair is labor.

And how much does the average home owner spend on repairs a month?

I've been in my current house for almost 3 years. I've had one significant repair that would have cost around 3k. I did it myself but that was the quote. Not too bad.

In places where people are concerned about a housing shortage, the majority of the cost is land.

Re: Isaac Asimov: The Last Question (1956)

#235

Post by dang »

Related. Others?

'The Last Question' [Isaac Asimov; 1956] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41971740 - Oct 2024 (3 comments)

The Last Question by Issac Asimov [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31743151 - June 2022 (74 comments)

The Last Question - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31675727 - June 2022 (164 comments)

The Last Question (1956) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18839078 - Jan 2019 (18 comments)

Asimov: The Last Question (1956) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15691277 - Nov 2017 (2 comments)

The Last Question - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10146821 - Aug 2015 (5 comments)

The Last Question by Isaac Asimov (1956) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8376716 - Sept 2014 (18 comments)

The Last Question - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5584807 - April 2013 (63 comments)

The Last Question - Isaac Asimov - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3691113 - March 2012 (41 comments)

The Last Question by Isaac Asimov -- 1956 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2467703 - April 2011 (5 comments)

The Last Question by Isaac Asimov - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1485286 - July 2010 (23 comments)

"The Last Question" by Isaac Asimov - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1290590 - April 2010 (7 comments)

The Last Question -- Isaac Asimov - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=595419 - May 2009 (24 comments)

(Reposts are fine after a year or so, and in the case of perennials like this one, it's good to have a thread every once in a while so new user cohorts learn the classics.)

Re: Isaac Asimov: The Last Question (1956)

#236

Post by parineum »

keybored wrote: post #179
parineum wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Housing is supply constrained and not tied to labor costs in a significant way. It largely is tied to the price of land in it's location. It's not going to get noticeably cheaper with cheaper labor and materials. Although, I can tell you that the products that one uses in a home have gotten cheaper (fixtures, flooring, etc) with a few exceptions, copper wiring and pipes for instance. Housing doesn't really fit into t…

> Housing doesn't really fit into the conversation at hand about cheaper labor leading to lower prices. A conversation that you reframed from wealth distribution to the weirdly much more narrow “cheaper products for end users”. Even though wealth inequality has been studied plenty in itself. I’m not buying the mind-commodity that you’re selling.

> A conversation that you reframed from wealth distribution to the weirdly much more narrow “cheaper products for end users”

A further up comment refers to robots picking strawberries.

Re: Isaac Asimov: The Last Question (1956)

#237

Post by TeMPOraL »

DonaldPShimoda wrote: post #114
LPisGood wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is that they are completely incapable of meta-cognition. Reasoning models don’t show their actual reasoning at all.

Right — they're not reasoning, they're generating text that statistically models reasoning. Anyone who says differently is selling something.

As the meme goes, "they are the same picture".

Re: Isaac Asimov: The Last Question (1956)

#238

Post by TeMPOraL »

fl4regun wrote: post #219
wat10000 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nothing in this world is guaranteed. That doesn't mean it's uniformly random either. LLMs can still do something unexpected if you give them clear instructions, but that doesn't mean it'll be arbitrary and unpredictable in scope. The same way C/C++ undefined behavior technically means program can give you nasal demons, but in reality it won't do anything unusual (like format your C:/ drive) unless someone purposefully coded it to do that.

Re: Isaac Asimov: The Last Question (1956)

#240

Post by parineum »

prerok wrote: post #217
parineum wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Chart 42[1]

[1]https://www.bls.gov/opub/100-years-of-u-s-consumer-spending....

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

Cars are much, much more value then they used to be.

The Slate truck is as close to what cars used to be in the seventies. No power steering, no power brakes, no crumple zones, no fuel injection, etc. All those features cost a lot of money yet the amount of money spent on cars really hasn't gone up in accordance.

A 1970 Honda Civic cost 2k base. A base model today appears to be around 25k. that's more than inflation but it's also a luxury car, in comparison.

The vehicle market is less about low pricing as much as it is feature sets at price points. In other words, the prices stay roughly static but they pack in more features.

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