A World Run with Code • Hacker News Board

Re: A World Run with Code

#31

Post by peterlk » Fri, May 03, 2019, 6:39 PM UTC

JackFr wrote: post #23

jwr wrote: post #11

I find Stephen Wolfram to be a an interesting person. On one hand, he is undeniably exceptional and created an impressive computational system. On the other hand, the "Wolfram language" is really a pretty poor design as far as programming languages go, and would not even be noticed if it wasn't for the giant standard library that gets shipped with it, called Mathematica. I use the "Wolfram language" because I have to…

> I find Stephen Wolfram to be a an interesting person. On one hand, he is undeniably exceptional and created an impressive computational system. On the other hand, the "Wolfram language" is really a pretty poor design as far as programming languages go, and would not even be noticed if it wasn't for the giant standard library that gets shipped with it, called Mathematica. I use the "Wolfram language" because I have…

I have worked with a small number of exceptionally talented individuals (I don't know where to draw the "genius" line, but they were up there), and I see negative aspects of their personalities echoed in Stephen Wolfram. It looks like ego to me. People lose their humility after being told that their better than everyone else for their whole lives.

Being an expert at one thing doesn't make you an expert at everything. But it's hard to realize that when you're king of your world.

A different perspective. Highly creative (smart) people are those who make mental connections that others do not see but which exist. Crazy people are those who make mental connections that others do not see and which don't exist. Perhaps he sees the Wolfram language is superior in some way that doesn't actually exist, or perhaps we're not seeing something that does.

Re: A World Run with Code

#32

Post by onemoresoop » Fri, May 03, 2019, 6:46 PM UTC

raz32dust wrote: post #20

daenz wrote: post #15

>Right now, most of what the computers in the world do is to execute tasks we basically initiate. But increasingly our world is going to involve computers autonomously interacting with each other, according to computational contracts. Once something happens in the world—some computational fact is established—we’ll quickly see cascades of computational contracts executing. And there’ll be all sorts of complicated intr…

In the same vein, "Human intelligence" led to the 2008 crash. Human's aren't infallible either. My problem with this argument is that there is no logical basis for how exactly human intelligence is different. Computers aren't there yet in most domains, but there is no evidence to say they can't get there. How soon is anybody's guess right now. While AGI might be far off, I can certainly imagine computers running larg…

In the same vein, a machine should always be geared towards being a tool put into the use of the human intelligence. This tool was designed by human intelligence after all. The problem is when human intelligence creates such a tool that becomes so complex it no longer understands how it works, what it does and how to stop it.

There's no doubt that more things will be managed by machines and artificial intelligence but let's not make human intelligence a second class citizen.

Re: A World Run with Code

#33

Post by cerealbad » Fri, May 03, 2019, 6:46 PM UTC

perhaps wolfram is parodying his main idea in his work output. from a basic origin he's creating monstrous bloat and complexity, as a type of demonstrative self-referential proof.

there are people who write code until it works, and people who rewrite until it doesn't. room enough for both.

Re: A World Run with Code

#34

Post by sktrdie » Fri, May 03, 2019, 6:47 PM UTC

To be honest I haven’t understood much of this.

Am I also the only one who’s very skeptical of AI? I see no correlation between what we call “biological thinking” and computation.

Even though I don’t know much of the theory behind AI, to me it’s similar to saying that since we have lots of simple calculators, we can arrange them together in some specific way and emergent intelligence will arise.

Sure yes I mean but you can say that about everything: let’s arrange a bunch of forks together and intelligence might emerge.

And actually from a math point of view you could luckily arrange some forks together and have intelligence since intelligence seems to emerge from an arrangement of atoms.

I don’t see why computation has to get a go at intelligent, while anything else not. What’s so unique about computation?

Re: A World Run with Code

#35

Post by dgfx » Fri, May 03, 2019, 6:50 PM UTC

Think of all the people in prison, justly or unjustly, under our current system where humans have to interpret and carry out our legal code. We may extend these practices into every domain at negligible cost. Why do we desire authority without conscience? I can think of two reasons: one, we do not wish to hold ourselves accountable; two, we desire to see the strong afflict the weak.

Re: A World Run with Code

#36

Post by tlb » Fri, May 03, 2019, 6:57 PM UTC

sktrdie wrote: post #34

To be honest I haven’t understood much of this. Am I also the only one who’s very skeptical of AI? I see no correlation between what we call “biological thinking” and computation. Even though I don’t know much of the theory behind AI, to me it’s similar to saying that since we have lots of simple calculators, we can arrange them together in some specific way and emergent intelligence will arise. Sure yes I mean but y…

The last 80 years have had a string of successes for arranging simple calculators in ways that produce impressive results. Google search, world champion chess players, Fortnite are all examples.

I don't know of any impressive results with arranging forks. If there were, you could model the fork behavior on computers and probably run it 1000000x faster.

It's certainly possible that some other elements than the simple calculators we use today will lead to the big breakthrough in AI. Perhaps quantum computation is needed. But right now, arrangements of simple calculators seem like the most promising.

Re: A World Run with Code

#37

Post by szemet » Fri, May 03, 2019, 7:04 PM UTC

sktrdie wrote: post #34

To be honest I haven’t understood much of this. Am I also the only one who’s very skeptical of AI? I see no correlation between what we call “biological thinking” and computation. Even though I don’t know much of the theory behind AI, to me it’s similar to saying that since we have lots of simple calculators, we can arrange them together in some specific way and emergent intelligence will arise. Sure yes I mean but y…

Universal computation is about information processing, and information processing is definitely an important thing that intelligent agents are doing.

(I wrote universal computation - to mske a distinction to common physical processes like what forks usually do - we may obviously say that a glass of water computes in a second where water molecules of that water will be in a second, but that is too direct and missing the abstraction level that my mind has (sensing and modelling my environment) or a universal turing machine has (manipulating symbols which may stand for(modell) something)

Re: A World Run with Code

#38

Post by IggleSniggle » Fri, May 03, 2019, 7:07 PM UTC

sktrdie wrote: post #34

To be honest I haven’t understood much of this. Am I also the only one who’s very skeptical of AI? I see no correlation between what we call “biological thinking” and computation. Even though I don’t know much of the theory behind AI, to me it’s similar to saying that since we have lots of simple calculators, we can arrange them together in some specific way and emergent intelligence will arise. Sure yes I mean but y…

The unique part about computation is that we can throw an immense amount of energy at specific problems in isolation to force rapid evolution, and backtrack to snapshots easily if we don’t like where we ended up.

You can select for an intelligent swarm of fruit-flies, but it’s going to take you a lot longer to get your result than if you could simulate the whole process. Now, if it’s simulated, will you be able to walk your final result back to meat-world DNA? Not unless you included that level of detail in your simulation, which would be extraordinarily expensive to do and fraught with problems due to the scale. But even then, the simulation gives you some advantages: affect the flow of time, backtrack in time to explore other paths under alternate simulated conditions, etc. In the real world, you can’t have that kind of perfect reproducibility.

Re: A World Run with Code

#39

Post by ff317 » Fri, May 03, 2019, 7:31 PM UTC

peterlk wrote: post #31

JackFr wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I find Stephen Wolfram to be a an interesting person. On one hand, he is undeniably exceptional and created an impressive computational system. On the other hand, the "Wolfram language" is really a pretty poor design as far as programming languages go, and would not even be noticed if it wasn't for the giant standard library that gets shipped with it, called Mathematica. I use the "Wolfram language" because I have…

I have worked with a small number of exceptionally talented individuals (I don't know where to draw the "genius" line, but they were up there), and I see negative aspects of their personalities echoed in Stephen Wolfram. It looks like ego to me. People lose their humility after being told that their better than everyone else for their whole lives. Being an expert at one thing doesn't make you an expert at everything.…

That last perspective is the most important one. I've known a few genius-ish people, and I recently had a jarring experience where one of them who's a bit older and retired, but definitely not mentally ill or demented, had gone off the cliff of believing in all kinds of crazy alien/government conspiracy theories and started working on some free-energy device, etc.

At first I found it shocking that he was being so completely irrational about these things and had become a "true believer" in so much crazy so quickly. But eventually I made the connection. All the innovative stuff he did earlier in life was no different. Every great idea he came up with and pursued with dogged passion was something that everyone else around him thought was stupid and crazy at the time.

Basically he's always been "crazy" in this sense, it's just that sometimes that ability to suspend disbelief and rationality works out well and you invent something useful that nobody else would've tried, and sometimes (probably many times!) it doesn't. His brain hasn't changed how it works, it just happened to latch onto the wrong thing this time.

Re: A World Run with Code

#40

Post by robbiep » Fri, May 03, 2019, 7:37 PM UTC

jerf wrote: post #25

raz32dust wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the same vein, "Human intelligence" led to the 2008 crash. Human's aren't infallible either. My problem with this argument is that there is no logical basis for how exactly human intelligence is different. Computers aren't there yet in most domains, but there is no evidence to say they can't get there. How soon is anybody's guess right now. While AGI might be far off, I can certainly imagine computers running larg…

"My problem with this argument is that there is no logical basis for how exactly human intelligence is different." I can give you a partial answer, which is that human intelligence is somewhat slower, which mitigates the ability to crash the entire economy in 15 seconds. That's why a stock market can crash in 15 seconds nowadays, but "the housing market" can't. This gives people some time to do some things about it w…

That’s also why there are trading halts built into all major exchanges, so if something triggers a large fall, there is a circuit breaker in the decision process of 18-48 hours for people to process and digest information