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Profession by Isaac Asimov (1957)

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Re: Profession by Isaac Asimov (1957)

#51

Post by godelski »

dryarzeg wrote: post #14

I've read this a long time ago, when I was a kid. Back then I thought about the education system and how it sometimes inhibits the creativity within the students. But right now, other comparison comes to mind - I don't know how relevant it is, though, so please don't judge it strictly. Modern "AI" (LLM-based) systems are somewhat similar to the humans in this story who were taped. They may have a lot of knowledge, ev…

What concerns me is that learning depth is more discouraged than ever. For a long time it's been discouraged, which is natural as we have a preference for simple things rather than difficult/complex things. But we're pushing much harder than ever before. From the way we have influencer education videos to the way people push LLMs ("you can just vibe code, no thinking required"). We've advanced enough that it's easy to make things look good enough but looks can be deceiving. It's impossible to know what's good enough without depth of knowledge, without mastery.

No machine will ever be sufficient to overcome the fundamental problem: a novice is incapable of properly evaluating a system. No human is capable of doing this either, nor can they (despite many believing they can). It's a fundamental information problem. The best we can do is match our human system, where we trust the experts, who have depth. But we even see the limits of that and how frequently they get ignored by those woefully unqualified to evaluate. Maybe it'll be better as people tend to trust machines more. But for the same reason it could be significantly worse. It's near impossible to fix a problem you can't identify.

Re: Profession by Isaac Asimov (1957)

#52

Post by hcs »

elcapitan wrote: post #8

Is this still in print, maybe as part of a collection? I tried to find it but couldn't. Many of his other works seem to be available as paperback, including a bunch of story collections.

Though it doesn't directly answer your question, isfdb.org is a great reference for publication history of SF: https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?55700

Re: Profession by Isaac Asimov (1957)

#53

Post by kmaitreys »

emoII wrote: post #29
kmaitreys wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have it in print. As part of Isaac Asimov: The Complete Stories Volume 1 (Published by Harper Voyager)

Thanks, just went and bought it!

It's a great collection. Do check out "The Dead Past" as well (it's the first story in the version I have).

Re: Profession by Isaac Asimov (1957)

#55

Post by onraglanroad »

lanstin wrote: post #43
bee_rider wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I can’t tell if this is sarcastic. Well I think it has a kernel of truth that overstates it for rhetorical flair. I’m willing to believe the phrase “trope” wasn’t invented in 1957 if that’s what you are saying. But surely they had the idea of popular little trends in contemporary literature. The must have known they were writing pulp sci-fi. At least when they got their copies they could feel the texture!

Trope comes from classical Latin.

It comes from Greek "tropos"

Re: Profession by Isaac Asimov (1957)

#56

Post by TMWNN »

KerrAvon wrote: post #37
bee_rider wrote: post #34

A very nice story, and an interesting reflection on the education system. Also, and this is just an aside, but “the protagonist who is too special for the sorting hat” is a bit of a trope in young adult literature at this point. Is this the first real instance of it? 1957. That’s a while ago! I don’t even know if the “sorting hat” trope was established enough to subvert at the time.

No one would have recognized any tropes in 1957 beyond Shakespeare. Even Joseph Campbell wasn’t popularized until decades later.

>No one would have recognized any tropes in 1957 beyond Shakespeare.

Nope. Just within science fiction, early issues of Galaxy had many editorials denouncing/mocking science fiction stories with overused tropes, such as Western transposed to space, or babies being killed as aberrant after a nuclear war because they have ten fingers and toe.

Re: Profession by Isaac Asimov (1957)

#57

Post by marcosdumay »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #35
dxuh wrote: post #20

I am sort of questioning my use of LLMs again after, first reluctantly, starting to use them multiple times a day. This story seems like it was intended to be an allegory for LLM-use though I know it couldn't have been.

It's an allegory about trusting "best practices", standardized bodies of knowledge¹, and "that's the way it's always been done". Not that those things necessarily don't work, they do in the story as well as in real life, but they need to adapt to change and the story illustrates what happens when they harden from best practice into unquestioned dogma. ¹ There's even a BoK for software developers, the SWEBOK, but I've…

It's also about hyperspecialization. A concept that was beginning to be noticed at the time.

Re: Profession by Isaac Asimov (1957)

#58

Post by wizzwizz4 »

This story is set thousands of years in the future, and yet their social norms are broadly those of 1960s America, conspicuously minus the racism. Their notion of gender equality, for instance, is to segregate, but add "(and women)" after every few "men" (respectively "(and husbands)" after "wives"). Stubby Trevelyan smokes, and litters the cigarette butts. This has to be deliberate on the part of the author. I wonder what Ladislas Ingenescu, Registered Historian, has to say about the matter?… if, indeed, he has any original thoughts to share.

Re: Profession by Isaac Asimov (1957)

#59

Post by mezyt »

hammock wrote: post #47
mezyt wrote: post #13

Remind me of a recent discussion we had among Stackoverflow moderator: > “Think about it,” he continued. “Who discovers the edge cases the docs don’t mention? Who answers the questions that haven’t been asked before? It can’t be people trained only to repeat canonical answers. Somewhere, it has to stop. Somewhere, someone has to think.” > “Yes,” said the Moderator. > He leaned back. For a moment, restlessness flicker…

What does “destroy the system” mean here?

The metaphor doesn't match very well here because stackoverflow is not selling new tape at a premium but giving them for free and reading a stackoverflow answer is harder than asking an LLM.

Could be that AI companies feeding on stackoverflow are selling tape at a premium, and if they tell you it's only supervised learning from a lot of human experts it's going to destroy the nice bubble they have going on around AGI.

Could also be that you have to do the actual theory / practice / correction work for your basal ganglia to "know" about something without thinking about it (i.e. learn), contrary to the novel where the knowledge is directly inserted in your brain. If everyone use AI to skip the "practice" phase lazily then there's no one to make the AI evolve anymore. And the world is not a Go board where the AI can learn against itself indefinitely.

Re: Profession by Isaac Asimov (1957)

#60

Post by ontouchstart »

godelski wrote: post #51
dryarzeg wrote: post #14

I've read this a long time ago, when I was a kid. Back then I thought about the education system and how it sometimes inhibits the creativity within the students. But right now, other comparison comes to mind - I don't know how relevant it is, though, so please don't judge it strictly. Modern "AI" (LLM-based) systems are somewhat similar to the humans in this story who were taped. They may have a lot of knowledge, ev…

What concerns me is that learning depth is more discouraged than ever. For a long time it's been discouraged, which is natural as we have a preference for simple things rather than difficult/complex things. But we're pushing much harder than ever before. From the way we have influencer education videos to the way people push LLMs ("you can just vibe code, no thinking required"). We've advanced enough that it's easy t…

Ironically, when machine learning is getting “deeper & deeper”, human learning is getting more and more impatient and shallow.

I have been searching “Vibe coding” videos on YouTube that are not promoting something. And I found this one and sat down and watched the whole three hours. It does take a lot of real effort.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EL7Au1tzNxE

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