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Life is more than an engineering problem

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Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#61

Post by ninetyninenine »

borski wrote: post #59
ninetyninenine wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rich people once they made their wealth creation move on society they no longer need to work. Their capital gains actually start increasing from the ownership of human capital. So they get richer and richer without contributing work. In fact that wealth gained without contributing and creating new wealth rises at a compounding rate. Simply owning enough capital your wealth will grow at speeds that far excel what a pe…

> You can see this effect in y combinator. The owners of y combinator don’t actually do much work. The YC partners who spend so much of their time helping startups are definitely doing work.

YC partners own capital right? I mean the labor they actually do doesn’t translate into the income they receive which is astronomically more.

Take for an example: a yc partner can take everything they know and train someone to do the same work and pay that person a much lower fixed salary. That salary represents work contributed, but a yc partner earns more than this. The majority of wealth gained from the yc partner does not come from actual work contributed… it comes from capital gains from growth.

I mean you can already see a logistical issue with capitalism by looking at a fundamental problem. A 747 is the result of thousands of man years of labor. Not one single man can build that thing. Not one single man can create enough wealth to create a 747.

Yet if one man can’t create enough wealth to create or trade for a 747 how do people become rich enough to own a 747? Of course it comes from siphoning wealth off of human capital. It is fundamentally unfair but unfortunately unfairness is the ultimate driver that led to the creation of the 747 in the first place. The idea of having an unfair advantage must exist to drive people.

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#62

Post by jhrmnn »

sukruh wrote: post #34

I agreed with almost all of it until: >My stance on this has probably shifted in a negative direction over time, primarily because of my growing awareness of how often technology is used for wealth accumulation. I don’t think capitalism will solve the problems that capitalism creates, so I’d be much more optimistic about technological development if we could prevent it from making a few people extremely rich. What's…

In capitalism, power correlates with wealth. So wealth inequality yields power inequality. Too much inequality, and a society can hardly feel just. If we only could somehow fix capitalism so that wealth doesn’t correlate with power.

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#63

Post by bee_rider »

gcanyon wrote: post #56

I'm 100% certain Chiang is wrong about art. I'm a product manager, not an artist, but I write many things as part of my job, and Claude in particular is a better writer than I am. Here's how Claude rewrote that, you can argue whether in this particular instance it did better than I did :-) While I respect Chiang's perspective on AI and art, my experience as a product manager has shown me otherwise - Claude routinely…

IMO Yours is much better in this case, it is more direct and clear (although I guess I’m looking for problems in Claude’s output). Yours starts by just giving us what you are trying to say. Then gives us your background succinctly.

Claude’s starts out with this circuitous “While I respect…” failing to drive the point in the interest of being… polite, I guess? But not actually polite because everybody who’s read anything knows that “While I respect” is almost always a preface to calling somebody wrong.

It also makes the argument worse. Yours is unambiguous, and does a better job of describing where your evidence comes from. You clearly describe yourself as doing something that is not exactly art, but it is like art, and so you bring it up as an good example of Claude doing an art-like thing better than a professional.

In the Claude sample, it isn’t clear until the dash what’s going on, which is more than halfway through the comment. What’s your experience? Up until that dash, you could be talking about your experience as a product manager managing artists (at a game studio for example). It’s like “oh, ok, he was just talking about a sort of… not exactly analogy it a less than completely exact experience of working with artists.”

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#64

Post by bee_rider »

mantas wrote: post #49
encomiast wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument seems to presuppose that a language is more perfect if it has fewer influences and contributions from other languages. But you didn’t actually state that assumption, and certainly didn’t support it. Maybe the most perfect language is a perfect amalgamation of all languages. That’s at least as plausible to me.

I don’t think so. That brings such bastardized result as English spelling. And there are many different ways and purposes to be best at. For example modern English is compact language with simple grammar. But at the same time it’s rather ambiguous compared to more verbose languages.

The idea of a perfect language seems somewhat ill defined in the first place. The definition used in the original comment seems to be more-or-less “most divinely inspired,” which is… not really something they can be argued about usefully.

If we’re going to discuss the idea of a perfect language, there will be a strong tendency for people to pick the language they can best use to express their thoughts—most likely their native language. So, English does have the advantage that even native speakers think it is quite a silly language, and nobody in their right mind would even think of calling it perfect.

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#65

Post by analog31 »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #61
borski wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can see this effect in y combinator. The owners of y combinator don’t actually do much work. The YC partners who spend so much of their time helping startups are definitely doing work.

YC partners own capital right? I mean the labor they actually do doesn’t translate into the income they receive which is astronomically more. Take for an example: a yc partner can take everything they know and train someone to do the same work and pay that person a much lower fixed salary. That salary represents work contributed, but a yc partner earns more than this. The majority of wealth gained from the yc partner…

Nobody needs to be rich enough to own a 747, in order to justify making one. In fact, I doubt there are more than a dozen individually owned jetliners in the world. All you need is for a lot of people to pool their wealth and allow it to be directed towards a common purpose. In turn, this happens because society provides entitlements (such as financial and corporate regulations, the money system, etc.) that allow great ventures to be formed and operate.

The entitlements are justified by a social theory, that the activity produces a net benefit for everybody. There may be pockets of unfairness -- no system works perfectly -- but no reason why it must allow unlimited unfairness. If it does, then there's also no reason why it can't be restrained.

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#66

Post by bee_rider »

borski wrote: post #57
almusdives wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We actually know exactly which gene sequence is responsible for real intelligence. We don't at all know this.

It’s an idea for a science fiction story.

It isn’t just an idea for a science fiction story though. It is also a philosophical argument, just predicated on something unexpected, which is probably not true, but which presents for us an interesting scenario, and which isn’t technically ruled out by existing evidence (although, it seems unlikely of course).

Well, I guess that’s what the best science fiction stories are. But, the best science fiction stories aren’t just science fiction stories!

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#67

Post by RangerScience »

vrnvu wrote: post #4

Highly recommend "Stories of Your Life and Others". I describe Ted Chiang as a very human sci-fi author, where humanity comes before technology in his stories. His work is incredibly versatile, and while I expected sci-fi, I'd actually place him closer to fantasy. Perfect for anyone who enjoys short stories with a scientific, social, or philosophical twist. Another anthology I'd recommend with fresh ideas is Axiomati…

I think of this as “humanist” sci-fi; which has heavy overlap with “golden era” SF.

Other authors I’d put in this category are Gene Roddenberry (TOS and TNG, particularly), Asimov, PKD, Vonnegut and Theodore Sturgeon.

Personally - fantasy stories are “and-then” stories, SF are “what-if”. Humanist sci-fi is then asking “what-if” about very human things, as opposed to technological things, although the two are always related.

However, practically speaking, literature vs sci-fi vs fantasy (vs young adult!) are more marketing cohorts than anything else; what kind of people buy what kind of books?

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#68

Post by abecedarius »

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 a simulated proof?

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#69

Post by svilen_dobrev »

JadeNB wrote: post #24
ycombinete wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve never encountered anything like Egan before. I’ve heard Stanislaw Lem mentioned in conversations about him though. But I can’t vouch for the comparison myself as I’ve never read Lem.

Both are fresh voices and well worth reading, but I don't think Lem comes anywhere near Egan's diamond-hard sci-fi. Egan knows, and does, real math; you can sometimes find him at the n-category Café. My impression is that Lem's beautiful philosophical ideas were not accompanied by comparable math or physics knowledge.

Lem is humanist. The sci-fi part is only a vehicle to make you think (eh, if you want to), and while things are written in 1950-80... they are not outdated, because humans are essentially same, for millenias. Just read "Stories of commandor Pirx". Somewhere in the middle of them, you may notice something like the current frenzy around LLMs and ethics. But he goes further..

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#70

Post by emtel »

I like Chiang’s stories, but he simply doesn’t know what he’s talking about when it comes to LLMs. Forget the philosophical points - he claims that LLMs are strictly worse than search engines for information retrieval. This is just obviously false, I can give you dozens of conversations from my ChatGPT history over the past two months which would have been impossible to get answers to on Google.
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