Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Life is more than an engineering problem

lareviewofbooks.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 257 posts

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#71

Post by textlapse »

gcanyon wrote: post #9

I'll take this as my chance to recommend Ted Chiang -- he is among the very best short story writers working in science fiction (I say confidently, not having done an extensive survey...). His works are remarkably clever, from Understand, which does a credible job of portraying human superintelligence, to Exhalation, which explores the concept of entropy in a fascinating way. And of course Story of Your Life, on whic…

I recommend reading George Saunders - probably the best living short story writer. His way of writing is both out there and grounded at the same time. Not much sci-fi (if anything it’s whimsical) though.

His collection Tenth of December is probably my favorite.

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#72

Post by spunkycomics »

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…

I’d also argue this is a view on the technical components of writing, rather than the artform.

AI can for sure place brush strokes more precisely (“correctly”?) but the argument is over the necessity of process/intent in the art

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#73

Post by ge96 »

gcanyon wrote: post #47
ChrisKnott wrote: post #14

> "It’s like imagining that a printer could actually feel pain because it can print bumper stickers with the words ‘Baby don’t hurt me’ on them. It doesn’t matter if the next version of the printer can print out those stickers faster, or if it can format the text in bold red capital letters instead of small black ones. Those are indicators that you have a more capable printer but not indicators that it is any closer…

Interestingly the movie Companion, out this weekend, illustrates this case exactly. It's a thriller, not a philosophical treatise, so don't expect it to go deep into the subject, but the question of what "pain" means to an AI is definitely part of the story.

I like the one with Ryan Gosling more

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#74

Post by mewpmewp2 »

abecedarius wrote: post #68

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…

Even most intelligent people can hallucinate, we still haven't fixed this problem. There's a lot of training material and bias which leads many to repeat those things "LLM's are just a stochastic parrot, glorified auto complete/google search, Markov chains, just statistics", etc. The thing is, these sentences sound really good and so it's easy to repeat them when you have made up your mind. It's a shortcut.

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#75

Post by benreesman »

emtel wrote: post #70

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.

LLMs are generally better search tools for certain topics today, but search engines have been in serious decline for at least 15 years.

IMHO old-school Google remains the high water mark of generalized information retrieval, with advantages ranging from speed to semi-durable citation.

I strongly suspect there is a cohort thing going on here, many HN users today weren’t involved in technology yet back when Google worked well.

Much like beer for Homer Simpson, AI is the cause of and solution to all of the Internet’s problems.

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#77

Post by ustad »

abecedarius wrote: post #68

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…

Has an AI “proven” a theorem?

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#78

Post by mewpmewp2 »

ChrisKnott wrote: post #28
epr wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. The reason humans anthropomorphize "AI" is because we apply our own meta-models of intelligence to llms, etc., where they simply don't apply. The model can spit out something that seems extremely intelligent and well thought out that would truly be shocking if a monkey said it for example due to our meta-model of intelligence, and that may be valid in that case if we determined it wasn't simply memorized.…

I agree that with current LLMs the error goes the other way; they appear more conscious than they are, compared to, say, crows or octopuses which appear less conscious than they actually are. My point is that "appears conscious" is really the only test there is. In what way is a human that says "that hurts" really feeling pain? What about Stephen Hawking "saying it", what about if he could only communicate through pr…

The only actual difference in my view is that somehow we feel that we are so uber special. Besides that, it seems there's no reason to believe that we are anything more than chemical signals. But the fact that we have this strong "feeling" that we are special refuses us to admit that. I feel like I'm special, I feel like I exist. That's the only argument for being more than something else.

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#79

Post by mofeien »

abecedarius wrote: post #68

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…

To me this also feels like a statement that would obviously need strong justification. For if animals are capable of reasoning, probably through being trained on many examples of the laws of nature doing their thing, then why couldn't a statistical model be?

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#80

Post by bmitc »

Humans love the pursuit of technology for technology's sake.

Quotes by Jacques Ellul:

----

> Technique has taken over the whole of civilization. Death, procreation, birth all submit to technical efficiency and systemization.

----

> Technique has penetrated the deepest recesses of the human being. The machine tends not only to create a new human environment, but also to modify man's very essence. The milieu in which he lives is no longer his. He must adapt himself, as though the world were new, to a universe for which he was not created. He was made to go six kilometers an hour, and he goes a thousand. He was made to eat when he was hungry and to sleep when he was sleepy; instead, he obeys a clock. He was made to have contact with living things, and he lives in a world of stone. He was created with a certain essential unity, and he is fragmented by all the forces of the modern world.

Post reply on HN