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A World Run with Code

blog.stephenwolfram.com

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Re: A World Run with Code

#81

Post by tomcam »

hinkley wrote: post #70
bitwize wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Welcome to Stephen Wolfram. Wolfram is madly in love with his own ideas, even when those ideas are not nearly as original or world-shakingly profound as he seems to think they are. That he is a genius does not mean he is not in a state of arrested development; prodigious genius like his can impede one's development because people around the genius are so in awe of them that they are unwilling to give them the much-ne…

It's very hard to teach someone whose cup is full. Very smart people can rationalize their bad ideas faster than other people can talk them out of them. But that doesn't mean you've actually explained yourself. If you can't explain things to other people, do you really understand it yourself? At this point Wolfram is lost to us. "What the hell are you talking about, Steve?". I was just fantasizing about resurrecting…

> fall madly in love!

And he took that advice with a ferocious passion that not even Feynman could have foreseen. Stephen Wolfram is madly in love with Stephen Wolfram!

Re: A World Run with Code

#82

Post by swiley »

szemet wrote: post #37
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 t…

We don't know that human thought actually can run on a Turing Machine though.

Re: A World Run with Code

#83

Post by SantalBlush »

codetrotter wrote: post #76
hinkley wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very hard to teach someone whose cup is full. Very smart people can rationalize their bad ideas faster than other people can talk them out of them. But that doesn't mean you've actually explained yourself. If you can't explain things to other people, do you really understand it yourself? At this point Wolfram is lost to us. "What the hell are you talking about, Steve?". I was just fantasizing about resurrecting…

> If you can't explain things to other people, do you really understand it yourself? I hear this said every now and then and I don’t think I agree with it. A lot of knowledge builds on other knowledge. And the other knowledge might be required in order to understand the knowledge that one wishes to share. So then either you have to explain it all, or you will have to simplify dramatically. Few people will want the fu…

You highlight a common fallacy that is repeated across the internet: "If you can't explain to me why I'm wrong, then I must be right," or something similar. But as you point out, this assumes that an explanation can be written in just a few paragraphs, which usually isn't the case. It takes years of study and experience to become an expert in a given field, and as a result, it becomes too difficult to accurately convey the necessary information to get a point across.

Re: A World Run with Code

#84

Post by marcosdumay »

new4thaccount wrote: post #68

Did he claim to invent computational irreducibility? Wasn't that Goedel or Turing or someone like that?

He claims it often. Yes, it was Turing, mostly based on previous work.

The worst part is that he misses the detail it being possible to describe all of Math as computation (so they are perfectly equivalent) and creates entire books with keen observations of how much of Math one can describe as computers.

Re: A World Run with Code

#85

Post by scotty79 »

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…

Maybe if economy can be crashed in 15 seconds it should be crashed in 15 seconds do we can have a saner economy?

Letting AI in is like fuzzing for computer programs. It can break your program in interesting ways but that's a good thing.

Re: A World Run with Code

#86

Post by maxxxxx »

onemoresoop wrote: post #32
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…

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 bu…

I think what will happen is that a few people at the top will manage the machines and benefit from them while they will be trying to make the other humans second class. I think a scenario like “Elysium” is very possible. That is until there is a revolution and then nobody knows how that will end.

Re: A World Run with Code

#87

Post by greenyouse »

gricardo99 wrote: post #57
robbiep wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Just FYI, NYSE Rule 80B[1] halts trading for 15 minutes, or until the next day if the first 2 levels are breached. CME follows similar rules. 1 - http://wallstreet.cch.com/nyse/rules/nyse-rules/chp_1_3/chp_...

Just for fun here's a link to a 2010 flash crash before those rules were in place where a trillion dollars were dropped in half an hour due to algorithms.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Flash_Crash

Re: A World Run with Code

#88

Post by bartread »

scotty79 wrote: post #85
jerf wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

Maybe if economy can be crashed in 15 seconds it should be crashed in 15 seconds do we can have a saner economy? Letting AI in is like fuzzing for computer programs. It can break your program in interesting ways but that's a good thing.

> Maybe if economy can be crashed in 15 seconds it should be crashed in 15 seconds do we can have a saner economy?

How do you know that would be the outcome?

Re: A World Run with Code

#90

Post by adrianN »

bartread wrote: post #88
scotty79 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe if economy can be crashed in 15 seconds it should be crashed in 15 seconds do we can have a saner economy? Letting AI in is like fuzzing for computer programs. It can break your program in interesting ways but that's a good thing.

> Maybe if economy can be crashed in 15 seconds it should be crashed in 15 seconds do we can have a saner economy? How do you know that would be the outcome?

Numbers getting smaller on the stock market doesn't destroy any real value. Companies still have all the IP they had before, all the real estate, all machines... If the bits in some computer's RAM are so disconnected from reality that they can change so dramatically without any catastrophe in the real world, then the rational choice is to disregard those bits.
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