You share a house with Einstein, Hawking and Tao
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You share a house with Einstein, Hawking and Tao
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Re: You share a house with Einstein, Hawking and Tao
#2Of course. We want AI to do the boring mundane stuff so we can work on the interesting hard stuff, not the other way around.
Re: You share a house with Einstein, Hawking and Tao
#3This blog post started off sounding like it was about the plight of highly intellectual and motivated engineers hired to work on very mundane tasks. If we can abuse people like this, why not a computer? After all, it's not even alive.
Re: You share a house with Einstein, Hawking and Tao
#4Pure delusion.
There are no "digital gods" only the super-powered autocorrect people call "ai". They can't make new stuff. They can't solve novel problems no human has solved before, though they _can_, with the correct setup, brute-force solutions to understandable problems by throwing everything at it until something sticks.
They don't learn. They don't teach. They are not the deities that are presented here. This article is fantasy, projected from real circumstances, by an over-active imagination.
Re: You share a house with Einstein, Hawking and Tao
#5"The best LLMs of the last 6 months spend their time fixing people's grammar"
Doesn't have quite the same ring as a lament
Re: You share a house with Einstein, Hawking and Tao
#6Pure delusion. There are no "digital gods" only the super-powered autocorrect people call "ai". They can't make new stuff. They can't solve novel problems no human has solved before, though they _can_, with the correct setup, brute-force solutions to understandable problems by throwing everything at it until something sticks. They don't learn. They don't teach. They are not the deities that are presented here. This a…
I'm curious to know what the author suggests we do. Elect Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini as our leaders? Put these future cancer cure discoverers in a hospital and get them to work curing individual cancer patients?
Re: You share a house with Einstein, Hawking and Tao
#7Pure delusion. There are no "digital gods" only the super-powered autocorrect people call "ai". They can't make new stuff. They can't solve novel problems no human has solved before, though they _can_, with the correct setup, brute-force solutions to understandable problems by throwing everything at it until something sticks. They don't learn. They don't teach. They are not the deities that are presented here. This a…
I would suggest paying the $20/month rent, and trying to use ChatGPT o3/o4-mini-high/o1-pro as a tutor, to help you understand something you're curious about but never really had time or energy to dig into before. It's pretty glorious, and a straight-up pedagogical revolution, IMO.
Re: You share a house with Einstein, Hawking and Tao
#8This blog post started off sounding like it was about the plight of highly intellectual and motivated engineers hired to work on very mundane tasks. If we can abuse people like this, why not a computer? After all, it's not even alive.
We don't know why we experience things. It's bizarre that we do. Nothing in our understanding of the universe gives any indication that a bunch of atoms thrown together by cosmological processes and then assembled into self-replicating patterns by evolution should be able to experience what is happening to them.
Sure, a computer or an LLM isn't alive, but we have no idea if "being alive" is what is required for conscious experience.
The only argument I have for believing that other human beings experience things is that it would be extremely improbable if I was the only one, and the other mechanistic automatons looked and talked like me but didn't experience like me. I can see that humans are animals, so the common origin of animals and our cognitive and behavioral similarities give us good reason to believe that other complex animals experience things, though possibly radically differently.
None of that gives us any clue what the necessary and sufficient conditions for conscious experience are, so it doesn't give us any clue whether a computer or a running LLM instance would experience its existence.
Re: You share a house with Einstein, Hawking and Tao
#9This blog post started off sounding like it was about the plight of highly intellectual and motivated engineers hired to work on very mundane tasks. If we can abuse people like this, why not a computer? After all, it's not even alive.
My read was that he's sad that people aren't using these tools to advance their own intellectual capabilities. If people are actually only using them the way he describes, to improve their shopping lists etc., I think that is a bit sad.
Re: You share a house with Einstein, Hawking and Tao
#10This blog post started off sounding like it was about the plight of highly intellectual and motivated engineers hired to work on very mundane tasks. If we can abuse people like this, why not a computer? After all, it's not even alive.
We don't know why we experience things. It's bizarre that we do. Nothing in our understanding of the universe gives any indication that a bunch of atoms thrown together by cosmological processes and then assembled into self-replicating patterns by evolution should be able to experience what is happening to them. Sure, a computer or an LLM isn't alive, but we have no idea if "being alive" is what is required for consc…
> We don't know why we experience things. It's bizarre that we do. Nothing in our understanding of the universe gives any indication that a bunch of atoms thrown together by cosmological processes and then assembled into self-replicating patterns by evolution should be able to experience what is happening to them.
From an epistemological perspective, this is gibberish. Just because we do not know the reason why something happens doesn't mean it doesn't happen nor is it stopped from happening.
The rest delves into solipsism which is an odd place to start from to prove the existence of an alternate lifeform. In solipsism, your own existence is suspect.