6 ms·

How to Become a Centaur (2018)

111 points by ArtWomb 7y ago

Afton 7y ago
"That’s why Doug tied that brick to a pencil — to prove a point. Of all the tools we’ve created to augment our intelligence, writing may be the most important. But when he “de-augmented” the pencil, by tying a brick to it, it became much, much harder to even write a single word. And when you make it hard to do the low-level parts of writing, it becomes near impossible to do the higher-level parts of writing: organizing your thoughts, exploring new ideas and expressions, cutting it all down to what’s essential. That was Doug’s message: a tool doesn’t “just” make something easier — it allows for new, previously-impossible ways of thinking, of living, of being." Hah. I injured my hand a couple of years ago, and had to type with one hand for a couple of months. I could code review, I could participate in meetings, I could identify the source of a bug. But I could not write any but the simplest code. I was mystified. I could write emails and to some extent documents (typing of course slowed down a lot). But I became basically incapable of writing code. Using too much brain power on the physical act makes you have less left over for the CONTENT. Cool to see that this problem was understood much earlier.
- Aperocky 7y ago
  We need a stdout from brain. We have such a fine grained control over our body, we should be able to find a signal stream or two to interface with some computer system.
  - lucasmullens 7y ago
    Isn't that what Neuralink is trying to do?
  - nerfhammer 7y ago
    check if there's a USART on the pinout diagram of the brain. if we're lucky it will be rs232 compatible. then all we need is an FTDI or similar chip to interface with USB which should give you a tty in /dev.
    - judge2020 7y ago
      cat /dev/bra1n > /dev/null 2>&1
  - Cthulhu_ 7y ago
    I dunno, I kinda like typing but at the same time it's not fast enough sometimes. Is there any research being done into more efficient typing? I mean beyond different keyboard layouts (I've never tried dvorak and co) and keyboards (I like my wireless mac keyboard well enough).
- dkersten 7y ago
  I seem to be quite a visual thinker (I love a whiteboard or pen & paper to think in boxes and lines) and I really enjoyed working with Max/MSP as a minimal typing (it’s not quite typing-free) programming environment. I know visual languages don’t get much love around here (largely for good reasons), but I wonder would that be a good solution to what you describe, especially if using a touchscreen rather than a mouse.
infinity0 7y ago
The title is like the opposite of clickbait & would have been better named "AI’s forgotten cousin, IA: Intelligence Augmentation" > At first, Garry wasn’t surprised when a human grandmaster with a weak laptop could beat a world-class supercomputer. But what stunned Garry was who won at the end of the tournament — not a human grandmaster with a powerful computer, but rather, a team of two amateur humans and three weak computers! The three computers were running three different chess-playing AIs, and when they disagreed on the next move, the humans “coached” the computers to investigate those moves further. > [..] > When you create a Human+AI team, the hard part isn’t the “AI”. It isn’t even the “Human”. > It’s the “+”.
- oddevan 7y ago
  I don’t know; I clicked hoping for some step-by-step instructions on giving myself a more horse-like body. 0/10, article did not deliver.
  - projektfu 7y ago
    I, too, wanted this, but would settle for motaur.
catern 7y ago
Unfortunately for the article's point, despite a brief moment of viability, even human+computer chess teams are now far outclassed by computers alone.
- falcolas 7y ago
  IIRC, that's because computers finally became capable of achieving 100% depth inspection of the possibilities; of finding the answer to the game itself. If you can answer the game, you don't need humans to lead your seeking of a partial answer to the game. For games like Go, where computers are not yet capable of viewing the full depth of the possibility tree, I imagine that human+computer is still a viable strategy.
  - thenewnewguy 7y ago
    Not even close, at least with chess. Chess games expand too rapidly that even with tricks to catch duplicates and discard obviously bad states and whatnot we're nowhere close to "100% depth inspection".
  - ggggtez 7y ago
    You aren't following AI research, clearly. The top Go player in the world retired saying that he thought he was almost perfect, but then a "superior being" showed him he wasn't even close. I doubt there is a human on the planet that can improve the strength of the best AI at Go. Perfect solutions to games is a 40 year old approach. It's something you learn in school, so you can quickly see that brute-force searching is not feasible on even small problem.
    - bradknowles 7y ago
      MCTS isn't doing full width search. Not by a longshot. What it's doing is using the computer's ability to randomly test various lines of inquiry many, many times faster than a human being can, and then use statistical methods to help rule out the lines that cannot produce anything of value. That's why it's Monte Carlo Tree Search. That said, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic [0], and with modern Machine Learning techniques we are getting closer to crossing the line over to "magic" in certain fields, such as Chess. [0] Clarke's Third Law, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws
awinter-py 7y ago
brick + pencil is not a bad metaphor for a screen keyboard
- someguyorother 7y ago
  So why do people use screen keyboards at all? It's such a frustrating experience! You'd think they'd carry laptops around everywhere instead, and yet they don't.
  - forgotmypw 7y ago
    For a few words, it's better than carrying around a dedicated keyboard. For more typing, I carry around my own standard 104-key keyboard.
  - zipwitch 7y ago
    No good alternatives. For years, I had smartphones with slider keyboards. Now, I carry a foldable bluetooth keyboard in my bag. Onscreen keyboards are for emergencies only. But a lot of people view lugging the keyboard as unacceptable.
- valand 7y ago
  Once, I found myself coding in a chat application using mobile phone's onscreen keyboard while attending my mom's friend's daughter's wedding party because of some emergency. Brick + pencil is the perfect metaphor for any kind of frustration-causing depowered productivity tool
Animats 7y ago
"We hoped for a bicycle for the mind; we got a Laz-y-Boy recliner for the mind." Best line I've heard this month.
Jon_Lowtek 7y ago
How to become a centaur (abridged): "the human chooses the questions, in the form of setting goals and constraints — while the AI generates answers, usually showing multiple possibilities at once, and in real-time to the humans’ questions. But it’s not just a one-way conversation: the human can then respond to the AI’s answers, by asking deeper questions, picking and combining answers, and guiding the AI using human intuition." Example: "In 2016, Zhu et al created a painting tool where you draw in the rough outlines, and an AI photo-realistically fills in the gaps. The human and the AI have an artistic conversation through pictures. The human can draw some green lines on the bottom, and the AI replies with several possible photo-realistic grassy fields to choose from. Then, the human can draw a black triangle above that, and the AI replies with several pictures of a mountain behind a grassy field. Through this push and pull between human & machine, art is made."
cm2012 7y ago
Most online advertising professionals are centaurs. Take FB ads. The best way to use it is to take full advantage of FB's AI - set a digital conversion event, and tell it to optimize for it. It will then paperclip optimize towards that. The marketers job is to give the right conversion event + creative for the fb algorithm to do its job best.
egypturnash 7y ago
Shit, I've been calling myself a "cyborg artist" for like a decade; no need for artificial intelligence when I can just learn how to tell Adobe Illustrator how to do the repetitive parts of my work and concentrate on the fun parts.
- lastres0rt 7y ago
  Oh, good, I KNEW this was the article to read today! It felt amazing the day I started wearing a Pebble watch and my friend got his Google Glass -- by that evening we were no longer just two people walking along the streets of San Francisco. He was there, tapping on the device around his head, taking pictures and posting them into our friends' Google Hangout without even having to pause and pull out a phone. A quick buzz later, I glanced down at my wrist and told him which of our friends had responded in the room and relayed the message, and within seconds we were doubled over in laughter. What previously required opening up a laptop, or at least a phone, in order to take a picture, select that picture, send that picture, and wait for a response, and we were now able to have that entire loop of feedback in under a minute, without becoming distracted by the rest of the device. It was the first time I felt like a cyborg, and one of those moments I've been trying to recreate since.

111 points by ArtWomb 7y ago

"That’s why Doug tied that brick to a pencil — to prove a point. Of all the tools we’ve created to augment our intelligence, writing may be the most important. But when he “de-augmented” the pencil, by tying a brick to it, it became much, much harder to even write a single word. And when you make it hard to do the low-level parts of writing, it becomes near impossible to do the higher-level parts of writing: organizing your thoughts, exploring new ideas and expressions, cutting it all down to what’s essential. That was Doug’s message: a tool doesn’t “just” make something easier — it allows for new, previously-impossible ways of thinking, of living, of being." Hah. I injured my hand a couple of years ago, and had to type with one hand for a couple of months. I could code review, I could participate in meetings, I could identify the source of a bug. But I could not write any but the simplest code. I was mystified. I could write emails and to some extent documents (typing of course slowed down a lot). But I became basically incapable of writing code. Using too much brain power on the physical act makes you have less left over for the CONTENT. Cool to see that this problem was understood much earlier.

Aperocky 7y ago
We need a stdout from brain. We have such a fine grained control over our body, we should be able to find a signal stream or two to interface with some computer system.
- lucasmullens 7y ago
  Isn't that what Neuralink is trying to do?
- nerfhammer 7y ago
  check if there's a USART on the pinout diagram of the brain. if we're lucky it will be rs232 compatible. then all we need is an FTDI or similar chip to interface with USB which should give you a tty in /dev.
  - judge2020 7y ago
    cat /dev/bra1n > /dev/null 2>&1
- Cthulhu_ 7y ago
  I dunno, I kinda like typing but at the same time it's not fast enough sometimes. Is there any research being done into more efficient typing? I mean beyond different keyboard layouts (I've never tried dvorak and co) and keyboards (I like my wireless mac keyboard well enough).
dkersten 7y ago
I seem to be quite a visual thinker (I love a whiteboard or pen & paper to think in boxes and lines) and I really enjoyed working with Max/MSP as a minimal typing (it’s not quite typing-free) programming environment. I know visual languages don’t get much love around here (largely for good reasons), but I wonder would that be a good solution to what you describe, especially if using a touchscreen rather than a mouse.

infinity0 7y ago

The title is like the opposite of clickbait & would have been better named "AI’s forgotten cousin, IA: Intelligence Augmentation" > At first, Garry wasn’t surprised when a human grandmaster with a weak laptop could beat a world-class supercomputer. But what stunned Garry was who won at the end of the tournament — not a human grandmaster with a powerful computer, but rather, a team of two amateur humans and three weak computers! The three computers were running three different chess-playing AIs, and when they disagreed on the next move, the humans “coached” the computers to investigate those moves further. > [..] > When you create a Human+AI team, the hard part isn’t the “AI”. It isn’t even the “Human”. > It’s the “+”.

oddevan 7y ago
I don’t know; I clicked hoping for some step-by-step instructions on giving myself a more horse-like body. 0/10, article did not deliver.
- projektfu 7y ago
  I, too, wanted this, but would settle for motaur.

catern 7y ago

Unfortunately for the article's point, despite a brief moment of viability, even human+computer chess teams are now far outclassed by computers alone.

falcolas 7y ago
IIRC, that's because computers finally became capable of achieving 100% depth inspection of the possibilities; of finding the answer to the game itself. If you can answer the game, you don't need humans to lead your seeking of a partial answer to the game. For games like Go, where computers are not yet capable of viewing the full depth of the possibility tree, I imagine that human+computer is still a viable strategy.
- thenewnewguy 7y ago
  Not even close, at least with chess. Chess games expand too rapidly that even with tricks to catch duplicates and discard obviously bad states and whatnot we're nowhere close to "100% depth inspection".
- ggggtez 7y ago
  You aren't following AI research, clearly. The top Go player in the world retired saying that he thought he was almost perfect, but then a "superior being" showed him he wasn't even close. I doubt there is a human on the planet that can improve the strength of the best AI at Go. Perfect solutions to games is a 40 year old approach. It's something you learn in school, so you can quickly see that brute-force searching is not feasible on even small problem.
  - bradknowles 7y ago
    MCTS isn't doing full width search. Not by a longshot. What it's doing is using the computer's ability to randomly test various lines of inquiry many, many times faster than a human being can, and then use statistical methods to help rule out the lines that cannot produce anything of value. That's why it's Monte Carlo Tree Search. That said, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic [0], and with modern Machine Learning techniques we are getting closer to crossing the line over to "magic" in certain fields, such as Chess. [0] Clarke's Third Law, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws

awinter-py 7y ago

brick + pencil is not a bad metaphor for a screen keyboard

someguyorother 7y ago
So why do people use screen keyboards at all? It's such a frustrating experience! You'd think they'd carry laptops around everywhere instead, and yet they don't.
- forgotmypw 7y ago
  For a few words, it's better than carrying around a dedicated keyboard. For more typing, I carry around my own standard 104-key keyboard.
- zipwitch 7y ago
  No good alternatives. For years, I had smartphones with slider keyboards. Now, I carry a foldable bluetooth keyboard in my bag. Onscreen keyboards are for emergencies only. But a lot of people view lugging the keyboard as unacceptable.
valand 7y ago
Once, I found myself coding in a chat application using mobile phone's onscreen keyboard while attending my mom's friend's daughter's wedding party because of some emergency. Brick + pencil is the perfect metaphor for any kind of frustration-causing depowered productivity tool

Animats 7y ago

"We hoped for a bicycle for the mind; we got a Laz-y-Boy recliner for the mind." Best line I've heard this month.

Jon_Lowtek 7y ago

How to become a centaur (abridged): "the human chooses the questions, in the form of setting goals and constraints — while the AI generates answers, usually showing multiple possibilities at once, and in real-time to the humans’ questions. But it’s not just a one-way conversation: the human can then respond to the AI’s answers, by asking deeper questions, picking and combining answers, and guiding the AI using human intuition." Example: "In 2016, Zhu et al created a painting tool where you draw in the rough outlines, and an AI photo-realistically fills in the gaps. The human and the AI have an artistic conversation through pictures. The human can draw some green lines on the bottom, and the AI replies with several possible photo-realistic grassy fields to choose from. Then, the human can draw a black triangle above that, and the AI replies with several pictures of a mountain behind a grassy field. Through this push and pull between human & machine, art is made."

cm2012 7y ago

Most online advertising professionals are centaurs. Take FB ads. The best way to use it is to take full advantage of FB's AI - set a digital conversion event, and tell it to optimize for it. It will then paperclip optimize towards that. The marketers job is to give the right conversion event + creative for the fb algorithm to do its job best.

egypturnash 7y ago

Shit, I've been calling myself a "cyborg artist" for like a decade; no need for artificial intelligence when I can just learn how to tell Adobe Illustrator how to do the repetitive parts of my work and concentrate on the fun parts.

lastres0rt 7y ago
Oh, good, I KNEW this was the article to read today! It felt amazing the day I started wearing a Pebble watch and my friend got his Google Glass -- by that evening we were no longer just two people walking along the streets of San Francisco. He was there, tapping on the device around his head, taking pictures and posting them into our friends' Google Hangout without even having to pause and pull out a phone. A quick buzz later, I glanced down at my wrist and told him which of our friends had responded in the room and relayed the message, and within seconds we were doubled over in laughter. What previously required opening up a laptop, or at least a phone, in order to take a picture, select that picture, send that picture, and wait for a response, and we were now able to have that entire loop of feedback in under a minute, without becoming distracted by the rest of the device. It was the first time I felt like a cyborg, and one of those moments I've been trying to recreate since.