4 ms·

As the presenter in the first video says, Will Wright lead to a "real shift" in the "younger generation" about how "people think about computers and about compu

As the presenter in the first video says, Will Wright lead to a "real shift" in the "younger generation" about how "people think about computers and about computing in general". As a member of the Will Wright generation of 12 year old Mac programmers who tried to take his games apart with ResEdit and tried to make our own, with Perl and HyperCard, this was really resonant, really true. When SimEarth came out, I spent hours and hours just rereading the thick paper manual of how it all worked, because the only places I could play it on the disks were in the computer lab after school, or for an hour a day on the home computer. He turned incredibly complex systems into games and games into systems, so that reading his game manuals made you think about the whole world. One thing sad to me now, with the focus on GPT or Diffusion prompts, is how much kids are no longer thinking about the actual systems or logical rules they're playing with, and just learning to trick something that's already inscrutable and smarter than them. Mastering AI prompts or even running your own neural net doesn't teach anything like logic or the kind of deep, recursive cause and effect structure you could get from Will Wright's toys, or even from CK3... even if you get all your prompts perfect to make what you want, it teaches something much more like dependence on a magical oracle than, say, a toy/game/sim that really encourages you to deconstruct and take pleasure in all its interconnections that you can understand.

szundi 4y ago
My funny hypothesis is that the ones who can actually make something out of the AI/machine learning trend are those who are good in this logical thinking you are talking about, not the ones who try to skip it on the way.
- noduerme 4y ago
  I'm tempted to think you're right, but we're probably going to have to live through a 5 years long boom / bust of illogical, unthinking children getting in and building very stupid things with very powerful weapons before another cryptocurrency-style crash. On the whole it is not going to serve as a technology to even teach young coders to think for themselves, let alone the devastating effects it will have on society and human relationships in all countries. Really, I mean, force kids to learn BASIC or Pascal or whatever... but these AI systems cannot ever be understood by people who grow up taking computation for granted (and only learning how to tinker with them on the surface). If they aren't understood, they will be treated like a magic box for answers, and worshipped as a deity or an oracle. I don't think it is too much to say that ChatGPT is the Golden Calf that represented the type of lazy thinking or psychological projection into imagined, embodied "gods" which the monotheistic religions starting with Judaism found to be morally atrocious. And why? Because giving up one's rational beliefs or even one's irrational monotheistic belief in a God to the fantasms and stories created of idols and their stewards was a form of slavery from which you could not rescue yourself or your children. Guarding the Word presages guarding its corruption by machine, several thousand years in advance. And Islam, Christianity and Judaism are all a warning against allowing the machinery - even seemingly perfect technologies - to become a god. [edit] and FWIW I am an atheist, but that only makes me more concerned, as I see a new and more terrifying irrationality taking the place of the old. The new religion of CHATGPT will be much more terrifying because the entity it worships will be PRESENT AND ALIVE...
  - another2another 4y ago
    Butlerian jihad on its way ... :)
  - softsound 4y ago
    Reading this above made me think of song lyrics from the 60's "And the people bowed and prayed To the neon god they made And sign flashed out it's warning In the words it was forming Then the sign said, "The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and in tenement halls" And whispered in the sound of silence" Honestly I think a lot of these tools are hit and miss right now. Some are pretty cool, super easy to steal stuff (art for example), and have it look mostly good to an untrained eye, or in the case of chat return reasonable good answers but often they still can't compare to a professional with the insight and history of understanding principals that are just not there yet in these tools. Will they ever be? I'm not sure. Some of these tools may survive but a lot will be hit with copyright, plagiarism, restricted use, and probably mainstream use with the understanding quality will go down but stuff will get cheaper... Like auto generated captions, most of the time it kinda sucks and I always have to go back and fix a bunch of stuff. It's sort of like CGI, if know what you are looking for it's pretty clear, but sometimes it can fool people. Considering people were being fooled in the 60's with chat bots (Eliza is well known), it will be interesting to see where this goes. Considering all this was stuff even before my parents time, I expect the younger generation to catch on to it too and to have some small counter movements too.
mycall 4y ago
GPT and transformers are not the end game for logical analysis. Pretrained LLMs cannot capture factual knowledge from text, that is true. MIT is proposing a unified model for Knowledge Embedding and Pretrained LanguagERepresentation (KEPLER) [0], which can better integrate factual knowledge into LLMs. Knowledge Embeddings could be created by anyone who wants to better simulate a particular system, including kids, given the right exploratory environment. [0] https://direct.mit.edu/tacl/article/doi/10.1162/tacl_a_00360/98089 https://direct.mit.edu/tacl/article/doi/10.1162/tacl_a_00360...
xattt 4y ago
> When SimEarth came out, I spent hours and hours just rereading the thick paper manual of how it all worked, because the only places I could play it on the disks were in the computer lab after school, or for an hour a day on the home computer. This is me, but with the SimCity 2000 Deluxe Edition and it’s novel-like manual.
- dwighttk 4y ago
  Civ II is the one that sticks in my head… always bought games at an egghead software 4 hours from home (and usually a couple days before my family would drive back anyway)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
emrah 4y ago
> One thing sad to me now, with the focus on GPT or Diffusion prompts, is how much kids are no longer thinking about the actual systems or logical rules they're playing with, and just learning to trick something that's already inscrutable and smarter than them This is something I don't understand. Sure, not every kid is going to think about that but that's ok. We need some kids to think about it, probably a small subset.. Back when computers were new, not every kid tried to make games or understand how they worked either. Only a small subset and that's how it is..
- q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 4y ago
  The way I read OP's comment was more about quality rather than quantity. Put another way, I'd say that the right amount of people who should be learning that skill is probably zero. "Learning to write AI prompts" is a skill that only exists because AI hasn't evolved enough yet; in another 10-25 years, "learning to write AI prompts" will just be equivalent to "communicating clearly." And, yes, thinking and communicating clearly are valuable skills that everyone should learn, but that's just the point — people investing time in the "writing AI prompts" skill now aren't learning that. They're just learning to string random adjectives together, along with (at best) a slight bit of the iterative never-give-up spirit that comes with poking an inscrutable pile of matrices until it does what you want. [1] [1]: https://xkcd.com/1838/ https://xkcd.com/1838/
  - jvalencia 4y ago
    I think the lament is that if people do not learn the logical side of things, they are unable to figure out how to reason about issues and errors. They are unable to easily go deep into topics like computer science.
    - serf 4y ago
      Do you think that the lament is wrong? I feel as if it stands to reason that someone without practice in common topics should do worse at a subject when encountered professionally or academically; the base mathematical principles behind programming like lambda calculus and the principles of recursion and boolean logic haven't changed, they've been masked. I feel like the use of many AI sub-systems really just trains someone in the use of that sub-system rather than any of the underlying principles. This feels obvious to me, am I missing something? Also : I don't think that specific 'AI sub-system' training is useless, that's the way our world is heading.. I just also happen to believe that it hides trees.
shagie 4y ago
> When SimEarth came out, I spent hours and hours just rereading the thick paper manual of how it all worked, because the only places I could play it on the disks were in the computer lab after school, or for an hour a day on the home computer. A copy of the manual can be found at https://retro-commodore.eu/files/downloads/amigamanuals-xiik.net/Games/Sim%20Earth%20-%20Manual-ENG.pdf https://retro-commodore.eu/files/downloads/amigamanuals-xiik... Page 149 (yes - it had a lot of pages) starts off with "An Introduction to Earth Science" and continues to the appendix on page 201. It has enough content to make a good starter for a grade school science class's syllabus.
- User23 4y ago
  That manual was my introduction to Daisyworld and the Gaea Hypothesis.
- lowercased 4y ago
  Holy tamole - all that in a 'game manual'(!)
  - shagie 4y ago
    A few factors to consider... Games were different then. While the price of a game has remained fairly fixed over the years, the amount of resources that represents has gone down. A $40 game back in 1990 had a lot more value to it compared to a $40 game in 2020. Based on inflation, that would be an $80 in 2020 dollars - you can do a lot more with a $80 game. Next, the internet wasn't there. Anything you wanted someone playing the game to have you put in the box on paper. Sometimes that was also the DRM (enter the 5th word on page 44). There wasn't a "look it up online" or "watch this video to understand the game." And then there was also the this was supposed to be a simulator - not a game. Read the intro part of the manual. > SimEarth is a planet simulator - a model of a planet. It is a game, an educational toy, and an enjoyable tool. With SimEarth you can take over many included planets, or design and create your own. > ... > SimEarth isn't exactly a game. it's what we cal a "Software Toy." Toys, by definition, are more flexible and open-ended than games. > ... > So when you play with SimEarth, or any of our Software Toys, don't limit yourself to trying to "win." Play with it, Experiment. Try new things. Just have fun. In order to use it to the fullest amount that the creators wanted you to be able to, it required a short course on earth science that not everyone may have been exposed to.
slavik81 4y ago
> When SimEarth came out, I spent hours and hours just rereading the thick paper manual of how it all worked, because the only places I could play it on the disks were in the computer lab after school, or for an hour a day on the home computer. When I rented SimEarth as a kid, it didn't come with a manual and absolutely nothing in the game made any sense to me. :( I tried renting it a few times, in hope that I'd eventually figure it out. I never did, though.

szundi 4y ago

My funny hypothesis is that the ones who can actually make something out of the AI/machine learning trend are those who are good in this logical thinking you are talking about, not the ones who try to skip it on the way.

noduerme 4y ago
I'm tempted to think you're right, but we're probably going to have to live through a 5 years long boom / bust of illogical, unthinking children getting in and building very stupid things with very powerful weapons before another cryptocurrency-style crash. On the whole it is not going to serve as a technology to even teach young coders to think for themselves, let alone the devastating effects it will have on society and human relationships in all countries. Really, I mean, force kids to learn BASIC or Pascal or whatever... but these AI systems cannot ever be understood by people who grow up taking computation for granted (and only learning how to tinker with them on the surface). If they aren't understood, they will be treated like a magic box for answers, and worshipped as a deity or an oracle. I don't think it is too much to say that ChatGPT is the Golden Calf that represented the type of lazy thinking or psychological projection into imagined, embodied "gods" which the monotheistic religions starting with Judaism found to be morally atrocious. And why? Because giving up one's rational beliefs or even one's irrational monotheistic belief in a God to the fantasms and stories created of idols and their stewards was a form of slavery from which you could not rescue yourself or your children. Guarding the Word presages guarding its corruption by machine, several thousand years in advance. And Islam, Christianity and Judaism are all a warning against allowing the machinery - even seemingly perfect technologies - to become a god. [edit] and FWIW I am an atheist, but that only makes me more concerned, as I see a new and more terrifying irrationality taking the place of the old. The new religion of CHATGPT will be much more terrifying because the entity it worships will be PRESENT AND ALIVE...
- another2another 4y ago
  Butlerian jihad on its way ... :)
- softsound 4y ago
  Reading this above made me think of song lyrics from the 60's "And the people bowed and prayed To the neon god they made And sign flashed out it's warning In the words it was forming Then the sign said, "The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and in tenement halls" And whispered in the sound of silence" Honestly I think a lot of these tools are hit and miss right now. Some are pretty cool, super easy to steal stuff (art for example), and have it look mostly good to an untrained eye, or in the case of chat return reasonable good answers but often they still can't compare to a professional with the insight and history of understanding principals that are just not there yet in these tools. Will they ever be? I'm not sure. Some of these tools may survive but a lot will be hit with copyright, plagiarism, restricted use, and probably mainstream use with the understanding quality will go down but stuff will get cheaper... Like auto generated captions, most of the time it kinda sucks and I always have to go back and fix a bunch of stuff. It's sort of like CGI, if know what you are looking for it's pretty clear, but sometimes it can fool people. Considering people were being fooled in the 60's with chat bots (Eliza is well known), it will be interesting to see where this goes. Considering all this was stuff even before my parents time, I expect the younger generation to catch on to it too and to have some small counter movements too.

mycall 4y ago

GPT and transformers are not the end game for logical analysis. Pretrained LLMs cannot capture factual knowledge from text, that is true. MIT is proposing a unified model for Knowledge Embedding and Pretrained LanguagERepresentation (KEPLER) [0], which can better integrate factual knowledge into LLMs. Knowledge Embeddings could be created by anyone who wants to better simulate a particular system, including kids, given the right exploratory environment. [0] https://direct.mit.edu/tacl/article/doi/10.1162/tacl_a_00360/98089 https://direct.mit.edu/tacl/article/doi/10.1162/tacl_a_00360...

xattt 4y ago

dwighttk 4y ago
Civ II is the one that sticks in my head… always bought games at an egghead software 4 hours from home (and usually a couple days before my family would drive back anyway)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

emrah 4y ago

> One thing sad to me now, with the focus on GPT or Diffusion prompts, is how much kids are no longer thinking about the actual systems or logical rules they're playing with, and just learning to trick something that's already inscrutable and smarter than them This is something I don't understand. Sure, not every kid is going to think about that but that's ok. We need some kids to think about it, probably a small subset.. Back when computers were new, not every kid tried to make games or understand how they worked either. Only a small subset and that's how it is..

q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 4y ago
The way I read OP's comment was more about quality rather than quantity. Put another way, I'd say that the right amount of people who should be learning that skill is probably zero. "Learning to write AI prompts" is a skill that only exists because AI hasn't evolved enough yet; in another 10-25 years, "learning to write AI prompts" will just be equivalent to "communicating clearly." And, yes, thinking and communicating clearly are valuable skills that everyone should learn, but that's just the point — people investing time in the "writing AI prompts" skill now aren't learning that. They're just learning to string random adjectives together, along with (at best) a slight bit of the iterative never-give-up spirit that comes with poking an inscrutable pile of matrices until it does what you want. [1] [1]: https://xkcd.com/1838/ https://xkcd.com/1838/
- jvalencia 4y ago
  I think the lament is that if people do not learn the logical side of things, they are unable to figure out how to reason about issues and errors. They are unable to easily go deep into topics like computer science.
  - serf 4y ago
    Do you think that the lament is wrong? I feel as if it stands to reason that someone without practice in common topics should do worse at a subject when encountered professionally or academically; the base mathematical principles behind programming like lambda calculus and the principles of recursion and boolean logic haven't changed, they've been masked. I feel like the use of many AI sub-systems really just trains someone in the use of that sub-system rather than any of the underlying principles. This feels obvious to me, am I missing something? Also : I don't think that specific 'AI sub-system' training is useless, that's the way our world is heading.. I just also happen to believe that it hides trees.

shagie 4y ago

> When SimEarth came out, I spent hours and hours just rereading the thick paper manual of how it all worked, because the only places I could play it on the disks were in the computer lab after school, or for an hour a day on the home computer. A copy of the manual can be found at https://retro-commodore.eu/files/downloads/amigamanuals-xiik.net/Games/Sim%20Earth%20-%20Manual-ENG.pdf https://retro-commodore.eu/files/downloads/amigamanuals-xiik... Page 149 (yes - it had a lot of pages) starts off with "An Introduction to Earth Science" and continues to the appendix on page 201. It has enough content to make a good starter for a grade school science class's syllabus.

User23 4y ago
That manual was my introduction to Daisyworld and the Gaea Hypothesis.
lowercased 4y ago
Holy tamole - all that in a 'game manual'(!)
- shagie 4y ago
  A few factors to consider... Games were different then. While the price of a game has remained fairly fixed over the years, the amount of resources that represents has gone down. A $40 game back in 1990 had a lot more value to it compared to a $40 game in 2020. Based on inflation, that would be an $80 in 2020 dollars - you can do a lot more with a $80 game. Next, the internet wasn't there. Anything you wanted someone playing the game to have you put in the box on paper. Sometimes that was also the DRM (enter the 5th word on page 44). There wasn't a "look it up online" or "watch this video to understand the game." And then there was also the this was supposed to be a simulator - not a game. Read the intro part of the manual. > SimEarth is a planet simulator - a model of a planet. It is a game, an educational toy, and an enjoyable tool. With SimEarth you can take over many included planets, or design and create your own. > ... > SimEarth isn't exactly a game. it's what we cal a "Software Toy." Toys, by definition, are more flexible and open-ended than games. > ... > So when you play with SimEarth, or any of our Software Toys, don't limit yourself to trying to "win." Play with it, Experiment. Try new things. Just have fun. In order to use it to the fullest amount that the creators wanted you to be able to, it required a short course on earth science that not everyone may have been exposed to.

slavik81 4y ago

> When SimEarth came out, I spent hours and hours just rereading the thick paper manual of how it all worked, because the only places I could play it on the disks were in the computer lab after school, or for an hour a day on the home computer. When I rented SimEarth as a kid, it didn't come with a manual and absolutely nothing in the game made any sense to me. :( I tried renting it a few times, in hope that I'd eventually figure it out. I never did, though.