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My point is you cannot teach a cockroach calculus, but if AIs invent a new type of math, they would be able to teach it to us. That's my claim. So the analogy o

by pbw 3y ago

My point is you cannot teach a cockroach calculus, but if AIs invent a new type of math, they would be able to teach it to us. That's my claim. So the analogy of "we are cockroaches compared to the AI" is wrong, that won't be the case. Once you have "enough" intelligence to have a complex language, like we do, I'm claiming you are in the club of intelligent species, and all species in that club can communicate ideas with each other. Even if the way they natively think is quite different.

arketyp 3y ago
I'm reminded of how one writes programs. I cannot maintain the state of the machine in my head, but I can convince myself of its workings, its intelligence, by reading the code, following along on its line of reasoning as it were. I think the Intelligence Completeness may boil down to the very same Church-Turing thesis.
- pbw 3y ago
  Yes I agree it might be same thing under the hood. But with intelligence many very smart people seem to fall into using these analogies that diminish humans in a way I don't think is accurate. And I feel that makes people more scared of AI than they need to be, makes AI seem totally alien. [1] The AIs might spit out entire fields of knowledge, and it might take humans decades of study to understand it all. And no single human might actually understand it all at the same time. But that's how very advanced fields of study already are. But the "cockroach" slur implies AIs would be in this other stratosphere having endless discussions that we cannot remotely grok. My guess is that won't happen. Because if the AI were to say "I cannot explain this to you" I'd take that as evidence it wasn't all that intelligent after all. [1] - https://metastable.org/alien.html https://metastable.org/alien.html
orlp 3y ago
> but if AIs invent a new type of math, they would be able to teach it to us There are already math proofs made by humans on this very day that are hundreds upon hundreds of pages of lemmas that are highly advanced and building on other advanced results. Understanding such a proof is an undertaking that literally takes years. An AI might end up doing it in minutes. But what an AI could cook up in years could take a human... several lifetimes to understand. As another example, take the design and fabrication of a modern microprocessor. There are so many layers of complexity involved, I would bet that no single person on this planet has all the required knowledge end-to-end needed to manufacture it. As soon as the complexity of an AI's knowledge reaches a certain point, it essentially becomes unteachable in any reasonable amount of time. Perhaps smaller sub-parts could be distilled and taught, but I think it's naive to assume all knowledge is able to be sliced and diced to human-bite-sized chunks.
- pbw 3y ago
  I agree "one AI" might produce output that keeps humans busy for decades. But that doesn't make us cockroaches. Cockroaches can't understand language, at all. You can't teach a cockroach calculus if had a trillion years. That's not our position relative to AIs. We will be learning shit-tons from them constantly. I think people who say humans will be "cockroaches" or "ants" or "bacteria" are fear-mongering, or just confused.
saulpw 3y ago
AlphaZero invented new moves in the game of Go, but it can't 'teach' them to us, it can only show us the moves and let us figure it out for ourselves (which we're doing). But note that despite this transfer of knowledge, humans didn't rise up to the level of AlphaZero, and they may never be able to. As a sibling comment points out, some things are computationally bound--and humans have a limit to computational ability (can't give ourselves more neurons/connections), whereas AI does not.
- pbw 3y ago
  I never said we'll mentally rise to the level of AIs. That won't happen. I only said AIs will be able to communicate complex ideas to us, in a way that's totally unlike our ability to communicate complex ideas to cockroaches. For example, if the AIs could design a complicated building, using our level of technology, they could explain to us how to build that building. And we could build it. Whereas if we come up with a better cockroach-house design, we cannot communicate it to the cockroaches, we simply cannot give them the information. So the AI->us is a very different relationship from us->cockroach. This doesn't preclude that there might be some things the AI cannot explain to us. Only that there will be many things (infinite in fact) which they can explain to us.
- kamaal 3y ago
  >>but it can't 'teach' them to us I always thought you could ask GPT to illustrate the steps it took to arrive at the answer. I mean it can take your through the process it went through to arrive at the answer. Its as close you get to an explanation.

by pbw 3y ago

arketyp 3y ago

I'm reminded of how one writes programs. I cannot maintain the state of the machine in my head, but I can convince myself of its workings, its intelligence, by reading the code, following along on its line of reasoning as it were. I think the Intelligence Completeness may boil down to the very same Church-Turing thesis.

pbw 3y ago
Yes I agree it might be same thing under the hood. But with intelligence many very smart people seem to fall into using these analogies that diminish humans in a way I don't think is accurate. And I feel that makes people more scared of AI than they need to be, makes AI seem totally alien. [1] The AIs might spit out entire fields of knowledge, and it might take humans decades of study to understand it all. And no single human might actually understand it all at the same time. But that's how very advanced fields of study already are. But the "cockroach" slur implies AIs would be in this other stratosphere having endless discussions that we cannot remotely grok. My guess is that won't happen. Because if the AI were to say "I cannot explain this to you" I'd take that as evidence it wasn't all that intelligent after all. [1] - https://metastable.org/alien.html https://metastable.org/alien.html

orlp 3y ago

> but if AIs invent a new type of math, they would be able to teach it to us There are already math proofs made by humans on this very day that are hundreds upon hundreds of pages of lemmas that are highly advanced and building on other advanced results. Understanding such a proof is an undertaking that literally takes years. An AI might end up doing it in minutes. But what an AI could cook up in years could take a human... several lifetimes to understand. As another example, take the design and fabrication of a modern microprocessor. There are so many layers of complexity involved, I would bet that no single person on this planet has all the required knowledge end-to-end needed to manufacture it. As soon as the complexity of an AI's knowledge reaches a certain point, it essentially becomes unteachable in any reasonable amount of time. Perhaps smaller sub-parts could be distilled and taught, but I think it's naive to assume all knowledge is able to be sliced and diced to human-bite-sized chunks.

pbw 3y ago
I agree "one AI" might produce output that keeps humans busy for decades. But that doesn't make us cockroaches. Cockroaches can't understand language, at all. You can't teach a cockroach calculus if had a trillion years. That's not our position relative to AIs. We will be learning shit-tons from them constantly. I think people who say humans will be "cockroaches" or "ants" or "bacteria" are fear-mongering, or just confused.

saulpw 3y ago

AlphaZero invented new moves in the game of Go, but it can't 'teach' them to us, it can only show us the moves and let us figure it out for ourselves (which we're doing). But note that despite this transfer of knowledge, humans didn't rise up to the level of AlphaZero, and they may never be able to. As a sibling comment points out, some things are computationally bound--and humans have a limit to computational ability (can't give ourselves more neurons/connections), whereas AI does not.

pbw 3y ago
I never said we'll mentally rise to the level of AIs. That won't happen. I only said AIs will be able to communicate complex ideas to us, in a way that's totally unlike our ability to communicate complex ideas to cockroaches. For example, if the AIs could design a complicated building, using our level of technology, they could explain to us how to build that building. And we could build it. Whereas if we come up with a better cockroach-house design, we cannot communicate it to the cockroaches, we simply cannot give them the information. So the AI->us is a very different relationship from us->cockroach. This doesn't preclude that there might be some things the AI cannot explain to us. Only that there will be many things (infinite in fact) which they can explain to us.
kamaal 3y ago
>>but it can't 'teach' them to us I always thought you could ask GPT to illustrate the steps it took to arrive at the answer. I mean it can take your through the process it went through to arrive at the answer. Its as close you get to an explanation.