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This whole thing reminds me a bit of playing Fallout 4. There will be good data, the pre-AI enshitification data. The stuff from before the war. And then...

by ilc 3y ago

This whole thing reminds me a bit of playing Fallout 4. There will be good data, the pre-AI enshitification data. The stuff from before the war. And then... the data after. Tainted by the entropy, and lack of utility of AI. Alas, this means in some senses, human progress will slow and stop in the tech field if we aren't careful and preserve ways to create pre-AI data. But the cost of it is so high in comparison to post... I'm not sold it will be worth it.

jhbadger 3y ago
This paints a rosy picture of human-generated data now. It's not as if most human data is reliable. Even among peer reviewed scientific literature, most of it is crap and it takes effort to find the good stuff. Also, your analogy kind of misses the point of the Fallout games. The pre-war world was awful, filled with evil corporations like Vault-tech and Nuka Cola that murdered and poisoned their customers, and the point of the games is that people need to move on and not idealize the past.
- ilc 3y ago
  There is a reason I didn't draw a hard parallel. I use AI day to day. I see what it can do and can't. But when you see pages, and pages, and pages of GPT spam all over the place. Finding the nuggets of wisdom will be much harder than before, the "bomb" was dropped. Thus actually leading to the whole FO4 main plot. Yes, life will always find a way. And yes humanity can not put the genie in a bottle, we are much more likely to put it on a Fat Man catapult. But it means, that in a sense... that we will all have to accept this background radiation of AI shit, as part of our new norm. And this isn't the first time I've thought in similar ways. I remember reading older math texts (way pre-computer works in things like diffeq and PDE) and often thinking the explanations were clearer. Probably because of the increased effort to actually print something. Who knows... maybe I'm just an old coot seeing patterns where there are none.
  - somenameforme 3y ago
    > "I remember reading older math texts (way pre-computer works in things like diffeq and PDE) and often thinking the explanations were clearer." This is 100% the case in chess as well. The books before and after the computer era are orders of magnitude different in terms of readability. I think a major shift in society has been in motivation. In the past if you were studying advanced mathematics, let alone writing about it, it was solely and exclusively because you absolutely loved the field. And you were also probably several sigmas outside the mean intellectually. Now? It's most often because of some vague direction such as wanting a decent paying job, which may through the twists and turns of fate eventually see you writing books in a subject you don't particularly have much enthusiasm for. And the much more crowded 'intellectual market', alongside various image crafting or signaling motivations, also creates a really perverse incentive. Exceptional competence and understanding within a subject makes it easy to explain things, even the esoteric and fabulously complex. See: Richard Feynman. But in modern times there often seems to be a desire to go the other direction - and make things sound utterly complex, even when they aren't. I think Einstein's paper on special relativity vs many (most?) modern papers is a good example. Einstein's writing was such that anybody with a basic education could clearly understand the paper, even if they might not fully follow the math. By contrast, so many modern papers seem to be written as if the author had a well worn copy of the Thesaurus of Incomprehensibility at his bedside table.

by ilc 3y ago

jhbadger 3y ago

This paints a rosy picture of human-generated data now. It's not as if most human data is reliable. Even among peer reviewed scientific literature, most of it is crap and it takes effort to find the good stuff. Also, your analogy kind of misses the point of the Fallout games. The pre-war world was awful, filled with evil corporations like Vault-tech and Nuka Cola that murdered and poisoned their customers, and the point of the games is that people need to move on and not idealize the past.

ilc 3y ago
There is a reason I didn't draw a hard parallel. I use AI day to day. I see what it can do and can't. But when you see pages, and pages, and pages of GPT spam all over the place. Finding the nuggets of wisdom will be much harder than before, the "bomb" was dropped. Thus actually leading to the whole FO4 main plot. Yes, life will always find a way. And yes humanity can not put the genie in a bottle, we are much more likely to put it on a Fat Man catapult. But it means, that in a sense... that we will all have to accept this background radiation of AI shit, as part of our new norm. And this isn't the first time I've thought in similar ways. I remember reading older math texts (way pre-computer works in things like diffeq and PDE) and often thinking the explanations were clearer. Probably because of the increased effort to actually print something. Who knows... maybe I'm just an old coot seeing patterns where there are none.
- somenameforme 3y ago
  > "I remember reading older math texts (way pre-computer works in things like diffeq and PDE) and often thinking the explanations were clearer." This is 100% the case in chess as well. The books before and after the computer era are orders of magnitude different in terms of readability. I think a major shift in society has been in motivation. In the past if you were studying advanced mathematics, let alone writing about it, it was solely and exclusively because you absolutely loved the field. And you were also probably several sigmas outside the mean intellectually. Now? It's most often because of some vague direction such as wanting a decent paying job, which may through the twists and turns of fate eventually see you writing books in a subject you don't particularly have much enthusiasm for. And the much more crowded 'intellectual market', alongside various image crafting or signaling motivations, also creates a really perverse incentive. Exceptional competence and understanding within a subject makes it easy to explain things, even the esoteric and fabulously complex. See: Richard Feynman. But in modern times there often seems to be a desire to go the other direction - and make things sound utterly complex, even when they aren't. I think Einstein's paper on special relativity vs many (most?) modern papers is a good example. Einstein's writing was such that anybody with a basic education could clearly understand the paper, even if they might not fully follow the math. By contrast, so many modern papers seem to be written as if the author had a well worn copy of the Thesaurus of Incomprehensibility at his bedside table.