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We'll still be hacking stuff with python when the singularity comes. It will be ultra high tech alien stuff that we can't hack or understand, only AI can, and t

We'll still be hacking stuff with python when the singularity comes. It will be ultra high tech alien stuff that we can't hack or understand, only AI can, and the tech will look like magic to us, and most will not be able to resist the bait of depending upon this miraculous technology that we can't understand or debug.

hnlmorg 3y ago
We (as a species) already depend upon lots of miraculous technology that we (as individuals) cannot understand nor debug. Even as IT professionals this is true. How many developers these days can debug a problem in their JavaScript runtime or Rust developers track down a bug in their CPU? There’s so much abstracted away from us that few people can fully grasp the entire stack their code executes. So those outside of tech don’t even stand a chance understanding computers. And that’s just focusing on IT. I also depend on medical equipment operated by doctors but have no way of completely understanding that equipment nor procedure myself. I drive a car that I couldn’t repair. Watch TV that I didn’t produce beamed to me via satellites that I didnt built nor fire into space. Eat food that I didn’t grow. We are already well past the point of understanding the technology behind the stuff that we depend upon daily.
- salawat 3y ago
  This is the most intellectually lazy take I've ever seen, and I truly wish people would stop throwing up their hands and giving in. You can absolutely peel back the layers with enough will. At least assuming anti-consumer cryptography/malicious toolmaking is not employed.
  - taneq 3y ago
    Some day you’ll realise that “could conceptually understand this” is a wildly different beast to “should invest the time and energy to understand this.” There are too many layers to too many different systems to understand everything that currently exists, let alone keep up with every new development. Like it or not, the age of universal experts is over. We all must pick our battles.
    - salawat 3y ago
      Do you think I lack the requisite bouncing off fields of specialization to understand the supreme frustration engendered by bouncing into and eventually off the surprising amount of depth pretty much every human field of endeavor is capable of generating? Logistics, law, military, healthcare, research/academia, education, sales, metrology, aviation, network and library sciences, industrial processes, construction, and manufacture? All of which, in their depths, hide surprisingly deep tracts of wisdom and tacit knowledge, and between them often exists gulfs of synergy unrealized because there is just rarely a place in society for one who has done both X and Y? You can take this as evidence of a mind unable to find a niche into whence it can settle long term peaceably, or you can take as words of experience from someone who has never slotted well into the current state of affairs, largely due to having issues with accepting "that's just the way it is". I'm fully cognizant long term practice opens doors, but I'm also aware the benefits of one's long term practice can transfer with enough care demonstrated in the act of crafting the transference. I'm also fully aware that no matter how "free" or "open-minded" you think yourself to be, the end result to which you can actually live up to those ideas is the extent to which you can lay claim, and our society as structured leaves much to be desired in terms of viability of livelihoods that don't involve centralizations of wealth as the first order problem, and all physical accidents that occur as a result of said centralization being happy accidents. Our means of creating new wealth extractions vs. solving the physical needs of continued societal operation keep diverging further and further away from each other, and no one seems to be able to stop and even process the ludicrousness of what's going wrong with the execution. No one will either as long as people don't try to untangle the very Gordian knot that prompted my original post, yet it seems most people are content to just hide from it as long as the status quo remains such that "Not my problem" holds over their individual mental horizons. I'm not tossing out hot takes for fun here. I'm tormented by the beast that our societal architecture has transformed us collectively into. I've stared at it's face with a profound sense of loss and unsatisfaction at the level of potential it lives up to, and the Riddle of Mice's individual effability cuts straight to the heart of the matter. If the Riddle of Mice is truly ineffable to a single person in totality; then we are simply doomed. We have admitted that we are no longer capable of pushing the frontiers of what we can achieve further than the complexity that it takes to make a circuit board, hosting an IC, fabricated using a combination of lithography masks, UV light sources, photochemisty, and a highly controlled manufacturing environment, all made using equipment made using precision manufacturing techniques (machining, chemical, orelectrically facilitated), assembled into a geospatially bounded factory, with outputs priced in such a way as to provide sufficient social incentivization to attract people to operate the machines; and a multi-axis movement measuring device, programmed to operate over either a USB HID centric protocol, or in cooperation with a p/s 2 interface, utilizing electronic bit toggling and sampling as an information transmission medium, working as a component of a machine local network of components acting in harmony. That we can not in one individual instill the understanding of PCB fabrication processes, semi-conductor fabrication processes, refining and extraction processes for the material inputs thereto, and the measuring processes to divise a means of detecting when a task has been satisfactorally carried out so as to meet the needs of the next step of processing culminating in the assembly of a final product. We cannot, in short, break latger problems into smaller problems, listing them, and enabling an individual to handle those one at a time. Our entire field of study (computer science) is a fraud. Because one entire half of the space/time tradeoff spectrum is just frigging lopped off. Problem decomp doesn't work, and isn't applicable across all problem spaces. That's what we're admitting here if we accept this proposition to be true, which I am not at all willing to grant, seeing as my very existence is predicated on that ability having been demonstrated at least once by someone. The state spaces may be growing, but with that, we devise new ways of coming to terms with addressing and navigating the respective prerequisite corpii of knowledge. Are there other processes that further constrain the space based on societal architecture? You bet. That's still addressable though. The real question on addressing that though is will. Does it matter enough for everyone to put down what we're doing and really reach a consensus on a new set of societal constraints in order to change the possible realities we can manifest? TL;DR: the problem is one of will. Not fundamental incapability. Any arguments predicated on "but no one does <drilling down into problem spaces until their brain hurts>" will fall on deaf ears, because despite the ongoing suffering it causes; I do that, because no one else seems to be willing to. I am the current living counterexample, and if it's my fate to be that so as to cut off everyone trying to lower the bar at the knees, so be it. and I will fight you for as long as I am able so someone can at least point to somebody that does it. If I have to pull a Stallman-esque chief GNU-isance to tilt the scales, then so bloody be it. It'll be the most courteous fight humanly possible, but I refuse to give any quarter in this regard. The only thing between you and knowing how to do something is your willingness to chase it down. Period. I'm not trying to cast aspersions on anyone here. Just stating an objective fact. An ugly, inconvenient, really comfortable to partition off in a dark, unfrequented part of your psyche fact. No one here should feel like I'm trying to make them feel like less of a person, or less accomplished than you no doubt are. But I am stating that you and you alone are responsible for drawing the lines indicating the lengths you are ultimately willing to go to achieve X, Y, or Z.
  - segfaultbuserr 3y ago
    > You can absolutely peel back the layers with enough will. I originally started from writing Python scripts and running Web servers, after 10 years I decided that pure software is too boring, and now I came to know the basics of high-speed digital signal propagation in circuit boards. So I agree with you conceptually. But practically speaking, it also requires an eternal life, an external brain storage, or possibly both. At least in my experience, I find that my time and attention doesn't allow me to investigate everything I'd like to. "No one on the planet knows how to build a computer mouse." https://briandbuckley.com/2012/09/12/who-knows-how-to-make-a-mouse/ https://briandbuckley.com/2012/09/12/who-knows-how-to-make-a...
    - salawat 3y ago
      >"No one on the planet knows how to build a computer mouse. Counterpoint: If a man has done it, a man can do it. Also, It wouldn't be research if you already knew what you were doing. Just because a particular assembly has it's tasks divided up between a myriad of people does not mean it is impossible to unify those tasks into a single person. In point of fact, the continued existence of mice can be directly attributed that someone has the network of knowledge/knowers of pieces of the problem already nailed down. Yes, the level of detail the real world flings at us on a regular basis is surprisingly deep, but hardly ineffable.
      - segfaultbuserr 3y ago
        > If a man has done it, a man can do it. [...] Just because a particular assembly has it's tasks divided up between a myriad of people does not mean it is impossible to unify those tasks into a single person. I don't understand your argument, in particular, the linked article already refuted this point by saying the following, but you didn't provide a counterargument to that: > But let’s imagine an extraordinarily talented man who started on the factory floor, worked his way through an engineering degree, moved up through the ranks to design the very thing he was building before, and knows the roles of everyone on his team so well that he could do all their jobs himself. Surely this brilliant person knows how to make a mouse. Or does he? He may understand circuits – but does he know every detail of how to build a diode from raw materials? He may understand plastics – but could he single-handedly synthesize a plastic from its constituent chemicals? Does he understand how to mine silicon out of the ground? Nobody in the world – not one single human being anywhere – knows how to make a mouse. It’s orders of magnitude too complex for a solitary mind.
  - psini 3y ago
    Hard disagree. Do you know how EVERYTHING around you works to the smallest scale? And if you do, when you encounter something new do you just drop everything and meticulously study and take apart that new something? The last time you could be a Renaissance man was, well, during the Renaissance.
    - salawat 3y ago
      Learn the basics and it's amazing the mileage you get. Care enough to try to become a beacon of actual knowlege, and master basic research skills, and the world is your oyster. There is nothing stopping you in this day and age from getting to the bottom of a question other than asshats like Broadcom or Nvidia who go out of their way to foster trade secrecy at all costs. Cars, electronic devices, manufacturing tools/processes, lawn equipment, chemical processes, software, algorithms, common subassemblys, logistics, mechanics of materials, measuring systems, what excuse does one have to not develop some level of familiarity with these aspects of modern life in a day where information is literally at your fingertips? I'll give you that the well is heavily poisoned, and that sometimes a return to dead tree mediums of info storage are required to boost signal; but there isn't really an excuse to remain ignorant other than willful ignorance. The answers are out there, you just need to have the will to hunt them down and wrest them from the world.
      - hnlmorg 3y ago
        > Learn the basics and it's amazing the mileage you get. This could also be described as the Dunning-Kruger effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect There is a massive difference between “learning the basics” and understanding it to a competent level that we can reproduce it. I know the basics of how rockets work but that doesn’t mean I could build a rocket and successfully launch it. Yet your comment suggests I’m already qualified to single-handedly deploy the next Starlink.
  - antonvs 3y ago
    "With enough will" makes this sound like Ayn Rand fan fiction. That's just something you tell yourself to make yourself feel better about trusting the black boxes your life depends on. But it simply isn't true. People devote their lives to specializing n these things. Yes, "with enough will" - and time, and money - you could pick one or two subjects and do the same. But that still leaves you as a dilettante at best when it comes to everything else.
    - salawat 3y ago
      Perhaps start looking at what your life seems to really demand of you. How are you being employed by those around you? As a means to their ends, or as a means to your own ends? Rand is garbage, and I'm insulted to end up being brought anywhere near that slop in your philosophical address space. The point I'm trying to make is that there is a helplessness taught by the optimizations we structure our societies around. A capitalist, consumerist society is going to focus around training the largest portion of it's population to act as specialized cogs that can be orchestrated by someone the next layer of abstraction up in pursuit of purely profitable/profitmaking engagements. If you change the optimizations, you change the system. You change the people that compose that system, you change the very bounds of the human experience. Just look at how much the world changed around the pandemic. The old order of the office & commute was shattered for many. Look at how deemphasis of throwing more fossil fuels at a problem changes the direction of innovation. You say the Riddle of Mice is ineffable by a single person. I say you're full of it, and looking at the problem wrong. It's completely effable, you just can't imagine society having a place for such a person given your priors about how the world operates. And in that, you may be right! That does not equal the Riddle of Mice being conquered by a single person can't happen. It's just unlikely, and dhould such an extraordinary individual exist, you'd likely see them as mad.
      - hydrok9 3y ago
        Fwiw, I agree with you. most people are way more capable than they think they are., and modern society encourages people to be single-minded and sedentary.
  - hnlmorg 3y ago
    Who said anything about giving up? I’m talking about the current state of play, not some theoretical ideal that is realistically impossible for even the most gifted, never mind the average person. If anything, you’re massively underestimating the amount of diverse specialist knowledge required in modern society for even simple interactions. People dedicate their entire lives to some of these fields that underpin the tech we use. It’s not something the average person can pick up in open university while working a full time job and bringing up kids. To suggest it’s just a motivational problem is absurd. And that’s without addressing that the level of physics or mathematics required for some specialties is beyond what some people can naturally accomplish (it would be stupid to assume everyone has the same natural aptitude to all disciplines). Honestly, I don’t know how you can post “This is the most intellectually lazy take I've ever seen” in any seriousness then go on to say it’s just a problem of will power.
sfn42 3y ago
"The singularity" is science fiction. You can't just infinitely improve software on static hardware - hardware must be designed, manufactured and installed to accommodate improvements. Maybe you could have a powerful AI running as a distributed system across whole data centers, but now you're limited by transmission times etc. There's always a new bottleneck. Actual AGI is nowhere near realism yet anyway.

hnlmorg 3y ago

We (as a species) already depend upon lots of miraculous technology that we (as individuals) cannot understand nor debug. Even as IT professionals this is true. How many developers these days can debug a problem in their JavaScript runtime or Rust developers track down a bug in their CPU? There’s so much abstracted away from us that few people can fully grasp the entire stack their code executes. So those outside of tech don’t even stand a chance understanding computers. And that’s just focusing on IT. I also depend on medical equipment operated by doctors but have no way of completely understanding that equipment nor procedure myself. I drive a car that I couldn’t repair. Watch TV that I didn’t produce beamed to me via satellites that I didnt built nor fire into space. Eat food that I didn’t grow. We are already well past the point of understanding the technology behind the stuff that we depend upon daily.

salawat 3y ago
This is the most intellectually lazy take I've ever seen, and I truly wish people would stop throwing up their hands and giving in. You can absolutely peel back the layers with enough will. At least assuming anti-consumer cryptography/malicious toolmaking is not employed.
- taneq 3y ago
  Some day you’ll realise that “could conceptually understand this” is a wildly different beast to “should invest the time and energy to understand this.” There are too many layers to too many different systems to understand everything that currently exists, let alone keep up with every new development. Like it or not, the age of universal experts is over. We all must pick our battles.
  - salawat 3y ago
    Do you think I lack the requisite bouncing off fields of specialization to understand the supreme frustration engendered by bouncing into and eventually off the surprising amount of depth pretty much every human field of endeavor is capable of generating? Logistics, law, military, healthcare, research/academia, education, sales, metrology, aviation, network and library sciences, industrial processes, construction, and manufacture? All of which, in their depths, hide surprisingly deep tracts of wisdom and tacit knowledge, and between them often exists gulfs of synergy unrealized because there is just rarely a place in society for one who has done both X and Y? You can take this as evidence of a mind unable to find a niche into whence it can settle long term peaceably, or you can take as words of experience from someone who has never slotted well into the current state of affairs, largely due to having issues with accepting "that's just the way it is". I'm fully cognizant long term practice opens doors, but I'm also aware the benefits of one's long term practice can transfer with enough care demonstrated in the act of crafting the transference. I'm also fully aware that no matter how "free" or "open-minded" you think yourself to be, the end result to which you can actually live up to those ideas is the extent to which you can lay claim, and our society as structured leaves much to be desired in terms of viability of livelihoods that don't involve centralizations of wealth as the first order problem, and all physical accidents that occur as a result of said centralization being happy accidents. Our means of creating new wealth extractions vs. solving the physical needs of continued societal operation keep diverging further and further away from each other, and no one seems to be able to stop and even process the ludicrousness of what's going wrong with the execution. No one will either as long as people don't try to untangle the very Gordian knot that prompted my original post, yet it seems most people are content to just hide from it as long as the status quo remains such that "Not my problem" holds over their individual mental horizons. I'm not tossing out hot takes for fun here. I'm tormented by the beast that our societal architecture has transformed us collectively into. I've stared at it's face with a profound sense of loss and unsatisfaction at the level of potential it lives up to, and the Riddle of Mice's individual effability cuts straight to the heart of the matter. If the Riddle of Mice is truly ineffable to a single person in totality; then we are simply doomed. We have admitted that we are no longer capable of pushing the frontiers of what we can achieve further than the complexity that it takes to make a circuit board, hosting an IC, fabricated using a combination of lithography masks, UV light sources, photochemisty, and a highly controlled manufacturing environment, all made using equipment made using precision manufacturing techniques (machining, chemical, orelectrically facilitated), assembled into a geospatially bounded factory, with outputs priced in such a way as to provide sufficient social incentivization to attract people to operate the machines; and a multi-axis movement measuring device, programmed to operate over either a USB HID centric protocol, or in cooperation with a p/s 2 interface, utilizing electronic bit toggling and sampling as an information transmission medium, working as a component of a machine local network of components acting in harmony. That we can not in one individual instill the understanding of PCB fabrication processes, semi-conductor fabrication processes, refining and extraction processes for the material inputs thereto, and the measuring processes to divise a means of detecting when a task has been satisfactorally carried out so as to meet the needs of the next step of processing culminating in the assembly of a final product. We cannot, in short, break latger problems into smaller problems, listing them, and enabling an individual to handle those one at a time. Our entire field of study (computer science) is a fraud. Because one entire half of the space/time tradeoff spectrum is just frigging lopped off. Problem decomp doesn't work, and isn't applicable across all problem spaces. That's what we're admitting here if we accept this proposition to be true, which I am not at all willing to grant, seeing as my very existence is predicated on that ability having been demonstrated at least once by someone. The state spaces may be growing, but with that, we devise new ways of coming to terms with addressing and navigating the respective prerequisite corpii of knowledge. Are there other processes that further constrain the space based on societal architecture? You bet. That's still addressable though. The real question on addressing that though is will. Does it matter enough for everyone to put down what we're doing and really reach a consensus on a new set of societal constraints in order to change the possible realities we can manifest? TL;DR: the problem is one of will. Not fundamental incapability. Any arguments predicated on "but no one does <drilling down into problem spaces until their brain hurts>" will fall on deaf ears, because despite the ongoing suffering it causes; I do that, because no one else seems to be willing to. I am the current living counterexample, and if it's my fate to be that so as to cut off everyone trying to lower the bar at the knees, so be it. and I will fight you for as long as I am able so someone can at least point to somebody that does it. If I have to pull a Stallman-esque chief GNU-isance to tilt the scales, then so bloody be it. It'll be the most courteous fight humanly possible, but I refuse to give any quarter in this regard. The only thing between you and knowing how to do something is your willingness to chase it down. Period. I'm not trying to cast aspersions on anyone here. Just stating an objective fact. An ugly, inconvenient, really comfortable to partition off in a dark, unfrequented part of your psyche fact. No one here should feel like I'm trying to make them feel like less of a person, or less accomplished than you no doubt are. But I am stating that you and you alone are responsible for drawing the lines indicating the lengths you are ultimately willing to go to achieve X, Y, or Z.
- segfaultbuserr 3y ago
  > You can absolutely peel back the layers with enough will. I originally started from writing Python scripts and running Web servers, after 10 years I decided that pure software is too boring, and now I came to know the basics of high-speed digital signal propagation in circuit boards. So I agree with you conceptually. But practically speaking, it also requires an eternal life, an external brain storage, or possibly both. At least in my experience, I find that my time and attention doesn't allow me to investigate everything I'd like to. "No one on the planet knows how to build a computer mouse." https://briandbuckley.com/2012/09/12/who-knows-how-to-make-a-mouse/ https://briandbuckley.com/2012/09/12/who-knows-how-to-make-a...
  - salawat 3y ago
    >"No one on the planet knows how to build a computer mouse. Counterpoint: If a man has done it, a man can do it. Also, It wouldn't be research if you already knew what you were doing. Just because a particular assembly has it's tasks divided up between a myriad of people does not mean it is impossible to unify those tasks into a single person. In point of fact, the continued existence of mice can be directly attributed that someone has the network of knowledge/knowers of pieces of the problem already nailed down. Yes, the level of detail the real world flings at us on a regular basis is surprisingly deep, but hardly ineffable.
    - segfaultbuserr 3y ago
      > If a man has done it, a man can do it. [...] Just because a particular assembly has it's tasks divided up between a myriad of people does not mean it is impossible to unify those tasks into a single person. I don't understand your argument, in particular, the linked article already refuted this point by saying the following, but you didn't provide a counterargument to that: > But let’s imagine an extraordinarily talented man who started on the factory floor, worked his way through an engineering degree, moved up through the ranks to design the very thing he was building before, and knows the roles of everyone on his team so well that he could do all their jobs himself. Surely this brilliant person knows how to make a mouse. Or does he? He may understand circuits – but does he know every detail of how to build a diode from raw materials? He may understand plastics – but could he single-handedly synthesize a plastic from its constituent chemicals? Does he understand how to mine silicon out of the ground? Nobody in the world – not one single human being anywhere – knows how to make a mouse. It’s orders of magnitude too complex for a solitary mind.
- psini 3y ago
  Hard disagree. Do you know how EVERYTHING around you works to the smallest scale? And if you do, when you encounter something new do you just drop everything and meticulously study and take apart that new something? The last time you could be a Renaissance man was, well, during the Renaissance.
  - salawat 3y ago
    Learn the basics and it's amazing the mileage you get. Care enough to try to become a beacon of actual knowlege, and master basic research skills, and the world is your oyster. There is nothing stopping you in this day and age from getting to the bottom of a question other than asshats like Broadcom or Nvidia who go out of their way to foster trade secrecy at all costs. Cars, electronic devices, manufacturing tools/processes, lawn equipment, chemical processes, software, algorithms, common subassemblys, logistics, mechanics of materials, measuring systems, what excuse does one have to not develop some level of familiarity with these aspects of modern life in a day where information is literally at your fingertips? I'll give you that the well is heavily poisoned, and that sometimes a return to dead tree mediums of info storage are required to boost signal; but there isn't really an excuse to remain ignorant other than willful ignorance. The answers are out there, you just need to have the will to hunt them down and wrest them from the world.
    - hnlmorg 3y ago
      > Learn the basics and it's amazing the mileage you get. This could also be described as the Dunning-Kruger effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect There is a massive difference between “learning the basics” and understanding it to a competent level that we can reproduce it. I know the basics of how rockets work but that doesn’t mean I could build a rocket and successfully launch it. Yet your comment suggests I’m already qualified to single-handedly deploy the next Starlink.
- antonvs 3y ago
  "With enough will" makes this sound like Ayn Rand fan fiction. That's just something you tell yourself to make yourself feel better about trusting the black boxes your life depends on. But it simply isn't true. People devote their lives to specializing n these things. Yes, "with enough will" - and time, and money - you could pick one or two subjects and do the same. But that still leaves you as a dilettante at best when it comes to everything else.
  - salawat 3y ago
    Perhaps start looking at what your life seems to really demand of you. How are you being employed by those around you? As a means to their ends, or as a means to your own ends? Rand is garbage, and I'm insulted to end up being brought anywhere near that slop in your philosophical address space. The point I'm trying to make is that there is a helplessness taught by the optimizations we structure our societies around. A capitalist, consumerist society is going to focus around training the largest portion of it's population to act as specialized cogs that can be orchestrated by someone the next layer of abstraction up in pursuit of purely profitable/profitmaking engagements. If you change the optimizations, you change the system. You change the people that compose that system, you change the very bounds of the human experience. Just look at how much the world changed around the pandemic. The old order of the office & commute was shattered for many. Look at how deemphasis of throwing more fossil fuels at a problem changes the direction of innovation. You say the Riddle of Mice is ineffable by a single person. I say you're full of it, and looking at the problem wrong. It's completely effable, you just can't imagine society having a place for such a person given your priors about how the world operates. And in that, you may be right! That does not equal the Riddle of Mice being conquered by a single person can't happen. It's just unlikely, and dhould such an extraordinary individual exist, you'd likely see them as mad.
    - hydrok9 3y ago
      Fwiw, I agree with you. most people are way more capable than they think they are., and modern society encourages people to be single-minded and sedentary.
- hnlmorg 3y ago
  Who said anything about giving up? I’m talking about the current state of play, not some theoretical ideal that is realistically impossible for even the most gifted, never mind the average person. If anything, you’re massively underestimating the amount of diverse specialist knowledge required in modern society for even simple interactions. People dedicate their entire lives to some of these fields that underpin the tech we use. It’s not something the average person can pick up in open university while working a full time job and bringing up kids. To suggest it’s just a motivational problem is absurd. And that’s without addressing that the level of physics or mathematics required for some specialties is beyond what some people can naturally accomplish (it would be stupid to assume everyone has the same natural aptitude to all disciplines). Honestly, I don’t know how you can post “This is the most intellectually lazy take I've ever seen” in any seriousness then go on to say it’s just a problem of will power.

sfn42 3y ago

"The singularity" is science fiction. You can't just infinitely improve software on static hardware - hardware must be designed, manufactured and installed to accommodate improvements. Maybe you could have a powerful AI running as a distributed system across whole data centers, but now you're limited by transmission times etc. There's always a new bottleneck. Actual AGI is nowhere near realism yet anyway.