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The Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)
- delibes 2y ago> Submitted on 31 Mar 2017 Just in time for April Fools
- jurassicfoxy 2y agoI don't know what I'm reading, but it's hilarious.
- FrustratedMonky 2y agoCame to make some comment about material science. Realized later it was joke.
- m3kw9 2y agoI’m not getting this, is this a way to challenge us? Elephants are way bigger
- ajuc 2y ago> Although the technical details from this point onward are unfortunately too dense to include in a general-audience essay of this sort, assuming as they do familiarity with constructive non-standard analysis, it suffices to say that supersized machines cannot be made (Figure 2). Brilliant. This is exactly how "Godel's Theorem or Quantum Mechanics therefore I'm right" arguments always go :)
- jvanderbot 2y agoIt took me an embarrassing amount of time to realize I was reading a parody of arguments against machines with human level intelligence (or "larger")
- cubefox 2y agoHint: It was an AI analogy.
- bee_rider 2y agoIs anyone actually arguing that a super-intelligent AI is, like, physically impossible or something? That seems like a very dumb position to hold, it would be necessary (but not sufficient) to believe that human brains are somehow following alternative laws of physics (aka, magic). The room to argue, I think, is in how close we are to making them and whether things like DNN’s are the path or a dead end.
- nullc 2y agoIn almost any HN thread that touches on the subject someone manages to express this sort of view. E.g. from the most recent thread I read: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40686920 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40686920 (apologies for singling out the post, it was impossible to give an example without doing singling out something-- I hope you'll read it in the sense it was intended: an example of a common pattern). It's even more common in other venues. That said, from what I've seen the posted article is often used to justify hysteria about AI. For some people the thing protecting them from a meltdown is just a view that superhuman machine intelligence isn't possible, and once that is broken they become vulnerable to cult indoctrination or just general dysfunction. One needs to maintain perspective, and sometimes an inaccurate view of impossibility is helping a person make better decisions on the whole than they would without it.
- MostlyStable 2y agoI also frequently see the slightly weaker form of argument hypothesizing "diminishing returns" of intelligence or some other claim that humans are close the practical upper limit of intelligence.
- AtlasBarfed 2y agoWhich is pretty stupid, because what human intelligence wouldn't be greatly enhanced by cybernetic math coprocessors and perfect wide memory recall, and a greatly increased lifespan so there wasn't so much collective work done constantly (re)training new generations and passing forward knowledge in 18-30 year education programs, which are constrained by communication mechanisms with bandwidth possibly in the thousand bytes per second rate? The sad fact is that the only real fiction in Isaac Asimov's robots is the ability to impose the laws of robotics.
- Hugsun 2y agoAt first I was frustrated that the abstract talks about machines without properly defining them. There are obviously gigantic machines, bigger than humans. Then I read a bit more. It's a pretty funny read. I found the "Unboundedness of Human Girth as Modified by Sweaters" graph particularly good.
- olooney 2y agoThe reference section at the end is pure gold.
- munchler 2y agoThis is awesome. The chart of "Unboundedness of Human Girth as Modified by Sweaters" made me laugh.