5 ms·

This. It’s far harder to think of reasons that limits will endure, in a world where innovation by inches has always produced improvements. Everyone brings out t

This. It’s far harder to think of reasons that limits will endure, in a world where innovation by inches has always produced improvements. Everyone brings out the current state and technology. Those are transient.

semi-extrinsic 2y ago
WTF? Look at a word processor today, and then one from 1999, and tell me again how technology always keeps improving dramatically. The standard electrical wall sockets that you use have not really changed since WW2. For load bearing elements in buildings, we don't have anything substantially better today than 100 years ago. There is a huge list of technological items where we've polished out almost every last wrinkle and a 1% gain once a decade is hailed as miraculous.
- richardw 2y ago
  So what? Many animals haven’t changed much for millions of years, and that was irrelevant to our emergence. Not everything has to change in equal measure. There are many reasons for all those things not to change. Limits abound. We discovered that getting taller or faster isn’t “better”, all we needed is smarter. Intelligence is different. It applies to everything else. You can lose a limb or eyesight and still be incredibly capable. The intelligence is what makes us able to handle all the other limits and change the world even though MS Word hasn’t changed much. We are now applying a lot of our intelligence to inventing another one. The architecture won’t stay the same, the limits won’t endure. People keep trying and it’s infinitely harder to imagine reasons why progress will stop. Just choose any limit and defend it.
- jcgrillo 2y ago
  There is an interesting delusion among web company workers that goes something like “technology progress goes steadily up and to the right” which I think comes from web company managers who constantly prattle on about “innovation”. Your word processor example is a good one, because at some point making changes to the UI just hurts users. So all that empty “innovation” that everyone needs to look busy doing is actually worse than doing nothing at all. All that is a roundabout way to say I think tech workers have some deep need to see their work as somehow contributing to “progress” and “innovation” instead of just being the meaningless undirected spasms of corporate amoebas.
  - richardw 2y ago
    Do you have any points that aren’t about the people you disagree with? Argue the facts. What are the limits that prevent progress on the dimension of replicating human intelligence?
    - jcgrillo 2y ago
      > Do you have any points that aren’t about the people you disagree with? Yes... > Argue the facts. What? > What are the limits that prevent progress on the dimension of replicating human intelligence? I don't work in that field, but as a layman I'd wager the lack of clear technical understanding of what animal intelligence actually is, let alone how it works is the biggest limitation.
      - richardw 2y ago
        > What Half of the language in your comment was fact free and incendiary. Delusion, prattle, deep needs of some role. That’s all firmly in the realm of ad hominem, so I was asking if you had anything substantial. > I'd wager the lack of clear technical understanding of what animal intelligence actually is I made the same points long time ago so can’t be too critical of that. I’ve changed my mind and here’s why. That’s not any kind of universal limit. It’s a state, and we can change states. We currently don’t understand intelligence but there’s no barrier I’m aware of that prevents progress. In addition, we’ve discovered types of intelligence (LLM’s, AlphaGo Zero etc) that don’t depend on our ability to understand ourselves. So our inability to understand intelligence isn’t a limit that prevents progress. New algorithms and architectures will be tested, in an ongoing fashion, because the perceived advantages and benefits are so great. It’s not like the universe had a map for intelligence before we arrived, it emerged from randomness. I’m less sure that it’s a good idea, but that’s a different discussion. Put me in the camp of “this is going to be absolutely massive and I wish people took it more seriously.”
        jcgrillo 2y ago
        > fact free and incendiary No. I believe it is factually accurate that many tech workers believe that technology progress marches steadily onwards and upwards. This is easily shown by the historical record to be patently false. Moreover, it's easy to imagine myriad ways we could regress technologically--nuclear war, asteroid impact, space weather, etc. So a belief in the inexorable progress of technology is therefore delusional. I believe it is a fact that tech companies' managers encourage these delusions by spinning up a bunch of pseudo religious sentiment using language like "innovation" to describe what is mostly actually really mundane, meaningless, and often actively harmful work. People hear that stuff, it goes to their heads, and they think they're "making the world a better place". The inexorable march of technology progress fits into such a world view. > We currently don’t understand intelligence but there’s no barrier I’m aware of that prevents progress. In addition, we’ve discovered types of intelligence (LLM’s, AlphaGo Zero etc) that don’t depend on our ability to understand ourselves. How can you claim both that we don't know what intelligence is, and that LLMs, AlphaGo Zero, and etc are "intelligent"?
- brenschluss 2y ago
  > For load bearing elements in buildings, we don't have anything substantially better today than 100 years ago What about post-tensioned concrete slabs? Cross-laminated timber? Structural glazing? Intumescent paint? Technology does keep improving, actually.
- googledocsftw 2y ago
  Except I can do things today that were not possible in 1999 like easily collaborate on a google doc realtime with someone on the other side of the planet, get an automated grammar expert to suggest edits and then have a video call with 15 people to discuss more about it. All in the same app, the browser, all on a whim, all high speed and to boot: all for free as in beer. And this is run of the mill YaaaaawN productivity tools. I can also create a web scale app in a weekend using AWS. It is just insane what we can do now vs. 1999. I remember in early 2000s Microsoft boasting how it could host a site for the olympics using active server pages. This was PR worthy. That would be a side project for most of us now using our pocket money.
  - jcgrillo 2y ago
    That's interesting, personally I've never found collaborative editing to be of any use, but the comments feature is instead the one I use, and often it works less well than the way we used to do it with inline comments (e.g. italicized or made a different color). The one advantage would be automatically merging comments from multiple reviewers, but that's not necessarily a good thing. Often the collection of comments from different reviewers each forms their own narrative, and merging it all into a chaotic mess drowns out each individual's perspective. Personally I'd rather treat each reviewer's critique individually. 1999 technology handles this just fine. Same for video calls. Screen sharing can be useful at times, but it would be easy distribute materials to all participants and collaborate on a conference call. You'll have better audio latency that way. So it's not super obvious to me that the latest Wunderwaffe are actually significantly better, but it is clear they use a hell of a lot more compute cycles and bandwidth.

semi-extrinsic 2y ago

WTF? Look at a word processor today, and then one from 1999, and tell me again how technology always keeps improving dramatically. The standard electrical wall sockets that you use have not really changed since WW2. For load bearing elements in buildings, we don't have anything substantially better today than 100 years ago. There is a huge list of technological items where we've polished out almost every last wrinkle and a 1% gain once a decade is hailed as miraculous.

richardw 2y ago
So what? Many animals haven’t changed much for millions of years, and that was irrelevant to our emergence. Not everything has to change in equal measure. There are many reasons for all those things not to change. Limits abound. We discovered that getting taller or faster isn’t “better”, all we needed is smarter. Intelligence is different. It applies to everything else. You can lose a limb or eyesight and still be incredibly capable. The intelligence is what makes us able to handle all the other limits and change the world even though MS Word hasn’t changed much. We are now applying a lot of our intelligence to inventing another one. The architecture won’t stay the same, the limits won’t endure. People keep trying and it’s infinitely harder to imagine reasons why progress will stop. Just choose any limit and defend it.
jcgrillo 2y ago
There is an interesting delusion among web company workers that goes something like “technology progress goes steadily up and to the right” which I think comes from web company managers who constantly prattle on about “innovation”. Your word processor example is a good one, because at some point making changes to the UI just hurts users. So all that empty “innovation” that everyone needs to look busy doing is actually worse than doing nothing at all. All that is a roundabout way to say I think tech workers have some deep need to see their work as somehow contributing to “progress” and “innovation” instead of just being the meaningless undirected spasms of corporate amoebas.
- richardw 2y ago
  Do you have any points that aren’t about the people you disagree with? Argue the facts. What are the limits that prevent progress on the dimension of replicating human intelligence?
  - jcgrillo 2y ago
    > Do you have any points that aren’t about the people you disagree with? Yes... > Argue the facts. What? > What are the limits that prevent progress on the dimension of replicating human intelligence? I don't work in that field, but as a layman I'd wager the lack of clear technical understanding of what animal intelligence actually is, let alone how it works is the biggest limitation.
    - richardw 2y ago
      > What Half of the language in your comment was fact free and incendiary. Delusion, prattle, deep needs of some role. That’s all firmly in the realm of ad hominem, so I was asking if you had anything substantial. > I'd wager the lack of clear technical understanding of what animal intelligence actually is I made the same points long time ago so can’t be too critical of that. I’ve changed my mind and here’s why. That’s not any kind of universal limit. It’s a state, and we can change states. We currently don’t understand intelligence but there’s no barrier I’m aware of that prevents progress. In addition, we’ve discovered types of intelligence (LLM’s, AlphaGo Zero etc) that don’t depend on our ability to understand ourselves. So our inability to understand intelligence isn’t a limit that prevents progress. New algorithms and architectures will be tested, in an ongoing fashion, because the perceived advantages and benefits are so great. It’s not like the universe had a map for intelligence before we arrived, it emerged from randomness. I’m less sure that it’s a good idea, but that’s a different discussion. Put me in the camp of “this is going to be absolutely massive and I wish people took it more seriously.”
      - jcgrillo 2y ago
        > fact free and incendiary No. I believe it is factually accurate that many tech workers believe that technology progress marches steadily onwards and upwards. This is easily shown by the historical record to be patently false. Moreover, it's easy to imagine myriad ways we could regress technologically--nuclear war, asteroid impact, space weather, etc. So a belief in the inexorable progress of technology is therefore delusional. I believe it is a fact that tech companies' managers encourage these delusions by spinning up a bunch of pseudo religious sentiment using language like "innovation" to describe what is mostly actually really mundane, meaningless, and often actively harmful work. People hear that stuff, it goes to their heads, and they think they're "making the world a better place". The inexorable march of technology progress fits into such a world view. > We currently don’t understand intelligence but there’s no barrier I’m aware of that prevents progress. In addition, we’ve discovered types of intelligence (LLM’s, AlphaGo Zero etc) that don’t depend on our ability to understand ourselves. How can you claim both that we don't know what intelligence is, and that LLMs, AlphaGo Zero, and etc are "intelligent"?
brenschluss 2y ago
> For load bearing elements in buildings, we don't have anything substantially better today than 100 years ago What about post-tensioned concrete slabs? Cross-laminated timber? Structural glazing? Intumescent paint? Technology does keep improving, actually.
googledocsftw 2y ago
Except I can do things today that were not possible in 1999 like easily collaborate on a google doc realtime with someone on the other side of the planet, get an automated grammar expert to suggest edits and then have a video call with 15 people to discuss more about it. All in the same app, the browser, all on a whim, all high speed and to boot: all for free as in beer. And this is run of the mill YaaaaawN productivity tools. I can also create a web scale app in a weekend using AWS. It is just insane what we can do now vs. 1999. I remember in early 2000s Microsoft boasting how it could host a site for the olympics using active server pages. This was PR worthy. That would be a side project for most of us now using our pocket money.
- jcgrillo 2y ago
  That's interesting, personally I've never found collaborative editing to be of any use, but the comments feature is instead the one I use, and often it works less well than the way we used to do it with inline comments (e.g. italicized or made a different color). The one advantage would be automatically merging comments from multiple reviewers, but that's not necessarily a good thing. Often the collection of comments from different reviewers each forms their own narrative, and merging it all into a chaotic mess drowns out each individual's perspective. Personally I'd rather treat each reviewer's critique individually. 1999 technology handles this just fine. Same for video calls. Screen sharing can be useful at times, but it would be easy distribute materials to all participants and collaborate on a conference call. You'll have better audio latency that way. So it's not super obvious to me that the latest Wunderwaffe are actually significantly better, but it is clear they use a hell of a lot more compute cycles and bandwidth.