8 ms·

I think we are going to be seeing a vast partitioning in society in the next months and years. The process of forming expressions just is the process of concep

I think we are going to be seeing a vast partitioning in society in the next months and years. The process of forming expressions just is the process of conceptual and rational articulation (as per Brandom). Those who misunderstand this -- believing that concepts are ready made, then encoded and decoded from permutations of tokens, or, worse, who have no room to think of reasoning or conceptualization at all -- they will be automated away. I don't mean that their jobs will be automated: I mean that they will cede sapience and resign to becoming robotic. A robot is just a "person whose work or activities are entirely mechanical" (https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=robot https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=robot). I'm afraid far too many are captive to the ideology of productionism (which is just a corollary of consumerism). Creative activity is not about content production. The aim of our creation is communication and mutual-transformation. Generation of digital artifacts may be useful for these purposes, but most uses seem to assume content production is the point, and that is a dark, sad, dead end.

fennecbutt 1y ago
99% if not 100% of human thought and general output is derivative. Everything we create or do is based on something we've experienced or seen. Try to think of an object that doesn't exist, and isn't based on anything you've ever seen before, a completely new object with no basis in our reality. It's impossible. Writers made elves by adding pointy ears to a human. That's it.
- musicale 1y ago
  > Writers made elves by adding pointy ears to a human. That's it. Humans have been interested in supernatural beings for thousands of years. Their appearance is usually less important than their powers and abilities. The word is present in Old English and Old Norse, and elves appear in Norse mythology.
- alganet 1y ago
  I'm not so sure about it. Maybe it's like that because there aren't many novel opportunities for varied experiences nowadays. The pointy ear sounds trivial in our experience, but it is radically different than ordinary everyday thought when observed as a piece of a whole imagined new world. Of course, pointy ears now are not a novelty anymore. But that's beyond the point. By the time they were conceived, human experience was already homogenized. The idea space for what an object is has been depleted by exploration. People already tried everything. It's kinda the same thing as saying that is impossible to come up with a new platonic solid (also an idea space that has been exhausted). Any novel thought is bound to be nameless at first, and it becomes novel by trying to use derivation to define an unknown observation, not as a basis for it.
  - NobodytheHobbit 1y ago
    You're trying to expand the human experience instead of individual human experience which is really yours from your perspective and mine from my perspective if I can be redundant by enumerating. The frustration comes from the sacrifice of individual experience to this weird aggregated experience in the machine. It will push the capability of technology but does that service the aim of luxury made easy for the many to acquire as tech is supposed to do? What profit a person to gain the whole world but lose the very thing that makes themselves them? It feels systemically dehumanizing.
- mr_toad 1y ago
  > Writers made elves by adding pointy ears to a human. Now that’s reductionist to the point of being diminutive.
  - TechDebtDevin 1y ago
    Its not, thats why the term humanoid exists.
  - BobbyTables2 1y ago
    Hey, no need to get short! We should try to be the bigger person. That’s really the long and short of it.
  - milliams 1y ago
    Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder. Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels. Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies. Elves are glamorous. They project glamour. Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment. Elves are terrific. They beget terror. The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning. No one ever said elves are nice. Elves are bad. ― Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies
- DavidPiper 1y ago
  That is a nonsense definition of creativity. The parent also wasn't suggesting - as far as I can read - that creativity is defined solely in the realm of the "truly novel" (or "isn't based on anything you've ever seen before"). All creativity is a conversation between our own ideas and what already exists. Consider the unused soundtrack to James Cameron's Avatar [0][1], where ethnomusicologists set out to create a kind of music that had never been heard before. They succeeded. But it was ultimately scrapped for the film because - by virtue of it being so different to any music anyone has ever heard before - it was not remotely accessible to audiences and the movie suffered as a result. To argue that work is not creative because it is still based on "music" is absurd. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tL5sX8VmvB8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tL5sX8VmvB8 [1] https://ethnomusicologyreview.ucla.edu/journal/volume/17/piece/583 https://ethnomusicologyreview.ucla.edu/journal/volume/17/pie...
  - myko 1y ago
    Incredibly interesting, thanks for sharing
  - fennecbutt 1y ago
    Where was I arguing that human output is not creative at all? Human creativity is for the most part derivative in some way, that is the nature of it and my point. I was contrasting it to illustrate why I think the idea that machines cannot be creative is wrong. Especially given that current models will only get more complex and nuanced in the future. I never said that humans cannot be creative because creativity is derivative at any point. We are engaging in another human pastime; tribalism.
- musicale 1y ago
  > Everything we create or do is based on something we've experienced or seen. I would add a couple of things to that. First, humans (like other animals) have instincts and feelings; even newborns can exhibit varying personality traits as well as fears and desires. It's certainly useful to fear things like spiders, snakes, or abandonment without prior experience. Second, an important part of experience is inner life - how you personally perceive, feel, and experience things. This may be very different from person to person.
  - Andrex 1y ago
    What really fascinates me is gender based toy preferences at <2 years old. Very consistent that boys like race cars and action figures, even though it's their first exposure. (I do not participate in culture wars, this fact just straight up fascinates me as a non-masculine gay guy.)
    - socalgal2 1y ago
      I'd be curious how we know they aren't exposed - 1 year is a long time to see TV shows, TV commercials, toys with pictures of target audience, picture books, etc...
      - gitremote 1y ago
        Cars were invented in the early 1900s and the vast majority of human existence was in a world without cars. There cannot be an innate preference for cars, which were a very recent invention.
        musicale 1y ago
        Toy cars (tiny wheeled carts) date back at least 5000 years, but tools/technology date to the dawn of humanity.
        gitremote 1y ago
        The spinning wheel (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_wheel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_wheel), which creates yarn from threads, existed longer than cars. I doubt you would argue that boys would have a preference for playing with toy versions these wheeled tools, given that women in various Western and Eastern cultures were the main users of these tools.
- Tallain 1y ago
  This is an alarmingly reductionist statement that I cannot believe is made in good faith. If it somehow is, it's based on an abundance of ignorance that only highlights the importance of education. Are you genuinely arguing that LLM output is derivative, and human output is derivative, therefore they're equal? Why don't you pop that thesis into ChatGPT and see how it answers.
  - fennecbutt 1y ago
    Oh, is agreement binary? Are thoughts binary? I didn't realise that by comparing derivative human output to derivative machine output that I was inherently arguing that they are equally derivative at this point in time. It is true that human output has higher entropy, but that will not be the case forever.
- MadcapJake 1y ago
  > Try to think of an object that doesn't exist, and isn't based on anything you've ever seen before, a completely new object with no basis in our reality. It's impossible. This is an outrageous thought experiment. Novelty is creating new connections or perceiving things in new ways, you can't just say "try to have eureka moment, see! impossible". You can't prompt engineer your own brain. In fact, there's some research about eureka moments rewiring our brain. https://neurosciencenews.com/insight-memory-neuroscience-28921/ https://neurosciencenews.com/insight-memory-neuroscience-289...
- voidhorse 1y ago
  It astonishes me sometimes how completely stupid and reductive some HN takes on arts and creativity can be. I am astounded continually at how we can produce humans who are so capable in one sphere of life and so ignorant and oblivious of others...yet all too willing to make dismissive claims about them... Creativity is much more than the derivative production of artifacts. What the OP is driving at is that creativity is a process of human connection and communication—you can see this most clearly in the art of interpretation. A single literary work has an almost uncountable number of possible interpretations, and a huge element of its existence in the world as a price of art are the discussions and debates that emerge over those interpretations, and how they shape us as individuals, instill morals, etc etc. Quite a lot more than "making elves by adding pointy ears to humans". Your post stinks of the very gross consumerist mindset the OP called out. The creation and preservation of meaning is about way more than the production of fungible decontextualized objects--it's all about the mediation and maintenance of human relationships through artifacts. The fact that the elves have pointy ears doesn't even begin to scratch at their actual meaning (e.g. they exist in a world with very big real problems that effect you and me too, e.g. race relations, and exaggerated features estrange these relations so as to make them more discernible to us and allow us to finally see the water we swim in). If humans stop engaging with these processes, it's reasonable to believe that a lot of that semiotic richness, which is much of what, in my opinion, makes us human and not just super smart animals in the first place, will be lost.
  - krelian 1y ago
    In full agreement with you on the flagrant incapability of a sizeable part of the HN crowd to understand and value of the arts. Throughout history man has been celebrated and distinguished as the rational animal. As master of the earth this animal in our days dedicates its brightest minds to the continual increase of economic growth. Ask the rational man what is growth good for and after a few exchanges they perhaps will say that it ultimately improves our quality of life and even extends it. If might even allow the human race to flourish beyond earth and thus prevail long after resources on earth are depleted. But ask him then why is improving the quality of life a good thing at all? Is it just a meaningless cycle in which we improve the quality of life so that we can then improve the quality of life even further? No. Ask an individual human (in contrast to the ultra rationalist who thinks they represent the human race as a whole) what they work for, what they strive to achieve, what does quality of life ultimately mean to them and you will end up with happy times spent among family and friends. With meaningful moments listening to music, watching a film, reading a book. About time spent in creative endeavors that are totally their own. The rational animal in its hubris forgot what it thinks for and trapped itself in an endless cycle where the true meaning of being human is hidden from the sight of many. But I think a wake up call is due very soon. The rational animal is about to discover the rationality it prides itself on was merely a sample of the true possibility. From the rational animal we have been relegated to another animal with some rational capability. As we slowly realize how futile are our attempts at thinking, we'll realize to our horror that the gift we are left with is the ability to recognize the futility and inadequacy of our attempts. Hopefully then we'll decide to retreat back into what truly makes us human, to what is ours, to what quality of life really means.
- jen729w 1y ago
  > Try to think of an object that doesn't exist, and isn't based on anything you've ever seen before, a completely new object with no basis in our reality. It's impossible. Pick up an Iain M. Banks book, my friend.
  - fennecbutt 1y ago
    I have read plenty of his work. If you like his stuff I would recommend the quantum thief trilogy, and the void trilogy. I find many people haven't read them and they're great scifi.
- Nevermark 1y ago
  Go with 99.9%. But not 100%. Someone imagined space and time could be a deformed fabric. That was new. In minor and major ways, new ideas are found or emerge from searches for solutions to problems from science to art. Or exploration of things in new combinations or from a previously untapped viewpoint. Most people are not looking hard for anything beyond what they know. So not likely to find anything new. But many people try new things, or try to improve or vary something in a direction that is not easy, and learning something nonobvious and new is the “price” they must pay to succeed. Or a bonus they are paid for pushing through a thicket, even if they don’t succeed at what they set out to do.
  - pwndByDeath 1y ago
    Not really new it came from observations or imagination of observed things.
    - Nevermark 1y ago
      General patterns don’t actually exist. We create a pattern from multiple observations. What is the point in saying there is nothing new,? So the word “new” is like “utopia”, with only a mythical aspirational meaning? History has never stopped proving how inane such an utterly unsupported opinion is. Just keep up with quantum physics. Constantly finding new strange counterintuitive effects that require intense research and explorations of combinations of ideas and imagination to envision. And then challenging invention of new highly artificially controlled conditions, not found in nature, to create. Mathematics as a profession is all about discovery of new things (from exploration) and invention (from imaginative questions and quests). Art produces new things all the time, but you have to have familiarity with art to see what is new. If all you see are materials and color you are not literate enough to read it. Anymore than a unique story is “just words”. For that matter, in slower timescales, nature has never stopped creating new creatures with new attributes or behaviors. Perhaps have you set your own sights much too low. Try doing something nobody has been able to do before, and sticking with it. You will discover something if you really do stick with it. Even understanding the barriers better than before reveals things, and forces new concepts into being.
- bccdee 1y ago
  No, that's not true. Quick, what's 51 plus 92? Now: Did you think back to a time someone else added these numbers together, or are you doing it yourself, right now, in your head? I'm sure it's not the first time these numbers have ever been summed, but that doesn't matter. You're doing it now, independently. Just because something isn't unique, doesn't make it derivative. We rediscover things every day.
  - griffzhowl 1y ago
    Pointing out that we can mechanically apply an algorithm on novel inputs is possibly the worst defence of human creativity I can think of in this context.
    - bccdee 1y ago
      Good thing I'm not nebulously defending creativity, then. I'm directly replying to the notion that something is derivative if it is "based on something we've experienced or seen." The fact that rote math calculations are generally less original than creative expressions makes my argument stronger, not weaker.
      - griffzhowl 1y ago
        Right, but the general context of the thread is a discussion about how human thought or creative activity more generally contrasts with (current) machine capabilities. That's the sense in which I thought that adding two numbers is the worst example. It's notably the paradigmatic thing that machines are better at than any human
  - treebirg 1y ago
    But I do know what numbers are. I've also done addition before, so I know what the steps are. The result of 51 + 92 is derivative from (at least) these two concepts, which derive from others and so on. Maybe I'm stretching the meaning of derivative here, but to me derivative doesn't mean strictly recalling something verbatim.
- bowsamic 1y ago
  You have fallen into the very trap he is criticising: you are entirely focussed on the product and how it differs from other ones, and have no sense of your individual journey of thinking being relevant
- parodysbird 1y ago
  To emphasize again part of the post above: "The aim of our creation is communication and mutual-transformation". When I write a poem in a birthday card for my wife to give her on her birthday, very little of the "meaning" that will be communicated to (and more importantly with) her is really from some generic semantic interpretation of the tokens. Instead, almost all of the meaning will come from it being an actual personal expression in a shared social context. If I didn't grasp that second part, I might actually think that asking ChatGPT to write the poem and then copying it in my handwriting to give to her is about the same thing as if the same tokens written but from genuine personal creation. Over prolonged interaction, it could lead to a shared social context in which she generally treats certain things I say as little different than if ChatGPT returned them as output. Thus the shared social context and relationship is then degenerated and fairly inhuman (or "robotic" as the above post calls it).
  - jonplackett 1y ago
    Someone just the other day told me about how they used to have a group WhatsApp where they’d share these hand made memes. Just a bunch of guys photoshopping dumb stuff. It went on for years. One day one of them discovers AI and post anything made with AI - initially it’s great, it’s much better quality than what they could photoshop. Everyone jumps on board. But after a day or so, the joke is over. The love has gone. The whole things falls apart and no-one posts anything anymore. It turns out - as you say - that the meaning - founded on the insight and EFFORT to create it - was more important than the anccuracy and speed.
    - parodysbird 1y ago
      Oh yeah this is exactly how my group chats went. We still can post some good (in our context) memes and have fun, but not like an avalanche of poorly filtered slop. A joke for a group can still be crafted via an LLM when used judiciously and as intentionally as part of the bit. But by judicious it's important that the human is the one doing the sending and in the right moment, and so the human is still the one communicating. When WhatsApp originally inserted their AI bot in the chats, it got very annoying very quickly and we agreed to all never invoke it again. It's just a generative spam machine without the curation.
- jonplackett 1y ago
  I think you misunderstand the point. It’s about intention. Are you creating this thing for the purpose of transforming or communicating? Or are you just making it for some businessy reason. Yes, elves are derivative, as was a lot of the Tolkien world in a way - being intentionally based on ww1 - but its intention was to create something beautiful and amazing and communicative and transformational.
- vaylian 1y ago
  > Try to think of an object that doesn't exist, and isn't based on anything you've ever seen before, a completely new object with no basis in our reality. It's impossible. That's easy. The hard part is to explain it to other people, because we lack a shared background and terminology to explain it.
- abathologist 1y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Menard,_Author_of_the_Quixote https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Menard,_Author_of_the_Q...
emporas 1y ago
It is knowledge that gets automated, rather than reasoning. I was thinking of the first solar civilization, which lives totally in space. Near a star, but not in a planet, and no gravitational pull anywhere. They build tubes 10 km long, a shot board is put at one end, and the players at the other end. They shoot darts at the board, and each shot takes 5 hours to reach the target. That's their national sport. Problem is, I have never played darts, i don't know anyone who plays it, I will ask the LLM to fill in the blanks, of how a story based on that game could be constructed. Then I will add my own story on top of that, I will fix anything that doesn't fit in, add some stuff, remove some other stuff and so on. For me it saves time, instead of asking people about something, hearing them talk about it or watching them do it, i do data mining on words. Maybe more shallow than experiencing it myself or asking people who know about it first hand, but the time it takes to get some information good enough collapses down to 5 minutes. Depends on how you use it, it can enhance human capabilities, or indeed, mute them.
- jen729w 1y ago
  Oh turns out ChatGPT generates exactly the level of banality that one would expect. https://chatgpt.com/canvas/shared/6827fcdd3ec88191ab6a2f3297d53b9a https://chatgpt.com/canvas/shared/6827fcdd3ec88191ab6a2f3297... I don't want to read this story. I probably want to read one that a human author laboured over.
  - visarga 1y ago
    It would be a mistake to take the banality of current LLM outputs and extrapolate that into the future. Of course they are going to get better. But that is not the point - it is that in the chat room the human and LLM spark ideas off each other. Humans come with their own unique life experience and large context, LLMs come with their broad knowledge and skills.
    - aorloff 1y ago
      There is a Borges short story written in the 1930s about "the Library" a supposed collection of all possible permutations of language, even misspellings and gibberish. In many ways, it is extremely prescient of AI. To cut it short, in the end what Borges proposed is that the meaning comes from the stories, and that all the stories are really repetitions and permutations of the same set of humans stories (the Order) and that is what makes meaning. So all a successful literary AI needs to do is figure out how to retell the same stories we have been telling but in a different context that is resonant today. Simple right ?
bowsamic 1y ago
> I don't mean that their jobs will be automated: I mean that they will cede sapience and resign to becoming robotic. Exactly, there’s a huge section of humanity that actively wants to give away its humanity. They want to reduce themselves to nothing. Because, as you say, they cannot understand anything as having value other than economic artefacts
cameldrv 1y ago
I've personally noticed this as a big trend. For example, I had become more and more reliant on my GPS in the car. I've not really been the outer control loop of the vehicle. An automated system tells me what to do. I recently got a running watch. It suggests workouts that will help me improve my speed (which honestly I don't even care about!). If you turn it on it will blare at you if you're going too fast or too slow. When you use any social media, you're not really choosing what you're looking at. You just scroll and the site decides what you're going to look at next. Anyhow recently I've been reducing my usage of these things, and it's made me feel much better. Even navigating the car without the GPS makes me feel much more engaged and alive. Ultimately one of the core things that makes us human is making decisions for ourselves. When we cede this in the name of efficiency, we gain something but we also lose something. Marshall Brain wrote an interesting short book about this called Manna.
- empiricus 1y ago
  For GPS, I start by looking at the overall route, and compare with potential alternatives. Then during the driving the GPS just manages the local details, I still have some understanding and agency over where to go and how to get there.
  - immibis 1y ago
    I start by looking at the map. I go in the direction of the place I want to be. If I want to know the technically fastest route then I let my device calculate that. I don't always take that route. It's an assistant, not a boss. It's more interesting to walk down different streets sometimes. (And while I'm preaching to Americans, it's also good to walk down streets sometimes. It breaks away a few layers of abstraction that you have when driving.) Looking at the map actually helps you learn the city layout. As of right now (literally as I'm typing this) the train was delayed, so I chose to get off at the next big station before everyone crowds on, and walk the rest of the way. I can do this without checking a map because I know where it is and where I am, because I don't let the machine think for me. I don't drive (non-car-worshipping cities are amazing) but I do this when walking and also with train routes. I don't memorize the bus routes, since the train is better and has fewer routes, so I also sometimes ask my device for a route if I think there's a faster bus route than train (usually not the case).
whyage 1y ago
> The aim of our creation is communication and mutual-transformation That's a myopic point of view. Personal transformation is as significant, if not more. Production-oriented pastimes like painting, gardening, or organizing your stamp collection can do wonders for the mind. Their goals can be remaining sane in this crazy world, not producing the best painting ever, growing conversation-starting plants, or showing off your stamp collection. It's about doing for the sake of being.
- techno_tsar 1y ago
  I was thinking about how the point of reading isn't to literally 'internalize' what you've read. When you're engrossed in a piece of literature, you don't remember the specifics of the last page you read. What's more important is what the book is doing to your mind as you read -- it triggers a set of processes that force you to imagine and therefore form connections that you haven't made before, even if subtle and unrelated to the content of the book. It's the same with writing. Writing isn't just a way to produce a good piece of writing, it's what the process of writing does to your brain as you think aloud, connecting words and sentences together. The same with painting, gardening, and organizing your stamp collection. The final 'product' isn't actually important. The significance lies in the process of immersion from the creator and the people who witness it.
- abathologist 1y ago
  > Personal transformation is as significant, if not more I would include personal transformation. I think it should be clear that my point is not against "production-oriented pastimes" in any way. > It's about doing for the sake of being. Yea, this is totally aligned with my view too. I'd just note that being is not separable from becoming and changing. I'm afraid you either didn't read me well, or I didn't write my intended sense well, or both. But I think we are pretty much in agreement in any case, assuming I understand what you've written here :D
Aerbil313 1y ago
...The industrial-technological system may survive or it may break down. If it survives, it may eventually achieve a low level of physical and psychological suffering, but only after passing through a long and very painful period of adjustment and only at the cost of permanently reducing human beings and many other living organisms to engineered products and mere cogs in the social machine. Furthermore, if the system survives, the consequences will be inevitable: There is no way of reforming or modifying the system so as to prevent it from depriving people of dignity and autonomy. - Industrial Society And Its Future, Ted Kaczynski (1975)
- abathologist 1y ago
  As a matter of fact, I don't think its true that > if the system survives, the consequences will be inevitable: There is no way of reforming or modifying the system so as to prevent it from depriving people of dignity and autonomy. But I also think that this claim is (1) practically impossible to prove and (2) a claim we morally ought to attempt to disprove.
  - Aerbil313 1y ago
    Highly recommend to read the full manifesto. The reason is game theory for why human civilization will increasingly automate until human autonomy is reduced to nil, which is the state of suffering he is talking about. If you don't automate, $ENEMY will. So you automate. If you still choose to not automate, $ENEMY wins and controls you, and they will automate ever more with your resources. In fact, these 3 sentences are a good summary of past 1000 years of history, possibly more. See the recent AI 2027 paper (https://ai-2027.com/ https://ai-2027.com/) for a more detailed approach. And Kaczynski talked about this stuff in the 70s. For the (2), I want to ask where did you get the idea that people have a moral responsibility to unconditionally defend the progress of technology? Do you think new technologies' good or bad impact depend entirely on the virtue of the people using them? Do you think new tools dictate their own usage on society when they make contact with constants like immediate-reward-seeking human neurological system?
zaphirplane 1y ago
There are a lot simpler ways of expressing what you are trying to say. I played a bit taking the text feeding it to LLM to simplify then converting the simple version into a more dense complex wording. What’s the point of my post you ask ? I like stories - Homer Simpson
- abathologist 1y ago
  How do you know that generated text is actually a compression of what the author is trying to say?

fennecbutt 1y ago

99% if not 100% of human thought and general output is derivative. Everything we create or do is based on something we've experienced or seen. Try to think of an object that doesn't exist, and isn't based on anything you've ever seen before, a completely new object with no basis in our reality. It's impossible. Writers made elves by adding pointy ears to a human. That's it.

musicale 1y ago
> Writers made elves by adding pointy ears to a human. That's it. Humans have been interested in supernatural beings for thousands of years. Their appearance is usually less important than their powers and abilities. The word is present in Old English and Old Norse, and elves appear in Norse mythology.
alganet 1y ago
I'm not so sure about it. Maybe it's like that because there aren't many novel opportunities for varied experiences nowadays. The pointy ear sounds trivial in our experience, but it is radically different than ordinary everyday thought when observed as a piece of a whole imagined new world. Of course, pointy ears now are not a novelty anymore. But that's beyond the point. By the time they were conceived, human experience was already homogenized. The idea space for what an object is has been depleted by exploration. People already tried everything. It's kinda the same thing as saying that is impossible to come up with a new platonic solid (also an idea space that has been exhausted). Any novel thought is bound to be nameless at first, and it becomes novel by trying to use derivation to define an unknown observation, not as a basis for it.
- NobodytheHobbit 1y ago
  You're trying to expand the human experience instead of individual human experience which is really yours from your perspective and mine from my perspective if I can be redundant by enumerating. The frustration comes from the sacrifice of individual experience to this weird aggregated experience in the machine. It will push the capability of technology but does that service the aim of luxury made easy for the many to acquire as tech is supposed to do? What profit a person to gain the whole world but lose the very thing that makes themselves them? It feels systemically dehumanizing.
mr_toad 1y ago
> Writers made elves by adding pointy ears to a human. Now that’s reductionist to the point of being diminutive.
- TechDebtDevin 1y ago
  Its not, thats why the term humanoid exists.
- BobbyTables2 1y ago
  Hey, no need to get short! We should try to be the bigger person. That’s really the long and short of it.
- milliams 1y ago
  Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder. Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels. Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies. Elves are glamorous. They project glamour. Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment. Elves are terrific. They beget terror. The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning. No one ever said elves are nice. Elves are bad. ― Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies
DavidPiper 1y ago
That is a nonsense definition of creativity. The parent also wasn't suggesting - as far as I can read - that creativity is defined solely in the realm of the "truly novel" (or "isn't based on anything you've ever seen before"). All creativity is a conversation between our own ideas and what already exists. Consider the unused soundtrack to James Cameron's Avatar [0][1], where ethnomusicologists set out to create a kind of music that had never been heard before. They succeeded. But it was ultimately scrapped for the film because - by virtue of it being so different to any music anyone has ever heard before - it was not remotely accessible to audiences and the movie suffered as a result. To argue that work is not creative because it is still based on "music" is absurd. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tL5sX8VmvB8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tL5sX8VmvB8 [1] https://ethnomusicologyreview.ucla.edu/journal/volume/17/piece/583 https://ethnomusicologyreview.ucla.edu/journal/volume/17/pie...
- myko 1y ago
  Incredibly interesting, thanks for sharing
- fennecbutt 1y ago
  Where was I arguing that human output is not creative at all? Human creativity is for the most part derivative in some way, that is the nature of it and my point. I was contrasting it to illustrate why I think the idea that machines cannot be creative is wrong. Especially given that current models will only get more complex and nuanced in the future. I never said that humans cannot be creative because creativity is derivative at any point. We are engaging in another human pastime; tribalism.
musicale 1y ago
> Everything we create or do is based on something we've experienced or seen. I would add a couple of things to that. First, humans (like other animals) have instincts and feelings; even newborns can exhibit varying personality traits as well as fears and desires. It's certainly useful to fear things like spiders, snakes, or abandonment without prior experience. Second, an important part of experience is inner life - how you personally perceive, feel, and experience things. This may be very different from person to person.
- Andrex 1y ago
  What really fascinates me is gender based toy preferences at <2 years old. Very consistent that boys like race cars and action figures, even though it's their first exposure. (I do not participate in culture wars, this fact just straight up fascinates me as a non-masculine gay guy.)
  - socalgal2 1y ago
    I'd be curious how we know they aren't exposed - 1 year is a long time to see TV shows, TV commercials, toys with pictures of target audience, picture books, etc...
    - gitremote 1y ago
      Cars were invented in the early 1900s and the vast majority of human existence was in a world without cars. There cannot be an innate preference for cars, which were a very recent invention.
      - musicale 1y ago
        Toy cars (tiny wheeled carts) date back at least 5000 years, but tools/technology date to the dawn of humanity.
        gitremote 1y ago
        The spinning wheel (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_wheel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_wheel), which creates yarn from threads, existed longer than cars. I doubt you would argue that boys would have a preference for playing with toy versions these wheeled tools, given that women in various Western and Eastern cultures were the main users of these tools.
Tallain 1y ago
This is an alarmingly reductionist statement that I cannot believe is made in good faith. If it somehow is, it's based on an abundance of ignorance that only highlights the importance of education. Are you genuinely arguing that LLM output is derivative, and human output is derivative, therefore they're equal? Why don't you pop that thesis into ChatGPT and see how it answers.
- fennecbutt 1y ago
  Oh, is agreement binary? Are thoughts binary? I didn't realise that by comparing derivative human output to derivative machine output that I was inherently arguing that they are equally derivative at this point in time. It is true that human output has higher entropy, but that will not be the case forever.
MadcapJake 1y ago
> Try to think of an object that doesn't exist, and isn't based on anything you've ever seen before, a completely new object with no basis in our reality. It's impossible. This is an outrageous thought experiment. Novelty is creating new connections or perceiving things in new ways, you can't just say "try to have eureka moment, see! impossible". You can't prompt engineer your own brain. In fact, there's some research about eureka moments rewiring our brain. https://neurosciencenews.com/insight-memory-neuroscience-28921/ https://neurosciencenews.com/insight-memory-neuroscience-289...
voidhorse 1y ago
It astonishes me sometimes how completely stupid and reductive some HN takes on arts and creativity can be. I am astounded continually at how we can produce humans who are so capable in one sphere of life and so ignorant and oblivious of others...yet all too willing to make dismissive claims about them... Creativity is much more than the derivative production of artifacts. What the OP is driving at is that creativity is a process of human connection and communication—you can see this most clearly in the art of interpretation. A single literary work has an almost uncountable number of possible interpretations, and a huge element of its existence in the world as a price of art are the discussions and debates that emerge over those interpretations, and how they shape us as individuals, instill morals, etc etc. Quite a lot more than "making elves by adding pointy ears to humans". Your post stinks of the very gross consumerist mindset the OP called out. The creation and preservation of meaning is about way more than the production of fungible decontextualized objects--it's all about the mediation and maintenance of human relationships through artifacts. The fact that the elves have pointy ears doesn't even begin to scratch at their actual meaning (e.g. they exist in a world with very big real problems that effect you and me too, e.g. race relations, and exaggerated features estrange these relations so as to make them more discernible to us and allow us to finally see the water we swim in). If humans stop engaging with these processes, it's reasonable to believe that a lot of that semiotic richness, which is much of what, in my opinion, makes us human and not just super smart animals in the first place, will be lost.
- krelian 1y ago
  In full agreement with you on the flagrant incapability of a sizeable part of the HN crowd to understand and value of the arts. Throughout history man has been celebrated and distinguished as the rational animal. As master of the earth this animal in our days dedicates its brightest minds to the continual increase of economic growth. Ask the rational man what is growth good for and after a few exchanges they perhaps will say that it ultimately improves our quality of life and even extends it. If might even allow the human race to flourish beyond earth and thus prevail long after resources on earth are depleted. But ask him then why is improving the quality of life a good thing at all? Is it just a meaningless cycle in which we improve the quality of life so that we can then improve the quality of life even further? No. Ask an individual human (in contrast to the ultra rationalist who thinks they represent the human race as a whole) what they work for, what they strive to achieve, what does quality of life ultimately mean to them and you will end up with happy times spent among family and friends. With meaningful moments listening to music, watching a film, reading a book. About time spent in creative endeavors that are totally their own. The rational animal in its hubris forgot what it thinks for and trapped itself in an endless cycle where the true meaning of being human is hidden from the sight of many. But I think a wake up call is due very soon. The rational animal is about to discover the rationality it prides itself on was merely a sample of the true possibility. From the rational animal we have been relegated to another animal with some rational capability. As we slowly realize how futile are our attempts at thinking, we'll realize to our horror that the gift we are left with is the ability to recognize the futility and inadequacy of our attempts. Hopefully then we'll decide to retreat back into what truly makes us human, to what is ours, to what quality of life really means.
jen729w 1y ago
> Try to think of an object that doesn't exist, and isn't based on anything you've ever seen before, a completely new object with no basis in our reality. It's impossible. Pick up an Iain M. Banks book, my friend.
- fennecbutt 1y ago
  I have read plenty of his work. If you like his stuff I would recommend the quantum thief trilogy, and the void trilogy. I find many people haven't read them and they're great scifi.
Nevermark 1y ago
Go with 99.9%. But not 100%. Someone imagined space and time could be a deformed fabric. That was new. In minor and major ways, new ideas are found or emerge from searches for solutions to problems from science to art. Or exploration of things in new combinations or from a previously untapped viewpoint. Most people are not looking hard for anything beyond what they know. So not likely to find anything new. But many people try new things, or try to improve or vary something in a direction that is not easy, and learning something nonobvious and new is the “price” they must pay to succeed. Or a bonus they are paid for pushing through a thicket, even if they don’t succeed at what they set out to do.
- pwndByDeath 1y ago
  Not really new it came from observations or imagination of observed things.
  - Nevermark 1y ago
    General patterns don’t actually exist. We create a pattern from multiple observations. What is the point in saying there is nothing new,? So the word “new” is like “utopia”, with only a mythical aspirational meaning? History has never stopped proving how inane such an utterly unsupported opinion is. Just keep up with quantum physics. Constantly finding new strange counterintuitive effects that require intense research and explorations of combinations of ideas and imagination to envision. And then challenging invention of new highly artificially controlled conditions, not found in nature, to create. Mathematics as a profession is all about discovery of new things (from exploration) and invention (from imaginative questions and quests). Art produces new things all the time, but you have to have familiarity with art to see what is new. If all you see are materials and color you are not literate enough to read it. Anymore than a unique story is “just words”. For that matter, in slower timescales, nature has never stopped creating new creatures with new attributes or behaviors. Perhaps have you set your own sights much too low. Try doing something nobody has been able to do before, and sticking with it. You will discover something if you really do stick with it. Even understanding the barriers better than before reveals things, and forces new concepts into being.
bccdee 1y ago
No, that's not true. Quick, what's 51 plus 92? Now: Did you think back to a time someone else added these numbers together, or are you doing it yourself, right now, in your head? I'm sure it's not the first time these numbers have ever been summed, but that doesn't matter. You're doing it now, independently. Just because something isn't unique, doesn't make it derivative. We rediscover things every day.
- griffzhowl 1y ago
  Pointing out that we can mechanically apply an algorithm on novel inputs is possibly the worst defence of human creativity I can think of in this context.
  - bccdee 1y ago
    Good thing I'm not nebulously defending creativity, then. I'm directly replying to the notion that something is derivative if it is "based on something we've experienced or seen." The fact that rote math calculations are generally less original than creative expressions makes my argument stronger, not weaker.
    - griffzhowl 1y ago
      Right, but the general context of the thread is a discussion about how human thought or creative activity more generally contrasts with (current) machine capabilities. That's the sense in which I thought that adding two numbers is the worst example. It's notably the paradigmatic thing that machines are better at than any human
- treebirg 1y ago
  But I do know what numbers are. I've also done addition before, so I know what the steps are. The result of 51 + 92 is derivative from (at least) these two concepts, which derive from others and so on. Maybe I'm stretching the meaning of derivative here, but to me derivative doesn't mean strictly recalling something verbatim.
bowsamic 1y ago
You have fallen into the very trap he is criticising: you are entirely focussed on the product and how it differs from other ones, and have no sense of your individual journey of thinking being relevant
parodysbird 1y ago
To emphasize again part of the post above: "The aim of our creation is communication and mutual-transformation". When I write a poem in a birthday card for my wife to give her on her birthday, very little of the "meaning" that will be communicated to (and more importantly with) her is really from some generic semantic interpretation of the tokens. Instead, almost all of the meaning will come from it being an actual personal expression in a shared social context. If I didn't grasp that second part, I might actually think that asking ChatGPT to write the poem and then copying it in my handwriting to give to her is about the same thing as if the same tokens written but from genuine personal creation. Over prolonged interaction, it could lead to a shared social context in which she generally treats certain things I say as little different than if ChatGPT returned them as output. Thus the shared social context and relationship is then degenerated and fairly inhuman (or "robotic" as the above post calls it).
- jonplackett 1y ago
  Someone just the other day told me about how they used to have a group WhatsApp where they’d share these hand made memes. Just a bunch of guys photoshopping dumb stuff. It went on for years. One day one of them discovers AI and post anything made with AI - initially it’s great, it’s much better quality than what they could photoshop. Everyone jumps on board. But after a day or so, the joke is over. The love has gone. The whole things falls apart and no-one posts anything anymore. It turns out - as you say - that the meaning - founded on the insight and EFFORT to create it - was more important than the anccuracy and speed.
  - parodysbird 1y ago
    Oh yeah this is exactly how my group chats went. We still can post some good (in our context) memes and have fun, but not like an avalanche of poorly filtered slop. A joke for a group can still be crafted via an LLM when used judiciously and as intentionally as part of the bit. But by judicious it's important that the human is the one doing the sending and in the right moment, and so the human is still the one communicating. When WhatsApp originally inserted their AI bot in the chats, it got very annoying very quickly and we agreed to all never invoke it again. It's just a generative spam machine without the curation.
jonplackett 1y ago
I think you misunderstand the point. It’s about intention. Are you creating this thing for the purpose of transforming or communicating? Or are you just making it for some businessy reason. Yes, elves are derivative, as was a lot of the Tolkien world in a way - being intentionally based on ww1 - but its intention was to create something beautiful and amazing and communicative and transformational.
vaylian 1y ago
> Try to think of an object that doesn't exist, and isn't based on anything you've ever seen before, a completely new object with no basis in our reality. It's impossible. That's easy. The hard part is to explain it to other people, because we lack a shared background and terminology to explain it.
abathologist 1y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Menard,_Author_of_the_Quixote https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Menard,_Author_of_the_Q...

emporas 1y ago

It is knowledge that gets automated, rather than reasoning. I was thinking of the first solar civilization, which lives totally in space. Near a star, but not in a planet, and no gravitational pull anywhere. They build tubes 10 km long, a shot board is put at one end, and the players at the other end. They shoot darts at the board, and each shot takes 5 hours to reach the target. That's their national sport. Problem is, I have never played darts, i don't know anyone who plays it, I will ask the LLM to fill in the blanks, of how a story based on that game could be constructed. Then I will add my own story on top of that, I will fix anything that doesn't fit in, add some stuff, remove some other stuff and so on. For me it saves time, instead of asking people about something, hearing them talk about it or watching them do it, i do data mining on words. Maybe more shallow than experiencing it myself or asking people who know about it first hand, but the time it takes to get some information good enough collapses down to 5 minutes. Depends on how you use it, it can enhance human capabilities, or indeed, mute them.

jen729w 1y ago
Oh turns out ChatGPT generates exactly the level of banality that one would expect. https://chatgpt.com/canvas/shared/6827fcdd3ec88191ab6a2f3297d53b9a https://chatgpt.com/canvas/shared/6827fcdd3ec88191ab6a2f3297... I don't want to read this story. I probably want to read one that a human author laboured over.
- visarga 1y ago
  It would be a mistake to take the banality of current LLM outputs and extrapolate that into the future. Of course they are going to get better. But that is not the point - it is that in the chat room the human and LLM spark ideas off each other. Humans come with their own unique life experience and large context, LLMs come with their broad knowledge and skills.
  - aorloff 1y ago
    There is a Borges short story written in the 1930s about "the Library" a supposed collection of all possible permutations of language, even misspellings and gibberish. In many ways, it is extremely prescient of AI. To cut it short, in the end what Borges proposed is that the meaning comes from the stories, and that all the stories are really repetitions and permutations of the same set of humans stories (the Order) and that is what makes meaning. So all a successful literary AI needs to do is figure out how to retell the same stories we have been telling but in a different context that is resonant today. Simple right ?

bowsamic 1y ago

> I don't mean that their jobs will be automated: I mean that they will cede sapience and resign to becoming robotic. Exactly, there’s a huge section of humanity that actively wants to give away its humanity. They want to reduce themselves to nothing. Because, as you say, they cannot understand anything as having value other than economic artefacts

cameldrv 1y ago

I've personally noticed this as a big trend. For example, I had become more and more reliant on my GPS in the car. I've not really been the outer control loop of the vehicle. An automated system tells me what to do. I recently got a running watch. It suggests workouts that will help me improve my speed (which honestly I don't even care about!). If you turn it on it will blare at you if you're going too fast or too slow. When you use any social media, you're not really choosing what you're looking at. You just scroll and the site decides what you're going to look at next. Anyhow recently I've been reducing my usage of these things, and it's made me feel much better. Even navigating the car without the GPS makes me feel much more engaged and alive. Ultimately one of the core things that makes us human is making decisions for ourselves. When we cede this in the name of efficiency, we gain something but we also lose something. Marshall Brain wrote an interesting short book about this called Manna.

empiricus 1y ago
For GPS, I start by looking at the overall route, and compare with potential alternatives. Then during the driving the GPS just manages the local details, I still have some understanding and agency over where to go and how to get there.
- immibis 1y ago
  I start by looking at the map. I go in the direction of the place I want to be. If I want to know the technically fastest route then I let my device calculate that. I don't always take that route. It's an assistant, not a boss. It's more interesting to walk down different streets sometimes. (And while I'm preaching to Americans, it's also good to walk down streets sometimes. It breaks away a few layers of abstraction that you have when driving.) Looking at the map actually helps you learn the city layout. As of right now (literally as I'm typing this) the train was delayed, so I chose to get off at the next big station before everyone crowds on, and walk the rest of the way. I can do this without checking a map because I know where it is and where I am, because I don't let the machine think for me. I don't drive (non-car-worshipping cities are amazing) but I do this when walking and also with train routes. I don't memorize the bus routes, since the train is better and has fewer routes, so I also sometimes ask my device for a route if I think there's a faster bus route than train (usually not the case).

whyage 1y ago

> The aim of our creation is communication and mutual-transformation That's a myopic point of view. Personal transformation is as significant, if not more. Production-oriented pastimes like painting, gardening, or organizing your stamp collection can do wonders for the mind. Their goals can be remaining sane in this crazy world, not producing the best painting ever, growing conversation-starting plants, or showing off your stamp collection. It's about doing for the sake of being.

techno_tsar 1y ago
I was thinking about how the point of reading isn't to literally 'internalize' what you've read. When you're engrossed in a piece of literature, you don't remember the specifics of the last page you read. What's more important is what the book is doing to your mind as you read -- it triggers a set of processes that force you to imagine and therefore form connections that you haven't made before, even if subtle and unrelated to the content of the book. It's the same with writing. Writing isn't just a way to produce a good piece of writing, it's what the process of writing does to your brain as you think aloud, connecting words and sentences together. The same with painting, gardening, and organizing your stamp collection. The final 'product' isn't actually important. The significance lies in the process of immersion from the creator and the people who witness it.
abathologist 1y ago
> Personal transformation is as significant, if not more I would include personal transformation. I think it should be clear that my point is not against "production-oriented pastimes" in any way. > It's about doing for the sake of being. Yea, this is totally aligned with my view too. I'd just note that being is not separable from becoming and changing. I'm afraid you either didn't read me well, or I didn't write my intended sense well, or both. But I think we are pretty much in agreement in any case, assuming I understand what you've written here :D

Aerbil313 1y ago

...The industrial-technological system may survive or it may break down. If it survives, it may eventually achieve a low level of physical and psychological suffering, but only after passing through a long and very painful period of adjustment and only at the cost of permanently reducing human beings and many other living organisms to engineered products and mere cogs in the social machine. Furthermore, if the system survives, the consequences will be inevitable: There is no way of reforming or modifying the system so as to prevent it from depriving people of dignity and autonomy. - Industrial Society And Its Future, Ted Kaczynski (1975)

abathologist 1y ago
As a matter of fact, I don't think its true that > if the system survives, the consequences will be inevitable: There is no way of reforming or modifying the system so as to prevent it from depriving people of dignity and autonomy. But I also think that this claim is (1) practically impossible to prove and (2) a claim we morally ought to attempt to disprove.
- Aerbil313 1y ago
  Highly recommend to read the full manifesto. The reason is game theory for why human civilization will increasingly automate until human autonomy is reduced to nil, which is the state of suffering he is talking about. If you don't automate, $ENEMY will. So you automate. If you still choose to not automate, $ENEMY wins and controls you, and they will automate ever more with your resources. In fact, these 3 sentences are a good summary of past 1000 years of history, possibly more. See the recent AI 2027 paper (https://ai-2027.com/ https://ai-2027.com/) for a more detailed approach. And Kaczynski talked about this stuff in the 70s. For the (2), I want to ask where did you get the idea that people have a moral responsibility to unconditionally defend the progress of technology? Do you think new technologies' good or bad impact depend entirely on the virtue of the people using them? Do you think new tools dictate their own usage on society when they make contact with constants like immediate-reward-seeking human neurological system?

zaphirplane 1y ago

There are a lot simpler ways of expressing what you are trying to say. I played a bit taking the text feeding it to LLM to simplify then converting the simple version into a more dense complex wording. What’s the point of my post you ask ? I like stories - Homer Simpson

abathologist 1y ago
How do you know that generated text is actually a compression of what the author is trying to say?