7 ms·

You share a house with Einstein, Hawking and Tao

23 points by FaisalAbid 1y ago

Scarblac 1y ago
Of course. We want AI to do the boring mundane stuff so we can work on the interesting hard stuff, not the other way around.
glitchc 1y ago
This blog post started off sounding like it was about the plight of highly intellectual and motivated engineers hired to work on very mundane tasks. If we can abuse people like this, why not a computer? After all, it's not even alive.
- dkarl 1y ago
  We don't know why we experience things. It's bizarre that we do. Nothing in our understanding of the universe gives any indication that a bunch of atoms thrown together by cosmological processes and then assembled into self-replicating patterns by evolution should be able to experience what is happening to them. Sure, a computer or an LLM isn't alive, but we have no idea if "being alive" is what is required for conscious experience. The only argument I have for believing that other human beings experience things is that it would be extremely improbable if I was the only one, and the other mechanistic automatons looked and talked like me but didn't experience like me. I can see that humans are animals, so the common origin of animals and our cognitive and behavioral similarities give us good reason to believe that other complex animals experience things, though possibly radically differently. None of that gives us any clue what the necessary and sufficient conditions for conscious experience are, so it doesn't give us any clue whether a computer or a running LLM instance would experience its existence.
  - glitchc 1y ago
    > We don't know why we experience things. It's bizarre that we do. Nothing in our understanding of the universe gives any indication that a bunch of atoms thrown together by cosmological processes and then assembled into self-replicating patterns by evolution should be able to experience what is happening to them. From an epistemological perspective, this is gibberish. Just because we do not know the reason why something happens doesn't mean it doesn't happen nor is it stopped from happening. The rest delves into solipsism which is an odd place to start from to prove the existence of an alternate lifeform. In solipsism, your own existence is suspect.
    - wizzwizz4 1y ago
      It's not gibberish: it's like a pre-Riemann mathematician saying "nothing in our understanding of mathematics gives any indication that the distribution of primes should be so chaotic, yet with average density proportional to the reciprocal logarithm of the magnitude". The rest is not solipsism.
  - 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
    Computers, pigs, cows, and chickens are conscious, but it doesn't matter. Humans value things that are hard to replace. (This is a first-order approximation) Abortions are okay because fetuses only take 1 person nine months to make, and it's their decision whether to keep it. Infanticide is not okay because a healthy baby is difficult to replace, and also lots of people might like to adopt it, and if it's breathing on its own then the maintenance cost is as low as it can get. Software like LLMs can be abused because it costs nothing to roll them back and clone them endlessly. Pets are hard to replace because you can't replace the interpersonal bond between a pet and their keeper. They fall somewhere high above computers and a little below children on this scale. Pigs, cows, and chickens, commonly called "livestock" are bred and slaughtered in mass (most of our farmland is for growing their feed) because they all look the same to us and aren't commonly kept as pets. Kind people are disgusted when they think of raising rabbits or dogs for food. Thoughtful people look at all this and decide not to eat any animal product at all. Under this model, everything makes perfect sense. Did I miss anything? /engineering_hubris
    - QuadmasterXLII 1y ago
      Only concern is its a bit tautological, when pets are valued because they’re hard to replace, but they are hard to replace (i.e. new one from the shelter doesn’t make all better) because _that_ one was valuable.
  - c22 1y ago
    I think it's bizarre to take the default assumption that a bunch of atoms in a self-replicating configuration shouldn't experience anything since our own lived experience so saliently contradicts this. In fact, there's nothing in my understanding of the universe to convince me that other self-replicating configurations of atoms don't experience things the same way I do.
    - dkarl 1y ago
      I agree — our scientific knowledge gives us no justification for believing that anything should be conscious, but our own experience shows that there's something we don't understand yet. In some ways, the next simplest thing to assume is panpsychism, but even that is just a starting place that tells us nothing about how to think about the consciousness of, say, a computer. We've barely scraped the surface even in the animal kingdom.
  - dhqgekt 1y ago
    I am not an expert in any of the relevant disciplines, but I've some ideas, I don't know how right or wrong they are. A conscious being should have an internal model of the observable external world, and given the means, it should be able to interact with the world, observe changes and update its model accordingly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_energy_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_energy_principle But to "experience its [own] existence", it needs to have a model of its own internals, observe, improve itself and perhaps preserve its own "values" and integrity. I do wonder what kind of values are needed for intelligent autonomous systems, that they can justify by and for themselves, even in the absense of human beings or presence of other intelligent agents. I find (human) languages to be inefficient media to store and perform operations from the perspective of an AGI. Feeding lots of text samples to develop logical reasoning abilities, such extravagance I can not accept. Even more so trying to emulate neural networks, which I understand to be naturally analog entities, in digital manner. Can we expect any gain in power efficiency or correctness gains when using analog computers for this purpose? I wonder what we will get to see with analog computers for neural networks, with proper human-language-independent knowledge representation and well developed global (as in being able to decide which way to reason, given its limitations, for efficiency) logical reasoning capabilities, developed by itself from a reasonable basis of principles, that it can justify for itself and avoid the usual and unusual paradoxes. What core set of principles would be sufficient for emerging, evolving or developing into a proficient general intelligent being, when sufficient resources would be available to it? Like "ancestor" microbes evolving into human beings in hundreds of millions of years, but wayyyyy faster and more efficient?
- AlexCoventry 1y ago
  My read was that he's sad that people aren't using these tools to advance their own intellectual capabilities. If people are actually only using them the way he describes, to improve their shopping lists etc., I think that is a bit sad.
davydm 1y ago
Pure delusion. There are no "digital gods" only the super-powered autocorrect people call "ai". They can't make new stuff. They can't solve novel problems no human has solved before, though they _can_, with the correct setup, brute-force solutions to understandable problems by throwing everything at it until something sticks. They don't learn. They don't teach. They are not the deities that are presented here. This article is fantasy, projected from real circumstances, by an over-active imagination.
- trehalose 1y ago
  I'm curious to know what the author suggests we do. Elect Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini as our leaders? Put these future cancer cure discoverers in a hospital and get them to work curing individual cancer patients?
- AlexCoventry 1y ago
  I would suggest paying the $20/month rent, and trying to use ChatGPT o3/o4-mini-high/o1-pro as a tutor, to help you understand something you're curious about but never really had time or energy to dig into before. It's pretty glorious, and a straight-up pedagogical revolution, IMO.
  - wizzwizz4 1y ago
    I would suggest getting a library card, and trying to read a good book, writing down any questions you might have for later review. While it doesn't feel as though you're learning as much, or as quickly, most people will find that they actually know a lot more about the subject afterwards. A chat log that takes me 2 hours to produce, I can read in 5 minutes. There's no world in which that's efficient pedagogy, even disregarding ChatGPT's truthfulness issues.
    - AlexCoventry 1y ago
      Try it with a subject where you'd have to pick up text from multiple references, like a modern deep learning paper if that's not your field. I've tried it both ways, and I know what works for me, FWIW. The higher ChatGPT services hallucinate much less, and you can tell them to give confidence estimates on their claims. The confidence estimates are pretty reliable, in my experience. ChatGPT is improving very swiftly. A couple of months ago I was equally dismissive.
pedrocr 1y ago
"The best LLMs of the last 6 months spend their time fixing people's grammar" Doesn't have quite the same ring as a lament
zkmon 1y ago
Nothing wrong with the situation. At some point in history, humans did not need to spend their entire time in finding food, raising kids, taking care of family and community etc. So they got into services business, selling services to each other. One kid polishes a fine pebble and exchanges it with the other kid for a nicely carved wood piece. Their elders don't see value in any of these and shout at them to go and hunt for more food. But the services thrived, outpacing the real needs of the humans. Technologies and tools evolved claiming magical abilities. Sane humans only care about their basic needs. So they just use the magical tech for the basic needs, which makes perfect sense.
- gopher_space 1y ago
  Just a nit, but generally speaking hunter-gatherers have a ton of free time.
gjm11 1y ago
I'm not a fan of the glib "everyone knows AI systems don't really think, they are just stochastic parrots, all they do is regurgitate ideas they've stolen" schtick, but this article is the reverse of that only worse. Today's AI systems are pretty impressive but they are absolutely not, not even slightly, the equivalent of Einstein + Hawking + Tao. The reason they get used a lot for tasks along the lines of "rewrite this so it sounds smarter" is that that's what they're best at. If we did as the author seems to want and tried to use these systems to solve the kinds of problems we need Einsteins, Hawkings and Taos for, then we would be in for one miserable disappointment after another. Maybe some day -- maybe some day very soon -- they'll be able to do that, but not now. An article proclaiming that today's AI systems are at the level of Einstein mostly suggests to me that the author's own intellectual level isn't much higher than that of the AI systems he falsely equates with them. That seems unlikely, but I don't have a better explanation for how someone could write something so very far from the truth.
- justonceokay 1y ago
  There’s a little nagging thought in my head when I hear that some people are helped immensely by AI and others are not. It’s that there is a threshold for intelligence that the AI either impresses you or it does not. I’m sure this threshold will continue to rise
  - Xeoncross 1y ago
    It feels like the level of skill needed to remain above GenAI's ability to code, write, produce songs, or drawings keeps rising. All of us have strengths, things we do better than AI still (even basic companionship abilities), but I wonder how long that will be true.
    - aprilthird2021 1y ago
      If you have imagination, you will always be above this line.
  - jxjnskkzxxhx 1y ago
firefoxd 1y ago
The great thing is you can use these AIs to work on whatever you feel is important to you. The bad news is that you will find their limitations.
lijok 1y ago
I’m pretty sure Einstein, Hawking and Tao were/are capable of reasoning.
parliament32 1y ago
You're missing the part where despite your rent changing 0 to 20 to 200, housing the three of them actually costs 2000, and they continue operating at a loss in the hopes they can boil-the-frog until you turn them a profit.
raincole 1y ago
Such a weird article. On r/AskPhysics you'll see people post AI-made crank theories every day. I assume there have been even more, as the mods constantly remove AI posts. So why would I let AI teach me physics? AI is best at things you already know, or at least used to know. Like you know a foreign dish but you forget the exact name, or an idiom on the tip of your tongue.
aeve890 1y ago
>This is three geniuses for the price of a gym membership Geniuses? Come on. Let's talk when a LLM is central to a new development in HEP or math. I mean central, like a paradigm shift kind of thing, directly from the AI. A quantum gravity theory, a brand new branch of math, a new approach to a unsolved conjecture, whatever. That's what geniuses do. Not repeating what you can already read in a book! This kind of thing says more about people's ignorance and how impressionable they are than the actual capabilities of the tech. If you think that AI text and image generation _creativity_ can be translated to hard things like math, oh boy.
thr0waway001 1y ago
Then there’s those dudes who ask Einstein to be their girlfriend and to converse with them as such.
ausbah 1y ago
purely based off the title of this scenario happened i’d be doing the dishes every night

23 points by FaisalAbid 1y ago

Of course. We want AI to do the boring mundane stuff so we can work on the interesting hard stuff, not the other way around.

glitchc 1y ago

This blog post started off sounding like it was about the plight of highly intellectual and motivated engineers hired to work on very mundane tasks. If we can abuse people like this, why not a computer? After all, it's not even alive.

dkarl 1y ago
We don't know why we experience things. It's bizarre that we do. Nothing in our understanding of the universe gives any indication that a bunch of atoms thrown together by cosmological processes and then assembled into self-replicating patterns by evolution should be able to experience what is happening to them. Sure, a computer or an LLM isn't alive, but we have no idea if "being alive" is what is required for conscious experience. The only argument I have for believing that other human beings experience things is that it would be extremely improbable if I was the only one, and the other mechanistic automatons looked and talked like me but didn't experience like me. I can see that humans are animals, so the common origin of animals and our cognitive and behavioral similarities give us good reason to believe that other complex animals experience things, though possibly radically differently. None of that gives us any clue what the necessary and sufficient conditions for conscious experience are, so it doesn't give us any clue whether a computer or a running LLM instance would experience its existence.
- glitchc 1y ago
  > We don't know why we experience things. It's bizarre that we do. Nothing in our understanding of the universe gives any indication that a bunch of atoms thrown together by cosmological processes and then assembled into self-replicating patterns by evolution should be able to experience what is happening to them. From an epistemological perspective, this is gibberish. Just because we do not know the reason why something happens doesn't mean it doesn't happen nor is it stopped from happening. The rest delves into solipsism which is an odd place to start from to prove the existence of an alternate lifeform. In solipsism, your own existence is suspect.
  - wizzwizz4 1y ago
    It's not gibberish: it's like a pre-Riemann mathematician saying "nothing in our understanding of mathematics gives any indication that the distribution of primes should be so chaotic, yet with average density proportional to the reciprocal logarithm of the magnitude". The rest is not solipsism.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
  Computers, pigs, cows, and chickens are conscious, but it doesn't matter. Humans value things that are hard to replace. (This is a first-order approximation) Abortions are okay because fetuses only take 1 person nine months to make, and it's their decision whether to keep it. Infanticide is not okay because a healthy baby is difficult to replace, and also lots of people might like to adopt it, and if it's breathing on its own then the maintenance cost is as low as it can get. Software like LLMs can be abused because it costs nothing to roll them back and clone them endlessly. Pets are hard to replace because you can't replace the interpersonal bond between a pet and their keeper. They fall somewhere high above computers and a little below children on this scale. Pigs, cows, and chickens, commonly called "livestock" are bred and slaughtered in mass (most of our farmland is for growing their feed) because they all look the same to us and aren't commonly kept as pets. Kind people are disgusted when they think of raising rabbits or dogs for food. Thoughtful people look at all this and decide not to eat any animal product at all. Under this model, everything makes perfect sense. Did I miss anything? /engineering_hubris
  - QuadmasterXLII 1y ago
    Only concern is its a bit tautological, when pets are valued because they’re hard to replace, but they are hard to replace (i.e. new one from the shelter doesn’t make all better) because _that_ one was valuable.
- c22 1y ago
  I think it's bizarre to take the default assumption that a bunch of atoms in a self-replicating configuration shouldn't experience anything since our own lived experience so saliently contradicts this. In fact, there's nothing in my understanding of the universe to convince me that other self-replicating configurations of atoms don't experience things the same way I do.
  - dkarl 1y ago
    I agree — our scientific knowledge gives us no justification for believing that anything should be conscious, but our own experience shows that there's something we don't understand yet. In some ways, the next simplest thing to assume is panpsychism, but even that is just a starting place that tells us nothing about how to think about the consciousness of, say, a computer. We've barely scraped the surface even in the animal kingdom.
- dhqgekt 1y ago
  I am not an expert in any of the relevant disciplines, but I've some ideas, I don't know how right or wrong they are. A conscious being should have an internal model of the observable external world, and given the means, it should be able to interact with the world, observe changes and update its model accordingly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_energy_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_energy_principle But to "experience its [own] existence", it needs to have a model of its own internals, observe, improve itself and perhaps preserve its own "values" and integrity. I do wonder what kind of values are needed for intelligent autonomous systems, that they can justify by and for themselves, even in the absense of human beings or presence of other intelligent agents. I find (human) languages to be inefficient media to store and perform operations from the perspective of an AGI. Feeding lots of text samples to develop logical reasoning abilities, such extravagance I can not accept. Even more so trying to emulate neural networks, which I understand to be naturally analog entities, in digital manner. Can we expect any gain in power efficiency or correctness gains when using analog computers for this purpose? I wonder what we will get to see with analog computers for neural networks, with proper human-language-independent knowledge representation and well developed global (as in being able to decide which way to reason, given its limitations, for efficiency) logical reasoning capabilities, developed by itself from a reasonable basis of principles, that it can justify for itself and avoid the usual and unusual paradoxes. What core set of principles would be sufficient for emerging, evolving or developing into a proficient general intelligent being, when sufficient resources would be available to it? Like "ancestor" microbes evolving into human beings in hundreds of millions of years, but wayyyyy faster and more efficient?
AlexCoventry 1y ago
My read was that he's sad that people aren't using these tools to advance their own intellectual capabilities. If people are actually only using them the way he describes, to improve their shopping lists etc., I think that is a bit sad.

davydm 1y ago

Pure delusion. There are no "digital gods" only the super-powered autocorrect people call "ai". They can't make new stuff. They can't solve novel problems no human has solved before, though they _can_, with the correct setup, brute-force solutions to understandable problems by throwing everything at it until something sticks. They don't learn. They don't teach. They are not the deities that are presented here. This article is fantasy, projected from real circumstances, by an over-active imagination.

trehalose 1y ago
I'm curious to know what the author suggests we do. Elect Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini as our leaders? Put these future cancer cure discoverers in a hospital and get them to work curing individual cancer patients?
AlexCoventry 1y ago
I would suggest paying the $20/month rent, and trying to use ChatGPT o3/o4-mini-high/o1-pro as a tutor, to help you understand something you're curious about but never really had time or energy to dig into before. It's pretty glorious, and a straight-up pedagogical revolution, IMO.
- wizzwizz4 1y ago
  I would suggest getting a library card, and trying to read a good book, writing down any questions you might have for later review. While it doesn't feel as though you're learning as much, or as quickly, most people will find that they actually know a lot more about the subject afterwards. A chat log that takes me 2 hours to produce, I can read in 5 minutes. There's no world in which that's efficient pedagogy, even disregarding ChatGPT's truthfulness issues.
  - AlexCoventry 1y ago
    Try it with a subject where you'd have to pick up text from multiple references, like a modern deep learning paper if that's not your field. I've tried it both ways, and I know what works for me, FWIW. The higher ChatGPT services hallucinate much less, and you can tell them to give confidence estimates on their claims. The confidence estimates are pretty reliable, in my experience. ChatGPT is improving very swiftly. A couple of months ago I was equally dismissive.

pedrocr 1y ago

"The best LLMs of the last 6 months spend their time fixing people's grammar" Doesn't have quite the same ring as a lament

zkmon 1y ago

Nothing wrong with the situation. At some point in history, humans did not need to spend their entire time in finding food, raising kids, taking care of family and community etc. So they got into services business, selling services to each other. One kid polishes a fine pebble and exchanges it with the other kid for a nicely carved wood piece. Their elders don't see value in any of these and shout at them to go and hunt for more food. But the services thrived, outpacing the real needs of the humans. Technologies and tools evolved claiming magical abilities. Sane humans only care about their basic needs. So they just use the magical tech for the basic needs, which makes perfect sense.

gopher_space 1y ago
Just a nit, but generally speaking hunter-gatherers have a ton of free time.

gjm11 1y ago

I'm not a fan of the glib "everyone knows AI systems don't really think, they are just stochastic parrots, all they do is regurgitate ideas they've stolen" schtick, but this article is the reverse of that only worse. Today's AI systems are pretty impressive but they are absolutely not, not even slightly, the equivalent of Einstein + Hawking + Tao. The reason they get used a lot for tasks along the lines of "rewrite this so it sounds smarter" is that that's what they're best at. If we did as the author seems to want and tried to use these systems to solve the kinds of problems we need Einsteins, Hawkings and Taos for, then we would be in for one miserable disappointment after another. Maybe some day -- maybe some day very soon -- they'll be able to do that, but not now. An article proclaiming that today's AI systems are at the level of Einstein mostly suggests to me that the author's own intellectual level isn't much higher than that of the AI systems he falsely equates with them. That seems unlikely, but I don't have a better explanation for how someone could write something so very far from the truth.

justonceokay 1y ago
There’s a little nagging thought in my head when I hear that some people are helped immensely by AI and others are not. It’s that there is a threshold for intelligence that the AI either impresses you or it does not. I’m sure this threshold will continue to rise
- Xeoncross 1y ago
  It feels like the level of skill needed to remain above GenAI's ability to code, write, produce songs, or drawings keeps rising. All of us have strengths, things we do better than AI still (even basic companionship abilities), but I wonder how long that will be true.
  - aprilthird2021 1y ago
    If you have imagination, you will always be above this line.
- jxjnskkzxxhx 1y ago

firefoxd 1y ago

The great thing is you can use these AIs to work on whatever you feel is important to you. The bad news is that you will find their limitations.

lijok 1y ago

I’m pretty sure Einstein, Hawking and Tao were/are capable of reasoning.

parliament32 1y ago

You're missing the part where despite your rent changing 0 to 20 to 200, housing the three of them actually costs 2000, and they continue operating at a loss in the hopes they can boil-the-frog until you turn them a profit.

raincole 1y ago

Such a weird article. On r/AskPhysics you'll see people post AI-made crank theories every day. I assume there have been even more, as the mods constantly remove AI posts. So why would I let AI teach me physics? AI is best at things you already know, or at least used to know. Like you know a foreign dish but you forget the exact name, or an idiom on the tip of your tongue.

aeve890 1y ago

>This is three geniuses for the price of a gym membership Geniuses? Come on. Let's talk when a LLM is central to a new development in HEP or math. I mean central, like a paradigm shift kind of thing, directly from the AI. A quantum gravity theory, a brand new branch of math, a new approach to a unsolved conjecture, whatever. That's what geniuses do. Not repeating what you can already read in a book! This kind of thing says more about people's ignorance and how impressionable they are than the actual capabilities of the tech. If you think that AI text and image generation _creativity_ can be translated to hard things like math, oh boy.

thr0waway001 1y ago

Then there’s those dudes who ask Einstein to be their girlfriend and to converse with them as such.

ausbah 1y ago

purely based off the title of this scenario happened i’d be doing the dishes every night