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I don't know why I am still perpetually shocked that the default assumption is that humans are somehow unique. It's this pervasive belief that underlies so muc

I don't know why I am still perpetually shocked that the default assumption is that humans are somehow unique. It's this pervasive belief that underlies so much discussion around what it means to be intelligent. The null hypothesis goes out the window. People constantly make comments like "well it's just trying a bunch of stuff until something works" and it seems that they do not pause for a moment to consider whether or not that also applies to humans. If they do, they apply it in only the most restrictive way imaginable, some 2 dimensional caricature of reality, rather than considering all the ways that humans try and fail in all things throughout their lifetimes in the process of learning and discovery. There's still this seeming belief in magic and human exceptionalism, deeply held, even in communities that otherwise tend to revolve around the sciences and the empirical.

slopinthebag 7mo ago
> I don't know why I am still perpetually shocked that the default assumption is that humans are somehow unique. Uh, because up until and including now, we are...?
- virgildotcodes 7mo ago
  Every living thing on Earth is unique. Every rock is unique in virtually infinite ways from the next otherwise identical rock. There are also a tremendous number of similarities between all living things and between rocks (and between rocks and living things). Most ways in which things are unique are arguably uninteresting. The default mode, the null hypothesis should be to assume that human intelligence isn't interestingly unique unless it can be proven otherwise. In these repeated discussions around AI, there is criticism over the way an AI solves a problem, without any actual critical thought about the way humans solve problems. The latter is left up to the assumption that "of course humans do X differently" and if you press you invariably end up at something couched in a vague mysticism about our inner-workings. Humans apparently create something from nothing, without the recombination of any prior knowledge or outside information, and they get it right on the first try. Through what, divine inspiration from the God who made us and only us in His image?
  - slopinthebag 7mo ago
    I doubt you can even define intelligence sufficiently to argue this point. Since that's an ongoing debate without a resolution thus far. But you claimed that humans aren't unique. I think it's pretty obvious we are on many dimensions including what you might classify as "intelligence". You don't even necessarily have to believe in a "soul" or something like that, although many people do. The capabilities of a human far surpass every single AI to date, and much more efficiently as well. That we are able to brute-force a simulacrum of intelligence in a few narrow domains is incredible, but we should not denigrate humans when celebrating this. > There's still this seeming belief in magic and human exceptionalism, deeply held, even in communities that otherwise tend to revolve around the sciences and the empirical. Do you ever wonder why that is? I often wonder why tech has so many reductionist, materialist, and quite frankly anti-human, thinkers.
    - blackcatsec 7mo ago
      > I often wonder why tech has so many reductionist, materialist, and quite frankly anti-human, thinkers. I think it comes from a position of arrogance/ego. I'll speak for the US here, since that's what I know the most; but the average 'techie' in general skews towards the higher intelligence numbers than the lower parts. This is a very, very broad stroke, and that's intentional to illustrate my point. Because of this, techie culture gains quite a bit of arrogance around it with regards to the masses. And this has been trained into tech culture since childhood. Whether it be adults praising us for being "so smart", or that we "figured out the VCR", or some other random tech problem that literally almost any human being can solve by simply reading the manual. What I've found, in the vast majority of technical problem solving cases that average people have challenges with, if they just took a few minutes to read a manual they'd be able to solve a lot of it themselves. In short, I don't believe as a very strong techie that I'm "smarter than most", but rather that I've taken the time to dive into a subject area that most other humans do not feel the need nor desire to do so. There are objectively hard problems in tech to solve, but the amount of people solving THOSE problems in the tech industry are few and far in between. And so the tech industry as a whole has spent the last decade or two spinning circles on increasingly complex systems to continue feeding their own egos about their own intelligence. We're now at a point that rather than solving the puzzle, most techies are creating incrementally complex puzzles to solve because they're bored of the puzzles that are in front of them. "Let me solve that puzzle by making a puzzle solver." "Okay, now let me make a puzzle solver creation tool to create puzzle solvers to solve the puzzle." and so forth and so forth. At the end of the day, you're still just solving a puzzle... But it's this arrogance that really bothers me in the tech bro culture world. And, more importantly, at least in some tech bro circles, they have realized that their target to gathering an exponential increase in wealth doesn't lie in creating new and novel ways to solve the same puzzles, but to try and tout AI as the greatest puzzle solver creation tool puzzle solver known to man (and let me grift off of it for a little bit).
snemvalts 7mo ago
The ability to learn and infer without absorbing millions of books and all text on internet really does make us special. And only at 20 watts!
- famouswaffles 7mo ago
  Last I checked humans didn't pop into existence doing that. It happened after billions of years of brute force, trial and error evolution. So well done for falling into the exact same trap the OP cautions. Intelligence from scratch requires a mind boggling amount of resources, and humans were no different.
  - sweezyjeezy 7mo ago
    To be fair, it is still pretty remarkable what the human brain does, especially in early years - there is no text embedded in the brain, just a crazily efficient mechanism to learn hierarchical systems. As far as I know, AI intelligence cannot do anything similar to this - it generally relies on giga-scaling, or finetuning tasks similar to those it already knows. Regardless of how this arose, or if it's relevant to AGI, this is still a uniqueness of sorts.
    - int_19h 7mo ago
      Human babies "train" their brain on literally gigabytes of multi-modal data dumped on them through all their sensory organs every second. In a very real sense, our magic superpower is that we "giga-scale" with such low resource consumption, especially considering how large (in terms of parameters) the brain is compared to even the most advanced models we have running on those thousands of GPUs today. But that's where all those millions of years of evolution pay off. Don't diss the wetware!
  - suddenlybananas 7mo ago
    Do you think evolutionary pressures are the best explanation for why humans were able to posit the Poincaré conjecture and solve it? While our mental architecture evolved over a very long time, we still learn from miniscule amounts of data compared to LLMs.
conz 7mo ago
Re: "I don't know why I am still perpetually shocked that the default assumption is that humans are somehow unique." Perhaps this might better help you understand why this assumption still holds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reducti...
- staticassertion 7mo ago
  It doesn't. I actually completely reject that theory, and it's nice to see that Wikipedia notes that it is "controversial". There are extremely good reasons to reject this theory. For one thing, any quantum effects are going to be quite tiny/ trivial because the brain is too large, hot, wet, etc, to see larger effects, so you have to somehow make a leap to "tiny effects that last for no time at all" to "this matters fundamentally in some massive way". It likely requires rejection of functionalism, or the acceptance that quantum states are required for certain functions. Both of those are heavy commitments with the latter implying that there are either functions that require structures that can't be instantiated without quantum effects or functions that can't be emulated without quantum effects, both of which seem extremely unlikely to me. Probably for the far more important reason, it doesn't solve any problem. It's just "quantum woo, therefor libertarian free will" most of the time. It's mostly garbage, maybe a tiny tiny bit of interesting stuff in there. It also would do nothing to indicate that human intelligence is unique.
- throw310822 7mo ago
  "Controversial theory justifies assumption". Because humans never hallucinate.
wrqvrwvq 7mo ago
It's only because humans came up with a problem, worked with the ai and verified the result that this achievement means anything at all. An ai "checking its own work" is practically irrelevant when they all seem to go back and forth on whether you need the car at the carwash to wash the car. Undoubtedly people have been passing this set of problems to ai's for months or years and have gotten back either incorrect results or results they didn't understand, but either way, a human confirmation is required. Ai hasn't presented any novel problems, other than the multitudes of social problems described elsewhere. Ai doesn't pursue its own goals and wouldn't know whether they've "actually been achieved". This is to say nothing of the cost of this small but remarkable advance. Trillions of dollars in training and inference and so far we have a couple minor (trivial?) math solutions. I'm sure if someone had bothered funding a few phds for a year we could have found this without ai.
- famouswaffles 7mo ago
  >It's only because humans came up with a problem, worked with the ai and verified the result that this achievement means anything at all. Replace ai with human here and that's...just how collaborative research works lol.
- hodgehog11 7mo ago
  Funding a few PhDs for a year costs orders of magnitude more than it did to solve this problem in inference costs. Also, this has been active research for some time. Or I guess the people working on it are just not as good as a random bunch of students? It's amazing the lengths that people go to maintain their worldview, even if it means belittling hardworking people. I take it you're not a mathematician. This is an achievement, regardless of whether you like LLMs or not, so let's not belittle the people working on these kinds of problems please.
  - famouswaffles 7mo ago
    >It's amazing the lengths that people go to maintain their worldview, even if it means belittling hardworking people. This is the most baffling and ironic aspects of these discussions. Human exceptionalism is what drives these arguments but the machines are becoming so good you can no longer do this without putting down even the top percenter humans in the process. Same thing happening all over this thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47006594 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47006594). And it's like they don't even realize it.
staticassertion 7mo ago
> I don't know why I am still perpetually shocked that the default assumption is that humans are somehow unique. Because, empirically, we have numerous unique and differentiable qualities, obviously. Plenty of time goes into understanding this, we have a young but rigorous field of neuroscience and cognitive science. Unless you mean "fundamentally unique" in some way that would persist - like "nothing could ever do what humans do". > People constantly make comments like "well it's just trying a bunch of stuff until something works" and it seems that they do not pause for a moment to consider whether or not that also applies to humans. I frankly doubt it applies to either system. I'm a functionalist so I obviously believe that everything a human brain does is physical and could be replicated using some other material that can exhibit the necessary functions. But that does not mean that I have to think that the appearance of intelligence always is intelligence, or that an LLM/ Agent is doing what humans do.
- stavros 7mo ago
  No, but it does mean that you should know we don't understand what intelligence is, and that maybe LLMs are actually intelligent and humans have the appearance of intelligence, for all we know.
  - staticassertion 7mo ago
    You're just defining intelligence as "undefined", which okay, now anything is anything. What is the point of that? Indeed, there's quite a lot of work that's been done on what these terms mean. The fields of neuroscience and cognitive science have contributed a lot to the area, and obviously there are major areas of philosophy that discuss how we should frame the conversation or seek to answer questions. We have more than enough, trivially, to say that human intelligence is distinct, so long as we take on basic assertions like "intelligence is related to brain structures" since we know a lot about brain structures.
    - stavros 7mo ago
      Our intelligence is related to brain structures, not all intelligence. You can't get to things like "what all intelligence, in general, is" from "what our intelligence is" any more than you can say that all food must necessarily be meat because sausages exist.
nicman23 7mo ago
it is not the assumption that humans are unique. it is that statistical models cannot really think out of the box most of the time
- stavros 7mo ago
  And you know that humans aren't statistical models how?
  - nicman23 7mo ago
    because they would be more logical
    - stavros 7mo ago
      Touche.

slopinthebag 7mo ago

> I don't know why I am still perpetually shocked that the default assumption is that humans are somehow unique. Uh, because up until and including now, we are...?

virgildotcodes 7mo ago
Every living thing on Earth is unique. Every rock is unique in virtually infinite ways from the next otherwise identical rock. There are also a tremendous number of similarities between all living things and between rocks (and between rocks and living things). Most ways in which things are unique are arguably uninteresting. The default mode, the null hypothesis should be to assume that human intelligence isn't interestingly unique unless it can be proven otherwise. In these repeated discussions around AI, there is criticism over the way an AI solves a problem, without any actual critical thought about the way humans solve problems. The latter is left up to the assumption that "of course humans do X differently" and if you press you invariably end up at something couched in a vague mysticism about our inner-workings. Humans apparently create something from nothing, without the recombination of any prior knowledge or outside information, and they get it right on the first try. Through what, divine inspiration from the God who made us and only us in His image?
- slopinthebag 7mo ago
  I doubt you can even define intelligence sufficiently to argue this point. Since that's an ongoing debate without a resolution thus far. But you claimed that humans aren't unique. I think it's pretty obvious we are on many dimensions including what you might classify as "intelligence". You don't even necessarily have to believe in a "soul" or something like that, although many people do. The capabilities of a human far surpass every single AI to date, and much more efficiently as well. That we are able to brute-force a simulacrum of intelligence in a few narrow domains is incredible, but we should not denigrate humans when celebrating this. > There's still this seeming belief in magic and human exceptionalism, deeply held, even in communities that otherwise tend to revolve around the sciences and the empirical. Do you ever wonder why that is? I often wonder why tech has so many reductionist, materialist, and quite frankly anti-human, thinkers.
  - blackcatsec 7mo ago
    > I often wonder why tech has so many reductionist, materialist, and quite frankly anti-human, thinkers. I think it comes from a position of arrogance/ego. I'll speak for the US here, since that's what I know the most; but the average 'techie' in general skews towards the higher intelligence numbers than the lower parts. This is a very, very broad stroke, and that's intentional to illustrate my point. Because of this, techie culture gains quite a bit of arrogance around it with regards to the masses. And this has been trained into tech culture since childhood. Whether it be adults praising us for being "so smart", or that we "figured out the VCR", or some other random tech problem that literally almost any human being can solve by simply reading the manual. What I've found, in the vast majority of technical problem solving cases that average people have challenges with, if they just took a few minutes to read a manual they'd be able to solve a lot of it themselves. In short, I don't believe as a very strong techie that I'm "smarter than most", but rather that I've taken the time to dive into a subject area that most other humans do not feel the need nor desire to do so. There are objectively hard problems in tech to solve, but the amount of people solving THOSE problems in the tech industry are few and far in between. And so the tech industry as a whole has spent the last decade or two spinning circles on increasingly complex systems to continue feeding their own egos about their own intelligence. We're now at a point that rather than solving the puzzle, most techies are creating incrementally complex puzzles to solve because they're bored of the puzzles that are in front of them. "Let me solve that puzzle by making a puzzle solver." "Okay, now let me make a puzzle solver creation tool to create puzzle solvers to solve the puzzle." and so forth and so forth. At the end of the day, you're still just solving a puzzle... But it's this arrogance that really bothers me in the tech bro culture world. And, more importantly, at least in some tech bro circles, they have realized that their target to gathering an exponential increase in wealth doesn't lie in creating new and novel ways to solve the same puzzles, but to try and tout AI as the greatest puzzle solver creation tool puzzle solver known to man (and let me grift off of it for a little bit).

snemvalts 7mo ago

The ability to learn and infer without absorbing millions of books and all text on internet really does make us special. And only at 20 watts!

famouswaffles 7mo ago
Last I checked humans didn't pop into existence doing that. It happened after billions of years of brute force, trial and error evolution. So well done for falling into the exact same trap the OP cautions. Intelligence from scratch requires a mind boggling amount of resources, and humans were no different.
- sweezyjeezy 7mo ago
  To be fair, it is still pretty remarkable what the human brain does, especially in early years - there is no text embedded in the brain, just a crazily efficient mechanism to learn hierarchical systems. As far as I know, AI intelligence cannot do anything similar to this - it generally relies on giga-scaling, or finetuning tasks similar to those it already knows. Regardless of how this arose, or if it's relevant to AGI, this is still a uniqueness of sorts.
  - int_19h 7mo ago
    Human babies "train" their brain on literally gigabytes of multi-modal data dumped on them through all their sensory organs every second. In a very real sense, our magic superpower is that we "giga-scale" with such low resource consumption, especially considering how large (in terms of parameters) the brain is compared to even the most advanced models we have running on those thousands of GPUs today. But that's where all those millions of years of evolution pay off. Don't diss the wetware!
- suddenlybananas 7mo ago
  Do you think evolutionary pressures are the best explanation for why humans were able to posit the Poincaré conjecture and solve it? While our mental architecture evolved over a very long time, we still learn from miniscule amounts of data compared to LLMs.

conz 7mo ago

Re: "I don't know why I am still perpetually shocked that the default assumption is that humans are somehow unique." Perhaps this might better help you understand why this assumption still holds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reducti...

staticassertion 7mo ago
It doesn't. I actually completely reject that theory, and it's nice to see that Wikipedia notes that it is "controversial". There are extremely good reasons to reject this theory. For one thing, any quantum effects are going to be quite tiny/ trivial because the brain is too large, hot, wet, etc, to see larger effects, so you have to somehow make a leap to "tiny effects that last for no time at all" to "this matters fundamentally in some massive way". It likely requires rejection of functionalism, or the acceptance that quantum states are required for certain functions. Both of those are heavy commitments with the latter implying that there are either functions that require structures that can't be instantiated without quantum effects or functions that can't be emulated without quantum effects, both of which seem extremely unlikely to me. Probably for the far more important reason, it doesn't solve any problem. It's just "quantum woo, therefor libertarian free will" most of the time. It's mostly garbage, maybe a tiny tiny bit of interesting stuff in there. It also would do nothing to indicate that human intelligence is unique.
throw310822 7mo ago
"Controversial theory justifies assumption". Because humans never hallucinate.

wrqvrwvq 7mo ago

It's only because humans came up with a problem, worked with the ai and verified the result that this achievement means anything at all. An ai "checking its own work" is practically irrelevant when they all seem to go back and forth on whether you need the car at the carwash to wash the car. Undoubtedly people have been passing this set of problems to ai's for months or years and have gotten back either incorrect results or results they didn't understand, but either way, a human confirmation is required. Ai hasn't presented any novel problems, other than the multitudes of social problems described elsewhere. Ai doesn't pursue its own goals and wouldn't know whether they've "actually been achieved". This is to say nothing of the cost of this small but remarkable advance. Trillions of dollars in training and inference and so far we have a couple minor (trivial?) math solutions. I'm sure if someone had bothered funding a few phds for a year we could have found this without ai.

famouswaffles 7mo ago
>It's only because humans came up with a problem, worked with the ai and verified the result that this achievement means anything at all. Replace ai with human here and that's...just how collaborative research works lol.
hodgehog11 7mo ago
Funding a few PhDs for a year costs orders of magnitude more than it did to solve this problem in inference costs. Also, this has been active research for some time. Or I guess the people working on it are just not as good as a random bunch of students? It's amazing the lengths that people go to maintain their worldview, even if it means belittling hardworking people. I take it you're not a mathematician. This is an achievement, regardless of whether you like LLMs or not, so let's not belittle the people working on these kinds of problems please.
- famouswaffles 7mo ago
  >It's amazing the lengths that people go to maintain their worldview, even if it means belittling hardworking people. This is the most baffling and ironic aspects of these discussions. Human exceptionalism is what drives these arguments but the machines are becoming so good you can no longer do this without putting down even the top percenter humans in the process. Same thing happening all over this thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47006594 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47006594). And it's like they don't even realize it.

staticassertion 7mo ago

> I don't know why I am still perpetually shocked that the default assumption is that humans are somehow unique. Because, empirically, we have numerous unique and differentiable qualities, obviously. Plenty of time goes into understanding this, we have a young but rigorous field of neuroscience and cognitive science. Unless you mean "fundamentally unique" in some way that would persist - like "nothing could ever do what humans do". > People constantly make comments like "well it's just trying a bunch of stuff until something works" and it seems that they do not pause for a moment to consider whether or not that also applies to humans. I frankly doubt it applies to either system. I'm a functionalist so I obviously believe that everything a human brain does is physical and could be replicated using some other material that can exhibit the necessary functions. But that does not mean that I have to think that the appearance of intelligence always is intelligence, or that an LLM/ Agent is doing what humans do.

stavros 7mo ago
No, but it does mean that you should know we don't understand what intelligence is, and that maybe LLMs are actually intelligent and humans have the appearance of intelligence, for all we know.
- staticassertion 7mo ago
  You're just defining intelligence as "undefined", which okay, now anything is anything. What is the point of that? Indeed, there's quite a lot of work that's been done on what these terms mean. The fields of neuroscience and cognitive science have contributed a lot to the area, and obviously there are major areas of philosophy that discuss how we should frame the conversation or seek to answer questions. We have more than enough, trivially, to say that human intelligence is distinct, so long as we take on basic assertions like "intelligence is related to brain structures" since we know a lot about brain structures.
  - stavros 7mo ago
    Our intelligence is related to brain structures, not all intelligence. You can't get to things like "what all intelligence, in general, is" from "what our intelligence is" any more than you can say that all food must necessarily be meat because sausages exist.

nicman23 7mo ago

it is not the assumption that humans are unique. it is that statistical models cannot really think out of the box most of the time

stavros 7mo ago
And you know that humans aren't statistical models how?
- nicman23 7mo ago
  because they would be more logical
  - stavros 7mo ago
    Touche.