2 ms·
“Technology that is based on everything humanity has already done, fails to do things that humanity has not yet done”
by xmcp123 3mo ago
“Technology that is based on everything humanity has already done, fails to do things that humanity has not yet done”
- runarberg 3mo agoThis may seem so blatantly obvious to us that it need not be mentioned, but to a lot of people I bet it is not obvious at al, and in fact may even be counter-obvious. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM
- esafak 3mo agoAre you following the news? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48863490 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48863490 LLMs don't just 'average' their data.
- Arainach 3mo agoThat doesn't disagree with this article. Proving a theorem that a human already proposed in an existing discipline of math - math, the most formalized and easiest discipline to involve computers in even before LLMs - is very different from expanding the boundaries of science.
- esafak 3mo agoHow is it different? Before there was no proof, and now there is. What counts as expanding the boundary to you?
- Arainach 3mo agoIdentifying what questions to ask is often much harder than answering them. Proposing new theorems - and new areas of investigation - is what expands boundaries. Proving them is confirmation. Once the Pythagorean theorem was proposed, many different proofs have been identified. In art, once a new style is created it's often straightforward for others to replicate. In physics, the idea of Relativity was what enabled the design of experiments to demonstrate its correctness. Proposing the idea is what's essential.
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- pton_xd 3mo agoThey interpolate data in an XYZ dimensional space. The implications of that is beyond our comprehension. I have a hard time believing that all novel concepts yet to be discovered are contained within that space, though.
- esafak 3mo agoYou might as well say AI can only think of things humans can, so even if they invent new maths or science they can't go beyond the space of human thought.
- BurningFrog 3mo agoWasn't Einstein's discoveries based on things humanity had already done? AIs do things no human has done before millions of times a day.
- nathan_compton 3mo agoEinstein's discoveries were based (to a large degree) on negating very specific parts of scientific orthodoxy and then taking the steps forward to carefully derive results with those rejections in place. LLMs are aggressively trained to reproduce facts and consequently struggle to reject orthodoxy. There isn't any reason they can't, in principal, make big new discoveries just by getting lucky, which is sort of also how humans do it, but its ok to acknowledge that current AIs aren't so good at certain things.
- onraglanroad 3mo agoI was under the impression that it was more accepting the othodoxy of Galilean/Newtonian relativety and joining it up with Maxwell's discovery about electromagnetism. So if the speed of propogation of EM waves is the same no matter your frame of reference (along with all the rest of physics) then the speed of light can't be relative (a conclusion that was aided by the Michaelson-Morley experiment) and what are the logical consequences of that. If I'm incorrect in my understanding I'd appreciate any correction.
- nathan_compton 3mo agoWell, sure, but if you want to accept those things you have to revoke the idea that distances and times are observer independent quantities. Even physicists fail to understand this after years of studying relativity. It is very difficult to really understand that relativity says: distances and durations that you measure in your frame of reference are not physically meaningful quantities.