4 ms·

Artificial Intelligence: Ars Notoria and the Promise of Instant Knowledge

140 points by jruohonen 3mo ago

dcminter 3mo ago
The AI title is veeeery tenuous/baity, but this is a fun read nonetheless. Upvoted.
- alexmuresan 3mo ago
  Well the book does promise to give the reader intelligence and knowledge acquired through means other than the natural way. So in, that way I think “artificial” makes sense. I think it’s a bit tongue in cheek and maybe a slight jab aimed at people that use AI(LLMs) to appear smarter than they are. The text was interesting.
- dimbletimbers 3mo ago
  I think the connection is pretty clear: people have always wanted to know things without having to learn them.
  - WillAdams 3mo ago
    "There is no Royal Road to Geometry".
    - esafak 3mo ago
      “I admire the elegance of your method of computation; it must be nice to ride through these fields upon the horse of true mathematics while the like of us have to make our way laboriously on foot.” -- Einstein admiring Levi-Civita's mastery of differential geometry.
  - mannanj 3mo ago
    I think the underlying motivation may be straw manned or misrepresented as only that. Do you use AI? Do you build anything with it technically? I do. I don't want to know things without learning them, I want to produce things of value and that solve important problems, and if I can do that rather than the alternative (not do it, because of competing focuses, limited time and energy, etc) I would go with the option of using AI to do so. People in religious study or having other pursuits, surviving at a time when this book came out, at least some of them, could very likely be thinking the same. It feels disingenuous to emphasize the motivation as "knowing things without having to learn them"
    - pixl97 3mo ago
      >I don't want to know things without learning them I lives in this world, but we live in a society. While you may diligently learn, there will be 10+ more that won't and will use the AI like an oracle. It then comes up how much damage will become of this. And we're not even in the era of rampant agentic AI spreading itself around and the fun and neat problems that will cause.
      - mannanj 3mo ago
        What's the necessary thing here that people need to "learn" to prevent the hypothetical AI damage scenario you are talking about?
        pixl97 3mo ago
        Eh, well, stop building AI. We're not going to do that, so it's pretty much unavoidable. If I had to make a "most probable guess" of what the future looks like, we'll have some kind of AI mess caused that will cost billion of dollars. This will get governments up in a tizzy about their dangers, while still being hopelessly addicted to them in military and tracking their citizens. Most people think that governments will attack the models being built, but I don't think so, they want powerful models mostly for themselves. So they'll go after the next best thing. Hardware. What exactly that looks like, I'm not sure, but the big clusters of the machines will have to be registered and licensed. Likely the models will have to be encoded to run on particular hardware and getting caught with an unencoded model would be considered an illegal munition, like we did with cryptography in the past.
        mannanj 3mo ago
        Am I hearing this right: - people will use AI bad - because people will use AI bad, stop building it
    - novocainn 3mo ago
      [dead]
  - Animats 3mo ago
    That's what Google is for.
- malfist 3mo ago
  I think it's a round about commentary. Many times these past fee years I've found myself telling junior engineers that AI cannot understand for you. That there is no shortcut to understanding.
peri-cl 3mo ago
> "The alien words, names, and characters are explained as coming from ancient languages such as Greek, Hebrew, and “Chaldean”" Why is "Chaldean" in scare-quotes? Ah, TIL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_Aramaic#Chaldean_misnomer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_Aramaic#Chaldean_misn... ("Chaldean language (misnomer)") (I think I might(?) have seen the same confusion in the wild. Voltaire's preface to Zadig (1747), the fantasy satire set in ancient Babylon, purports to translate a found manuscript written in Chaldean).
themgt 3mo ago
It's an interesting piece. The great attraction of the Ars notoria for John was its promise of quick access to advanced scholarly knowledge. He recounts his continuing wish to study, and how he was lent a copy of a book of necromancy by “a certain cleric”. He copied much of it and wanted more... For John, the Ars notoria was dangerous not in some abstract way, but very directly. He confesses that it struck him at first as beautiful and holy, and seemed to offer miraculous gifts rather than demonic temptations. It became apparent, however, that the book was utterly deceptive, a work of the Devil, a “sick pleasure” that was actually fatally poisonous to the soul, not only to the body. John records that the Ars notoria was especially attractive because he could not afford all the books needed for his studies, nor the many lectures. He seems to have abandoned his official course, wishing to take advantage of the promise of knowledge of all the sciences, and devoted himself to working with the Ars. ... Further troubling visions ensued, in which arrogant figures demanded worship — something that was clearly against true religion. Gradually it became clear to John that the book hid invocations to demons within what appeared to be beautiful prayers. And yet, like any addict, John found it almost impossible to give up the Ars notoria completely; it was only when the visions became directly life-threatening that the Virgin, with St John the Evangelist as her intermediary, appeared and made it clear that, as John says, “the Ars notoria was deeply evil”. Beyond the title the analogy is never quite made explicit, but is the subtext that AI "is futile because it cannot deliver what it promises ... its 'signs' are neither understood by humans (like ordinary words and letters) nor sent by God (as sacraments are), and thus are precisely the type of thing that lures humans into contact and compact with demons"? Or that denouncements of AI are coming from the modern equivalent of medieval clergy? Or both?
- treetalker 3mo ago
  People always seek shortcuts to true learning and understanding.
  - bob001 3mo ago
    That describes all of human civilization and society. We pass knowledge and learnings to each other without needing to personally experience it. Language, writing, books, schools, universities, apprenticeships and so on are all shortcuts.
zug_zug 3mo ago
What am I reading here? A matrix fan-fiction? As far as I can tell this is something masquerading as something it's not.
titanomachy 3mo ago
I don’t know much about medieval universities, but maybe this thing was popular because the subjects are sort of vague and subjective? Like maybe a powerful placebo could make you feel you’ve improved at “eloquence” or “dialect”, but it certainly wouldn’t make you able to compute wavefunctions for quantum mechanics. It’s pretty hard to imagine people trying something like this to learn the material for a present-day physics or CS degree, for example. You’d pretty much immediately realize it’s not working.
- galaxyLogic 3mo ago
  Somewhat reminiscient of I-Ching
  - titanomachy 3mo ago
    Right. I think for certain things a tool which lets you quiet discursive thought and access the unconscious parts of your mind would be pretty useful. For writing poetry, or deciding whether to divorce your partner, or coming up with new business ideas. This has always been my interpretation of why things like the I Ching are so enduringly popular.
- drivebyhooting 3mo ago
  And yet, knowing how to calculate a wave function helps little with leading a happy life, finding and maintaining good relationships, talking to children, etc. The more secular we become, the more “gospel” we reject, the more we leave behind, the more …critical thinking… we have to do. If it’s gonna take until you’re 40+ years old to have it figured it out, then truly what was gained by rejecting dogma?
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
  - titanomachy 3mo ago
    Yeah I’m pretty keen on contemplative practices and stuff in general, I just don’t think anyone today would make the mistake of thinking that this thing would help them ace their STEM degree.
hankbond 3mo ago
I like the idea that what is demonic about this piece is that it steals productive attention. Its use takes the energy that would otherwise be spent learning something useful (by the author's estimation) and redirects it to practicing something incomprehensible. The original required existing knowledge to practice, such that it filtered out those who were not already devoting their life to study. The time people spend vibing out slop could be better spent learning the actual domain. I don't think I've seen any way to make something high quality and original without great effort.
- nullstyle 3mo ago
  Vibing out slop and then developing that into something notslop can be one way to learn the actual domain.
  - inigyou 3mo ago
    Can, but do people do that? I'm reminded of a story of a professor who visited a programming class taught by another professor who was teaching kids about binary and registers and stuff which was boring, and the visiting professor showed the kids how to write 10 PRINT "HELLO YOURNAME!": GOTO 10 which they'd never seen before and got them all excited to learn more about computers. That's the good kind of slop leading into learning.
    - nullstyle 3mo ago
      > Can, but do people do that? Yes, of course they are. Not the people who are vibe-puking feed-content to try and make a quick buck; The people that are hustler first, craftsperson second. But there are plenty examples of it being done better if you start following projects. A simple example: https://github.com/simonw/tools/commits/main/ https://github.com/simonw/tools/commits/main/ Its worth remembering that the word we use for what we do is _development_, and the vast majority of software running right now is undergoing continual development. I swear, there must be whole generation of coddled-coders out there who have never had to work on a legacy codebase, and these chuckleheads must be the source of most anti-clanker sentiment. In 2013 I started working for couchsurfing, a company that was trying to go from a volunteer-coded and operated web app to a "proper" startup with an engineering team and a set of phone apps to go along with the application. The legacy codebase was worse than anything claude or codex will produce these days; It was a true cronenburg horror of php and mysql filled with a decade of twists, turns, dead and hidden features. Every step of that development project involved de-slopping, and none of it had been produced by AI.
aleksiy123 3mo ago
This book must have been a direct inspiration to some Warhammer 40k lore. It fits there perfectly.
inigyou 3mo ago
Life sure was weird before we learned certain mushrooms caused hallucinations.
Helldez 3mo ago
[dead]
galaxyLogic 3mo ago
This made me think: Could it be that the purpose of the Voynich Manuscript was similar, not to carry real knowledge but to make people possessing it believe they would be magically infused with some higher order esoteric knowledge?

140 points by jruohonen 3mo ago

dcminter 3mo ago

The AI title is veeeery tenuous/baity, but this is a fun read nonetheless. Upvoted.

alexmuresan 3mo ago
Well the book does promise to give the reader intelligence and knowledge acquired through means other than the natural way. So in, that way I think “artificial” makes sense. I think it’s a bit tongue in cheek and maybe a slight jab aimed at people that use AI(LLMs) to appear smarter than they are. The text was interesting.
dimbletimbers 3mo ago
I think the connection is pretty clear: people have always wanted to know things without having to learn them.
- WillAdams 3mo ago
  "There is no Royal Road to Geometry".
  - esafak 3mo ago
    “I admire the elegance of your method of computation; it must be nice to ride through these fields upon the horse of true mathematics while the like of us have to make our way laboriously on foot.” -- Einstein admiring Levi-Civita's mastery of differential geometry.
- mannanj 3mo ago
  I think the underlying motivation may be straw manned or misrepresented as only that. Do you use AI? Do you build anything with it technically? I do. I don't want to know things without learning them, I want to produce things of value and that solve important problems, and if I can do that rather than the alternative (not do it, because of competing focuses, limited time and energy, etc) I would go with the option of using AI to do so. People in religious study or having other pursuits, surviving at a time when this book came out, at least some of them, could very likely be thinking the same. It feels disingenuous to emphasize the motivation as "knowing things without having to learn them"
  - pixl97 3mo ago
    >I don't want to know things without learning them I lives in this world, but we live in a society. While you may diligently learn, there will be 10+ more that won't and will use the AI like an oracle. It then comes up how much damage will become of this. And we're not even in the era of rampant agentic AI spreading itself around and the fun and neat problems that will cause.
    - mannanj 3mo ago
      What's the necessary thing here that people need to "learn" to prevent the hypothetical AI damage scenario you are talking about?
      - pixl97 3mo ago
        Eh, well, stop building AI. We're not going to do that, so it's pretty much unavoidable. If I had to make a "most probable guess" of what the future looks like, we'll have some kind of AI mess caused that will cost billion of dollars. This will get governments up in a tizzy about their dangers, while still being hopelessly addicted to them in military and tracking their citizens. Most people think that governments will attack the models being built, but I don't think so, they want powerful models mostly for themselves. So they'll go after the next best thing. Hardware. What exactly that looks like, I'm not sure, but the big clusters of the machines will have to be registered and licensed. Likely the models will have to be encoded to run on particular hardware and getting caught with an unencoded model would be considered an illegal munition, like we did with cryptography in the past.
        mannanj 3mo ago
        Am I hearing this right: - people will use AI bad - because people will use AI bad, stop building it
  - novocainn 3mo ago
    [dead]
- Animats 3mo ago
  That's what Google is for.
malfist 3mo ago
I think it's a round about commentary. Many times these past fee years I've found myself telling junior engineers that AI cannot understand for you. That there is no shortcut to understanding.

peri-cl 3mo ago

> "The alien words, names, and characters are explained as coming from ancient languages such as Greek, Hebrew, and “Chaldean”" Why is "Chaldean" in scare-quotes? Ah, TIL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_Aramaic#Chaldean_misnomer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_Aramaic#Chaldean_misn... ("Chaldean language (misnomer)") (I think I might(?) have seen the same confusion in the wild. Voltaire's preface to Zadig (1747), the fantasy satire set in ancient Babylon, purports to translate a found manuscript written in Chaldean).

themgt 3mo ago

It's an interesting piece. The great attraction of the Ars notoria for John was its promise of quick access to advanced scholarly knowledge. He recounts his continuing wish to study, and how he was lent a copy of a book of necromancy by “a certain cleric”. He copied much of it and wanted more... For John, the Ars notoria was dangerous not in some abstract way, but very directly. He confesses that it struck him at first as beautiful and holy, and seemed to offer miraculous gifts rather than demonic temptations. It became apparent, however, that the book was utterly deceptive, a work of the Devil, a “sick pleasure” that was actually fatally poisonous to the soul, not only to the body. John records that the Ars notoria was especially attractive because he could not afford all the books needed for his studies, nor the many lectures. He seems to have abandoned his official course, wishing to take advantage of the promise of knowledge of all the sciences, and devoted himself to working with the Ars. ... Further troubling visions ensued, in which arrogant figures demanded worship — something that was clearly against true religion. Gradually it became clear to John that the book hid invocations to demons within what appeared to be beautiful prayers. And yet, like any addict, John found it almost impossible to give up the Ars notoria completely; it was only when the visions became directly life-threatening that the Virgin, with St John the Evangelist as her intermediary, appeared and made it clear that, as John says, “the Ars notoria was deeply evil”. Beyond the title the analogy is never quite made explicit, but is the subtext that AI "is futile because it cannot deliver what it promises ... its 'signs' are neither understood by humans (like ordinary words and letters) nor sent by God (as sacraments are), and thus are precisely the type of thing that lures humans into contact and compact with demons"? Or that denouncements of AI are coming from the modern equivalent of medieval clergy? Or both?

treetalker 3mo ago
People always seek shortcuts to true learning and understanding.
- bob001 3mo ago
  That describes all of human civilization and society. We pass knowledge and learnings to each other without needing to personally experience it. Language, writing, books, schools, universities, apprenticeships and so on are all shortcuts.

zug_zug 3mo ago

What am I reading here? A matrix fan-fiction? As far as I can tell this is something masquerading as something it's not.

titanomachy 3mo ago

I don’t know much about medieval universities, but maybe this thing was popular because the subjects are sort of vague and subjective? Like maybe a powerful placebo could make you feel you’ve improved at “eloquence” or “dialect”, but it certainly wouldn’t make you able to compute wavefunctions for quantum mechanics. It’s pretty hard to imagine people trying something like this to learn the material for a present-day physics or CS degree, for example. You’d pretty much immediately realize it’s not working.

galaxyLogic 3mo ago
Somewhat reminiscient of I-Ching
- titanomachy 3mo ago
  Right. I think for certain things a tool which lets you quiet discursive thought and access the unconscious parts of your mind would be pretty useful. For writing poetry, or deciding whether to divorce your partner, or coming up with new business ideas. This has always been my interpretation of why things like the I Ching are so enduringly popular.
drivebyhooting 3mo ago
And yet, knowing how to calculate a wave function helps little with leading a happy life, finding and maintaining good relationships, talking to children, etc. The more secular we become, the more “gospel” we reject, the more we leave behind, the more …critical thinking… we have to do. If it’s gonna take until you’re 40+ years old to have it figured it out, then truly what was gained by rejecting dogma?
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- titanomachy 3mo ago
  Yeah I’m pretty keen on contemplative practices and stuff in general, I just don’t think anyone today would make the mistake of thinking that this thing would help them ace their STEM degree.

hankbond 3mo ago

I like the idea that what is demonic about this piece is that it steals productive attention. Its use takes the energy that would otherwise be spent learning something useful (by the author's estimation) and redirects it to practicing something incomprehensible. The original required existing knowledge to practice, such that it filtered out those who were not already devoting their life to study. The time people spend vibing out slop could be better spent learning the actual domain. I don't think I've seen any way to make something high quality and original without great effort.

nullstyle 3mo ago
Vibing out slop and then developing that into something notslop can be one way to learn the actual domain.
- inigyou 3mo ago
  Can, but do people do that? I'm reminded of a story of a professor who visited a programming class taught by another professor who was teaching kids about binary and registers and stuff which was boring, and the visiting professor showed the kids how to write 10 PRINT "HELLO YOURNAME!": GOTO 10 which they'd never seen before and got them all excited to learn more about computers. That's the good kind of slop leading into learning.
  - nullstyle 3mo ago
    > Can, but do people do that? Yes, of course they are. Not the people who are vibe-puking feed-content to try and make a quick buck; The people that are hustler first, craftsperson second. But there are plenty examples of it being done better if you start following projects. A simple example: https://github.com/simonw/tools/commits/main/ https://github.com/simonw/tools/commits/main/ Its worth remembering that the word we use for what we do is _development_, and the vast majority of software running right now is undergoing continual development. I swear, there must be whole generation of coddled-coders out there who have never had to work on a legacy codebase, and these chuckleheads must be the source of most anti-clanker sentiment. In 2013 I started working for couchsurfing, a company that was trying to go from a volunteer-coded and operated web app to a "proper" startup with an engineering team and a set of phone apps to go along with the application. The legacy codebase was worse than anything claude or codex will produce these days; It was a true cronenburg horror of php and mysql filled with a decade of twists, turns, dead and hidden features. Every step of that development project involved de-slopping, and none of it had been produced by AI.

aleksiy123 3mo ago

This book must have been a direct inspiration to some Warhammer 40k lore. It fits there perfectly.

inigyou 3mo ago

Life sure was weird before we learned certain mushrooms caused hallucinations.

Helldez 3mo ago

[dead]

galaxyLogic 3mo ago

This made me think: Could it be that the purpose of the Voynich Manuscript was similar, not to carry real knowledge but to make people possessing it believe they would be magically infused with some higher order esoteric knowledge?