> Attaching profit motives to basic infrastructure
Water, food, housing, healthcare, telecommunications, computing (including artificial intelligence). I guess it's "socialist" to believe that these baseline needs should be, and can be, free for all of humanity.
One day we'll look back and laugh at the stupidity of our current state of civilization, that we'd need to pay anybody anything to live on this planet that provides all those things and more for free. Pity us, future people, I hope we grow up soon.
> planet that provides all those things and more for free
This planet does not provide healthcare, telecommunications, or computing for free (unless you consider nature's "the sick get eaten" approach "healthcare"). Housing is only free if you either don't value the labor or you are fine living in caves. Water and food could be free if you're only interested in drinking from rivers and foraging for fruit, otherwise we're back to whether or not you value the labor in farming or building the infrastructure for water collection and transport.
(for the record, I think those things should be all funded by taxes. I just think it is silly to claim the planet provides those things for free. We created those things, through millennia of toil.)
True, but something is qualitatively different. Similar to open-source software projects, where people used to participate for the love of the game. Now that machines are doing the work, there is less human connection and feeling of community.
Why bother contributing when there's no one on the other side. There's value being produced, but the beneficiary is mainly the corporations who run the models. Even if the result eventually benefits society in general, the credit goes to them. Not that "credit" or "clout" means much practically, but there used to be emotional and social value for the people involved.
There is still emotional and social value. The AI is a tool in the hands of a competent operator.
You’re blinded by your hate for corporations, if you cannot see value here. The actual human who’s working on it responds, and you can’t help but make it about the AI that you believe is somehow only benefiting the corporation.
David Harvey, the author of the paper linked here, hasn't even read the paper on the topic. He says as much in the paper, directly. The repo linked in response shows little sign of human authorship.
Has anyone actually gone through and fully understood the contents? My bet would be that nobody has looked, let alone understood, anything in there.
So, is collaboration just paying for more tokens, or is it doing the human understanding that the authors couldn't be arsed to do?
Either way, I hope nobody is foolish enough to fall for it.
> Has anyone actually gone through and fully understood the contents?
It happened before. For example in Wiles' proof of Fermat's Last Theorem it took like half a year until someone found an error, another year until Wiles and Taylor fixed the proof and another half year until it was reviewed and published. Add a few years until it was widely understood (where widely is a small set of people that excludes me for now). Now there are even shorter proof.
The new thing here is that we are seen the internal discussion published online. Also, the chatbots like to make long pdf, so expect to see a pile of intermediate pdf created by chatbots+humans until we get a nice proof that is widely understood (this is more related to my area, I have a hope that I may understand it).
If you know something to be true, without knowing why, does that reduce the value of said truth to zero? And what if that truth has positive effects on your ability to invent and leverage technology, treat/cure disease, etc? Would you still say it is of no value and people are “falling for it”?
This is called faith, and as strange as it may sound, in a few decades this kind of faith in the machine will be commonplace, because it will prove its utility over and over and over again, and save mountains of human effort in the process. In 3-7 years we’ll start to see major practical applications from AI-led advances.
As a second-order effect we may even see the rise of an actual religion around AI. I’m not saying these are all positive effects, but it’s what I see happening - and like all technological revolutions there will be a huge number of positive effects alongside some deeply disturbing developments.
Yes, that I agree is definitely happening already. Like Arthur Clarke's famous saying about sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic.
And it's true that these changes are not all positive or negative, that there is actual social value being produced by machine-generated mathematics, software, writing, visual works, etc. And that it's changing human culture in ways difficult to imagine while we're in the midst of the transformation.
I'll add another prediction: AI will become more and more "human" until it becomes indistinguishable practically. Eventually we will merge with it to become something more than human. It will be normal to have robot friends and sexual partners, and one day machine-human hybrid children.
By that point, corporations and governments will have merged to create a "benevolent" totalitarian system with complete surveillance and control, with an elite class overseeing the rest of humanity as domesticated population, like an automated farm. Oh wait we're already there, haha.
Why should humans care about any of this when the machine can just refill our cat food dish and wave some feathers on a string to keep us entertained?
Either what you say is true, in which case I see no reason to care about truth, science, or math (the machines will figure it out for me), or it isn't, and people are falling for dealing with slop on behalf of people too lazy to look at the turds they purchased.
Either way, I don't see any reason to participate in AI projects without getting paid.
I’m happy to engage in meaningful discussion; this is just sci-fi exaggeration (Wall-E?).
Sci-fi has tainted our collective imagination of a tech-forward future - it doesn’t have to be that way.
Two things can be true - yes, AI can benefit mega-corporations AND drive spectacular human progress at the same time. Is all of it “good” by my ethical standards? No. Is it still valuable? Yes, immensely.
We need to design an AIGPL - you can only use the collective expertise that created our code to train a model if the model, its training data and potentially its output are also available via AIGPL.
Why not embrace nihilism now instead taking the long way to get there?
At the end of the day there is no reason, there is no purpose but the one you make for yourself. The universe doesn't care and will slowly wind itself down to thermal noise.
If they want to make a lean solution and publish it then they can because that's what they want to do.
And if you're breaking this much already, the future is going to be really really hard on you. You are not ready for what is coming.
You keep saying this human connection thing, but it has no bearing on moving the frontier forward. A lot of these problems have remained unsolved for hundreds of years. What is your claim here, that they should remain unsolved artificially for 100 more years so that human mathematicians can have careers and community?
Francis of Assisi, Lao Tzu, Gurdjieff (yes, really), Blavatsky (yes), Zhang Guolao, Nasreddin, Jesus of Nazareth.. These last three all have been known to ride a donkey backwards.
I would guess you're being sarcastic, but it depends on your worldview I suppose. I haven't found any of his writing to be insightful or even entertaining.
> Clay is a data visualization and literate programming tool that creates documents (HTML pages, PDFs, books, blog posts, reports, slideshows) from Clojure source code and comments.
I guess it's more of a computational notebook or interactive environment.
So not only the code but the running program and the editing environment itself is clay.
The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
The laws of physics wrote that sentence, it was fated to be written when this deterministic system of a universe was set off like a mechanism. Or maybe not, let me use my non-free will to choose to say.. Aubergine. Periwinkle. Streptococcus.
There's also no evidence that mystical leprechauns exist. Do you seriously consider their possible existence in the decisions you make? But somehow, we all seem to presume free will exists in virtually every part of society.
I wonder if this may be related to anendophasia, the absence of an inner voice. Apparently it has an influence on self-reflection and verbal working memory.
I have aphantasia so anendophasia sounds like such a nightmare to me, though I imagine those so have it would likely feel the opposite of me. I've met some folks in the past who I'd suspect have anendophasia, but I'm not sure how I'd ever bring that up without coming across as uncouth.
Anyone with anendophasia care to opine on their experience?
Yes, I’m very familiar. I have no inner semantic articulation whatsoever. When I hear people talk about meditation (clearing your head, etc.) it always amuses me, because that's my normal state. It's completely still up there...
But it’s more than that. I don’t have any conscious notions of thought at all. It’s much more like these guys in the tv show Severance who stare at numbers until “it feels right”.
The end result just pops into my head, often just as a feeling, not even as anything graspable, and only takes semantic shape when I say it out loud or write it. And even when I write it, it continues — it’s like a constant irking feeling of calibration that never feels quite right until it does.
There is one exception: demi-sleep is the only state where I can ruminate (e.g. stress-related), but then it's also non-verbal -- more like a combination of images and sensations. It's hard for me to put into words (no pun intended)...
That's a fascinating description of anendophasia from the inside. It's hard to imagine not having an innner monologue, a constant stream of words and images. Must be so nice and quiet in there! For me it takes conscious effort to step back and let it cease, but when my attention drifts away, the stream starts again by itself.
Would you say you're a visual thinker, or is there no imagery either? I'm trying to imagine (ha) how someone can think without words or images. The closest I can relate to is when I'm playing music, like the piano, there is a thinking process - even problem solving - without any concrete concepts internally, no words, colors or forms, not even sounds. Now that I think about it, I get into that mode of non-verbal (and non-visual) thinking sometimes when I'm doing math or writing software. It's like thinking by doing, often through an external medium - shaping code, numbers and operations, music or art as it's happening.
> stare at numbers until “it feels right”
I think most people do this sometimes, consciously or not, but just not as their dominant mode of thinking. How interesting.
Perhaps it was more common in the past, or in some subcultures like a Buddhist monastery. Or among animals and plants, their "thinking process", problem-solving without words.
Visual imagination and inner monologue are not complements, but more like orthogonal capabilities. I am pretty far away from both. Sorry, for the long reply, but this topic hooks me every time I trip over it... ;-) Ironically, given what I will state next, people around me tend to describe me as very imaginative.
I lack conscious visual imagery. I can't recall faces of loved ones or really "see" scenes from memory in a way that feels visually coherent. Even though I have practiced drawing and painting at times, I cannot render people, animals, nor landscapes from memory. I would need a live model or reference photo. I could draw or paint fictional scenes or more basic forms, but would struggle with anything life-like without a reference. I can recognize it is flawed, but cannot summon the missing bits.
I also lack any inner monologue. My thinking is not verbal. It is extra work I have to do to cast ideas into words after I've already thought them up. I can think about words as a task, but I don't think in words. This interviewing strategy also sounds like a nightmare to me. I could talk at length about "how I think" in some philosophical or psychological mode, but I cannot recite a real thought process as if it is a sequence of verbalizable intermediate steps. That's just absurdly ill-fitting to me.
By contrast, I have a pretty strong inner stage for proprioception and a sense of spatial relationships or topology for both real 3D and 4D (space-time) structures. If I focus, I can nearly invoke physical sensation by imagining falls, spins, impact, flight, etc. This can also involuntarily engage my inner audio stage, where I might imagine corresponding sound effects.
There is a first-person and third-person version of my spatial stage. I can sometimes think about a dynamic stage, i.e. the 3D stuff moving, but more often this turns into a more static sense of a stage that includes motion vector information. (Alas, this hasn't made me a dancer nor given me appreciation for choreography...) I don't know how to describe this to people though. I don't "see" it. I feel or know it. It may have a perspective-like projection to it, favoring or enlarging the near space, but it doesn't have occlusion, lighting, or other visual qualia.
Sometimes, but not always, I cast more abstract thinking onto topological structures that map into this spatial stage. Then I can "feel" the shape of a problem, problem space, or search process over that.
As I mentioned above, I do have an inner audio stage. I can think about arbitrary sound and it has an experience like a faint version of real-time hearing on a secondary channel. There are intensity and frequency qualia, timing and rhythm, etc. It can convey harmony, noise, sharp attacks, etc. At the extremes, I can nearly induce accompanying physical senses like a deep bass thumping my chest or a high-hat sizzling in my ear. But it's always sort of off in the corner as an apparatus I can access, without being mistaken for real hearing. This and real hearing can operate in parallel, though it is harder to attend to the inner stage if real hearing is overwhelmingly loud or full of semantic content.
When I think about words, it is sometimes in this audio stage. To some degree, I can remember people talking or run through hypothetical speech with intonation etc. It's a bit thinner on the audio qualia than other audio thinking, as I focus more on the semantic and emotional content and less on the sounds qualities. I know whose voice I am imagining, but it's not necessarily a rich or faithful synthesis of the sound qualia. Musical thoughts bring more of that richness.
But, I have another linguistic stage that is more symbolic. It's more like feeling the topology of the words, a bit like a parse tree, and less a real-time stream. It would be a mistake to say it is a visual process, as it morphs into semantic units in my spatial/topological stage. It can also abstract, thinking about the sequenced structure of sections, chapters, etc. rather than all the words.
Finally, all of the above-mentioned things feel like tools I can apply. They don't seem like "me" or my core thoughts. It is very difficult to describe my thoughts that happen behind the scenes in all this. There is a version of the above senses that represents my real, anchored, position in the world. And there are the extra, "imagining" versions that I can operate. My real self is some amorphous attention that flits among these.
(Probably) due to trauma effects, I have very high situational awareness. So, it's very rare that my attention can completely separate from the real-world monitoring. But I can deprioritize it a bit when I really focus on other problem solving, recall, or rumination. It's a bit like a mixing board that cuts from one blend to another with different levels of abruptness versus smooth blending or transition...
The "all in on LLM" hypesters are as obnoxious as the "all in on Rust" hipsters.
We get it, Rust is great, and LLMs too. But sometimes it's like listening to teenage philosophers who just discovered atheism, who go on and on to disparage all religions every chance they get. They're so full of themselves that they don't realize they're missing entire areas of understanding about the world and people.
The juvenile arrogance on display in many threads in recent years is second-hand embarrassing. Meanwhile the greybeards continue getting the job done, with or without LLMs, in Rust, C++ or even C.
Exactly. The purpose of news is not to inform you. It's to present you with a view of the world carefully curated to shape your beliefs. The BBC is notorious for their biases, but all major media channels serve the same purpose.
When they use the word "killed" (actively, by whom) or "died" (passively as if by chance), when they choose to highlight an event, downplay it, or ignore it altogether - the deeper question is not about the event itself, but the motivation behind its presentation. What do they want you to believe?
And it's untrue that "all major media channels serve the same purpose". Fox News serves very different purposes than Russia Today or Al Jazeera or NPR or …
What is true is that all media channels serve their own purposes.
OpenAI has the opportunity to do the funniest thing: "Ooops, our AI escaped containment again but this time it's going around and patching security vulnerabilities as a benevolent public service. It's smarter than us and we have no choice but to let it do its thing."
Water, food, housing, healthcare, telecommunications, computing (including artificial intelligence). I guess it's "socialist" to believe that these baseline needs should be, and can be, free for all of humanity.
One day we'll look back and laugh at the stupidity of our current state of civilization, that we'd need to pay anybody anything to live on this planet that provides all those things and more for free. Pity us, future people, I hope we grow up soon.
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