Usefulness relies on understanding, even if that means understanding what is possible to ask for. What is being generated right now is really just a translation from one inscrutable phenomenon into another. In neither case do we have power over the data, because we don’t know what it means, truly where it comes from, and even the beginning of the limits of what the discovery allows. We’ve traded one black box for another, and still need to unpack it.
> We’ve traded one black box for another, and still need to unpack it.
The human mind has been a black box, and largely still is.
So we traded one black box for another, in more than one way. The new black boxes are going to be able understand and keep up with their own work, much more quickly than we will.
The "alien" picnics, in this case, are a prelude to settlement and expansion, and we have only met the children.
Your point on understanding mostly holds (although our own mind's inscrutability but usefulness is a strong counter-case), but it will increasingly work against us.
We do have a "working hypothesis" how the mind works though, what psychology calls "theory of mind" or "folk psychology". While this is completely divorced from the level of neurons or brain regions and so might tell little of how the mind "really" works, it's detailed and useful enough that we can judge how other people would react, guess what attitudes, feelings and motivations drive them and in general can have a useful level of interaction.
The same is true for traditional computer programs. The standard argument against valuing understanding is "well, you don't understand the assembly, processor microcode and the electrical signaling when your program runs either, why do you care about understanding the high-level code then?"
I'd counter this by saying that high-level languages have (mostly!) self-contained abstractions that allow you to "understand" a program deep enough to make accurate predictions of its runtime behavior, answer "why" questions when errors happening and safely make changes to it - without having to understand all the stuff at lower levels.
In contrast, with AI, I see the risk that we lose understanding of both the low- and the high-level structure of things. Then we really end up in "unpredictable alien artifact" territory.
Usefulness doesn’t always rely on understanding. And it’s not a new thing in mathematics to have an answer without fully understanding it. We’re talking about a change in the rate of that happening, not a new phenomenon in itself.
Ooof, it's definitely not just you. I definitely root for Mozilla to succeed and think they're critical in the grand scheme of the browser wars, but that video is rough. It's practically Cocomelon.
Something about this irritated me so much that I even felt compelled to comment. If this ever became a mainstream idea, I would just stop using computers altogether. I am smart enough to mark my own emphasis internally, that is why I have a brain, and one of the advantages of using it.
Many have never seen a really, truly beautiful high modern home, and it shows. Lots of both traditional and modern slop out there, with gems on both sides every once in a while.
I was able to have Astra accurately solid model with plasticity (NOT import from Blender) and presumably it would be trivial with autocad, but I haven’t tried it yet.
We're talking about being ghosted or rejected for applications and interviews. It actually seems very relevant. Details matter. Don't give anyone a reason to reject you, because there are hundreds (or thousands) of applications who are also qualified and ran spellcheck. I'm really not trying to be a jerk.
