Comment by larryett | Hacker News Reader

Comment by larryett | Hacker News Reader

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The problem is western society doesn't really believe in science at this point to save us, it believes in technology.

All our problems are just the engineering problem of AGI. Why waste money on something like this when AI will be "smarter" than us by the time it is built?

We should just do nothing and wait for AI to build the instruments it wants.

Maybe there is the slightest hope in this "overpriced" and long delayed space telescope that is getting ready right now but even with that the narrative will end up being how "AI finds alien planet" or "AI sees first star in the universe".

To really build a new LHC it just needs to be marketed to the populace as a tool for AI research. Done. Everyone knows AI is the future and we are not so stupid to skimp on AI research funding.

Spend all that money on researching particle physics though? What a fucking waste of money.

I’m not an expert on AI but I was under the impression that AI is just a fancy way to fit data with massive computative power. So if you wanted AI to do science for us it would basically just return the result we expected in a fancy and unexpected way, and even then we might be overfitting. If an AI would return new science we didn’t expect—I don’t see how but lets imagine—we would reject it as a miss.

Take the Event Horizon Telescope as an example here. It requires a massive amount of computational modeling to create those images from a huge dataset. Humans did their science to figure out how the supermassive black holes would look like and created their models (AI if you will) based on this knowledge. Even so they are not free from criticism that they might be overfitting onto a conformation bias and many scientists are waiting for an independent confirmatory observation before they believe the image. Now if you replace the humans in that equation with more models (AGI if you will) how do you even know what you are looking at is even sensical?

I’m not a fan of the LHC++ project either, but I think you might have too much faith in AI and AGI.

How do you know that AGI can be reached?

We dont know if we will ever reach AGI and if we want to theoretically demonstrate if we can reach it or not then we need to rely on science.

Engineering alone cannot answer theoretical questions.

> western society doesn't really believe in science at this point to save us, it believes in technology.

I'm afraid - not even in technology at this point.

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