Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

> Study Deep Blue’s 1997 defeat of world chess champion Garry Kasparov, and your excitement about how quickly this technology would take over other cognitive work would wane as you learned just how much brute human force went into fine-tuning the software specifically to beat Kasparov.

That was ~26 yeas ago. In the intervening 26 years humans have been curb-stomped so hard at chess that certain microwaves might be competitive against human grandmasters. Anyone who doesn't think that was an exciting moment for AI research has impossible standards, we're living in a tiny window of existence where humans were at the top of the intellectual food chain and are now dropping to also-ran status along with the rest of the meat-based animal kingdom.

All these moments are the real deal. The idea that somehow this particular step change is even unexpected is missing the forest for the trees. The trends that have been observed since the beginning of computers are chugging away so quickly the whole process may well happen in a single generation.

The are microwaves fully in on the curb-stomping https://www.tomsguide.com/news/ges-kitchen-hub-is-the-smarte... My back of the envelope suggests most digital microwaves with a smart defrost but no connectivity are probably more in the 2000 ELO range (i.e. can beat most players but not grandmasters). Mainly due to not having enough storage for large opening/endgame books.

I for one welcome measuring compute power in chess ELO over FLOPS. Let's me know which devices I can trounce and which ones to pay respect to.

Agreed. Although my ego might not be able to take it if it turns out I can be outplayed by my IKEA smart lamp.

I can program an IKEA smart lamp to be better at chess then I am; I see this as a win.

everything so far looks to me like improvements on the pocket calculator, bearing in mind that an order of magnitude difference in scale really still is a difference of kind, they're still orders of magnitude improvements on pocket calculators (which admittedly is something of a different kind). There's a very important particular kind of human intelligence that machines can't seem to do at all, like Einstein discovering general relativity or Fleming discovering antibotics...which sounds like I'm cherry-picking human intelligence at its best, but I'm really pointing out a kind of information synthesis on the basis of reacting to unexpected information.

I have trouble articulating it, but I can see that LLMs and chess engines don't do the slightest hint of it.

I'll be concerned when machines show the slightest hint of it, but we're playing a ball game in a sphere they can't even touch yet.

I'm genuinely continually boggled that people are not seeing this difference and feeling threatened by machine "intelligence", although they are encroaching on something thought uniquely human, and I don't think the brain is doing some kind of information processing that can't be done in any other medium, but the number of connections and kind of processing in the human brain may make it hard with current technology. The number of connections in the brain is staggering, and we certainly can't simulate anything of its scale on the scale of computer we have now, so I don't know what it will take to get any bootstrap on the kind of intelligence computers aren't doing.

I mean you might think AI can't currently affect humanity but it really does. A lot of people are now using AI to write code and to answer questions they probably should be asking a doctor or lawyer. A lot of people seem to think it's some all knowing and psychic thing and will take its advice blindly.

When you have to manually input the scores for the various board positions, feels much less exciting.

Monumental progress is very rarely done in one giant step, but with many incremental improvements.

That is just the physical layer.

Robotics is behind in making a 'human'.

Even AlphaGo had a human moving the pieces, and nobody would say that was evidence of any 'lack' in the AI.

It's just an interfacing issue, engineering will eventually solve.

Edit> What I was getting at. Take Robots as the physical interface layer for the AI. AI advancements are currently outpacing advancements in Robotics. So potentially AI could use real humans as the 'hands and feet' to do things in the physical world, by giving directions. Something will be needed to bridge the gap until Industry can be done completely by robots. Until then, AI wont be able to manufacture itself.

Plenty of practically mint human bodies just sitting around waiting to be repurposed.

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna9816703

This is the scary scenario. What if AI does out pace humans, but the physical side does not, we don't succeed in making vast quantities of easy to build and maintain robots. Thus to keep industry going, the AI does need humans, and it gives the directions.

If you have ever worked in a modern warehouse, it is very evident, the humans are just following instructions from the system. Now scale that up to a manufacturing facility, it is already happening.

Everybody with an ear-piece or 'phone' type device, following instructions.

Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manna_(novel)

This is what Doctorow refers to as the "reverse centaur"

> The problem here isn't automation, it's power. The workers whom the robots could benefit are instead harnessed to the robot to the benefit of the shareholders.

> Workplace democracy, AKA unionization, AKA the thing Amazon has pulled out every dirty trick to prevent, is the difference between centaur utopia and reverse-centaur dystopia.

-- https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/17/reverse-centaur/#reverse-...

Again, your information is tremendously out of date. AlphaZero crushes grandmasters and had no human training whatsoever as to board evaluation functions.

Again? When else?

Also, we were talking about deep blue. Perhaps trying to not go OT would be beneficial to a productive discussion.

Except that human + computer beats either on their own, known as Centaur Chess.

Curious why you needed to inject the violent overtones in your comment, "curb stomped?

We're building tools to help us augment our intelligence, I don't see anyone getting "curb stomped"?

If intelligence leads to more violence, then I don't think it will be as useful as we'd have hoped.

It's just a turn of phrase that means you got 100% beaten without challenge.

No, no it isn't. It's a very particular violent act designed to maximize ongoing physical pain and social disadvantage in the victim. Sort of like throwing sulfuric acid at someone's face.

wait until you hear such idioms as "punched in the gut", "made a killing", etc.

Punched in the gut vs curb stomped...hmmm

vs made a killing, hmmm...

Michael Jordan was a stone-cold killer on the court.

Don't stop with merely hearing them; think about them.

> [Hobbes] even, through sheer force of imagination, was able to outline the main psychological traits of the new type of man who would fit into such a society and its tyrannical body politic. He foresaw the necessary idolatry of power itself by this new human type, that he would be flattered at being called a power-thirsty animal, although actually society would force him to surrender all his natural forces, his virtues and his vices, and would make him the poor meek little fellow who has not even the right to rise against tyranny, and who, far from striving for power, submits to any existing government and does not stir even when his best friend falls an innocent victim to an incomprehensible raison d'etat.

-- Hannah Arendt

Policing language sounds a bit Orwellian (insert doublespeak quote). People like to use various metaphors. It doesn't mean they literally want to curb stomp a competitor.

> Policing language sounds a bit Orwellian (insert doublespeak quote).

And that only applies to criticizing phrases like "killing it", without even demanding it to not be used -- but not to bringing out Nineteen-Eightyfour? And doublespeak? No, doublethink means holding two contradictory things to be true at the same time, doublespeak is the verbalization of that. You're thinking of wrongthink, and either way you are doing what you criticize. Instead of saying "this is horrible" you say "this is dystopian", it changes nothing.

More importantly, your reply contains nothing specifically applying to my comment. Maybe you missed the point, which is that people delude themselves to compensate their lack of agency, being restricted to partake in a rat race that will leave them empty-handed in the end -- all of which Hannah Arendt explains in the context, but I didn't want to post a wall of text. That they don't actually mean what they say, because what they mean (and do) would be to pitiful to say without such flourish, and that they aren't actually violent and powerful, but "poor meek little fellows", is precisely the point.

I bet you're fun at parties.

It would be more accurate to say that some people use it as a simple turn of phrase without considering what it means. Language is made mostly of metaphor and analogy. Explaining something by comparison to something that is already understood is a technique that seems to fit our model of thought.

Over time the original meaning may fade or be forgotten, and the residual symbol in the language becomes the thing itself. Etymology is full of examples.

But that much history has not yet passed since the introduction of the term "curbstomping" and so using it is still a choice that conveys some meta-meaning about content and style.

As mentioned further up in the thread it is unnecessarily violent for conveying the meaning in the comment.

Curb-stomping is used in many sorts of competitions to denote being beaten badly. Also they got their ass beat, whipped-up on, wrecked, etc.

No reason to make it an issue, people just like using those metaphors.

Is it, imagine saying this to your kids, "Hey Sam, your sister totally curb stomped you at practice today..."??

It's not clear to me that we need to talk to each other like we're talking to our own children. That would be odd.

> brute human force

> beat Kasparov

So much violence everywhere

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