https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Robert_Oppenheimer#:~:text=...
If your goal is to implement an absurd comment you can use this one next time: instruct your LLM to implement Conway’s Game of Life to implement an abacus.
Because, you know, humans are notoriously poor at implementing the x86-64 instruction set in their minds. This is why God had to create Guido van Rossum.
Arguably Mathematica would be a better fit, but there are those who frequent this corner of the Internet who rather not have to read anything that might cause them to think about Stephen Wolfram.
So I won’t mention it.
sitzfleisch: the ability to endure or carry on with an activity
Something Oppenheimer did not have, apparently.
Grit can be the courage to endure adversity.
It can also be the resolve to endure tedium.
People go whole lives without being able to make it pan out.
Nowhere did I suggest that “the reason for discrediting string theorists is that they have financial stakes in the idea.” Please try to be more charitable than that.
> No, not morons, but people who have built a career on string theory. At this point, even if they regret their decisions, it’s too late to turn back now.
This is not presented as "yet another option that may or may not be the reality", this is presented as your conclusion of why we observe what we observe.
Maybe it is not what you are thinking, but you cannot blame people for interpreting your message the way you have written it.
I agree with you that there are several options, one of the most probable, that you did not mention, is that the situation of the string theory is just "normal" and some idiots are not able to understand that.
ReactJS devs will retrain when the market dies. Professors still publishing theories/experiments costing large amounts of public monies better spent elsewhere.
You have tons of software developers that cling to their preferences for ages. They have their beloved language, or beloved paradigm, and they will invent any excuse to explain how relevant it is. It is also visible with current LLM, where there are plenty of software developer islands where they blanket ban LLM usage as an emotional response. There is a big contrast with the academic sector where the most sceptical people did not blanket banned it, but find way to put guardrails (and I'm sure you can find anecdotal places that are emotionally against LLM in academia, but it is an order of magnitude lower than in the software development sector).
Same about "real life market forces". Especially when at the same time people criticize, correctly, the "publish or perish" hyper-competitiveness problem in academia. The reality is that a physicist need to retrain plenty of time, probably as much as a ReactJS dev. But that reality flies high above the head of people who jump into the first caricatural idea they have about the sector.
As for "costing large amounts of public monies", you don't seem to even know what you are talking about. String Theory probably costs society way less than plenty of other useless things, and still managed to provide very useful tools that are used in mathematical physics outside of string theory (not that I'm saying it was worth it, but it is just not fair to pretend that they did not produce anything). In contrast, the software development sector has a huge contribution on enshittification, stealing user data, making porn, creating social media addiction and creating financial bubbles that splash in the whole economy. Between the two, there is clearly one that is way more toxic on the society.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not interested in "taking side" and particularly defending physicists. I'm sure they are making mistakes and wasting money, like any other sectors, and that we still should find these places and fix them. But your depiction is so caricatural that I had to rebalance the situation by reassessing the facts.
That is not true. In academia you have extremely niche research specializations and tenure as two major contributors to inertia. In general software development you have an enormous amount of career mobility.
Software developers learn new languages, new frameworks, new tools, new development methodologies all the time. A string theorist who decides to pivot away from string theory essentially has to start their career over from scratch. It’s not even close!
Let's take for example https://arxiv.org/pdf/1901.02789
It's not even clear where String Theory is categorized in this article. Maybe High Energy Physics? Maybe Condensed Matter? It already shows how broad it is, as they already consider that people with such a different specific subject (for example theoretical dark matter in HEP or superconductivity in Condensed Matter) are not even "changing field" when they move to String Theory.
In this article, you can see on Figure 1 that about 65% of physicists (similar in HEP and CondMatter) are also working on subjects that are in one other category (so, it's not even that the person is doing String Theory and another subject inside their own group, like dark matter or superconductivity, it is more like String Theory and Astrophysics).
In Figure 2, you can see that 38% (resp. 21%) that have started their career as specialist in HEP (resp. CondMatter) ended up changing specialisation within about 5 years. (and this is "voluntary", it means that "changing specialisation" is in reality pretty easy, as of course the majority of people could change easily but just decide not to because they don't see the point of changing)
Even without this study, you can easily check the reality yourself. If I do a search on "computational tools for string theory", the first result I get is https://compstring.org/.
First, if you look at the list of participants, you will notice their CVs and how diverse they are, with background or even current activities in: SUSY, QFT, CFT, condensed matter, cosmology, quantum gravity, black hole thermodynamics, ...
Second, if you look at the software, you will see the majority are very recent (2025, 2023 and 2025). Each of them require learning the specific framework, with new rules, new ways of describing the problem and new ways of making the software do what you want. This is similar to passing from ReactJS to Angular (both are about 10 years old, so in fact, the String Theory community seems to change framework more often than devs).
You can also look up in wikipedia, the famous names in String Theory, they all have plenty of activities that go well beyond string theory (which means the reality is even stronger, as they were not even forced to do something else, they've done it because it was trivial for them to also work on these subjects): Maldacena and Susskind on black holes and wormholes, Shenker on quantum chaos, Seibert on SUSY, Strominger on gravitational waves, Fischler on blackholes production in particle colliders, Kounnas on GUTs, ...
> A string theorist who decides to pivot away from string theory essentially has to start their career over from scratch. It’s not even close!
That's just factually not true. And I've provided data that demonstrate that. It looks like you have no idea what a string theorist is doing and how they can transition to another field.
Comparing academic inertia to software development is a joke. One that is so bad it’s not worth picking apart anything you wrote.
(thinking of black holes for example - they were theorized way before we had observations. And presumably a lot of particle physics can similarly be theorized before we built the technology to experimentally verify them)
String theory has nothing even theorized that would allow us to prove it.
The fact that so many people, like you, just INVENT that it is not testable is quite worrying. Why? What's the point of doing that?
String theory can't be disproved even in theory. Spending decades on that is akin to spending decades rearchitecting your software to make it more beautiful and full of design patterns and promising users/management that some day it'll all make sense.
But more importantly, "falsifiable" means "observations reduce the landscape". It does not matter if the landscape never fully disappear, as long as the observations constrain the parameters of the theory, then the theory is falsifiable. This is the real condition for a theory to be unfalsifiable. Astrology is not falsifiable: whatever the observation, the full astrology theory remains exactly the same, nothing has been constrained.
Why is it the correct definition? Because your definition leads to illogical situations. For example, I can divide "string theory" into "string theory of region 1", "string theory of region 2", "string theory of region 3", ... which are all in different parameters space. In this case, suddenly, "string theory of region 1" can be fully excluded. But it is illogical to pretend that "string theory of region 1" is suddenly "good falsifiable science" just because you renamed it while the physics is 100% the same. Another example of illogical situation is "an observed theory suddenly qualifies as falsifiable" (cf. the example with the electromagnetism below).
Also, "try again with more energy" is very common in beyond standard model physics. It is the case for lepton compositeness, heavy bosons, fourth lepton generation, SUSY, all of Effective Field Theory, ... None of these theories are abandoned because "unfalsifiable". The argument that string theory is bad because unfalsifiable feels like a bad faith argument while plenty of other physicists activities have the same characteristics but people who are against string theory does not care when physicists work on those.
It's also the case with common theories like electromagnetism or weak force: we are happy with them because we have observed them, but theoretically (in their current formulation), their parameters are free: if the alpha constant was 10 to the power -100, electromagnetism would have been undetectable up to now (the world would be quite different, but still). And if in this parallel universe a physicist would have came up with the theory and tried to observe it and failed, they could have always said "well, it just means that the alpha constant is even smaller". So, do you agree that electromagnetism is a non falsifiable theory because the alpha constant is a free parameter and could have been arbitrarily small? Because if not, you are saying that exactly the exact same theory is sometimes falsifiable, sometimes unfalsifiable, depending on where the free parameters are: right now string theory is unfalsifiable, but if we observe cosmic superstrings, suddenly, the theory qualifies as falsifiable.
Finally, the more you eliminate part of the landscape, the more the credibility of the theory decreases. And even if some part of landscape remains, the theory is abandoned when it is virtually useless.
String theory necessitates observable objects to remain viable as an useful theory (for example, SUSY particles, specific inflationary signature, ...). If these are not observed, the theory is not 100% rejected, but it becomes "useless": it will prove that the reality needs another fix than the string theory to explain some of the problem we observe in the current standard model. In other term, "string theory" can always remain a possibility, but "string theory as the answer of the current problems" would be 100% rejected and physicists will start working on other theories.
The idea that you pretend that physicists will still work on string theory when all the "juice" would been removed due to constraints is just so surreal to me. The reason string theory is popular amongst physicists is because they want to understand the current problems and that, according to them, string theory is a good candidate to explain them. It is crazy to imagine that when we have demonstrated that string theory cannot explain these problems, people whose main motivation is to explain these problems would say "we know we will not get anything of what we want if we work on this subject, but, hey, it's theoretically not fully excluded, so, I have to continue for eternity before passing to a more promising subject".
On a serious note, I was reflecting the other day and recognize I need to do better with how I address people online. I genuinely apologize for my part in our nasty interaction. It's something I've struggled with, but I will do better.
As for the unsolicited following, I'm not sure what you would get out of it. I guess you will regularly spew your bile. But it does not really affect me, it just confirms I'm right about what I think of you. The "unsolicited following" perfectly fits the character, it is not really an action that you expect from the "winning side" of the story.
I personally don't care how you respond to my apology; I don't say that defiantly. I just believe that I should own any toxicity I spewed unnecessarily.
But how you respond to someone's genuine apology speaks volumes about how rotten you have become as a person. And I say that in a factual manner; not in any retaliatory way. You are a truly rotten person.
If you have any, I truly feel sorry for your spouse and any children.
Anyways Cauch, best of luck, bud. May your spirit one day be free from the anger and bitterness that oozes from your being.
And this is quite creepy: 1. tracking me back, months after we had our discussion, as if it is something you still think about, this is super creepy, 2. saying, even under the cover of humour (cf. next point), that we're "in too deep" or that it is an "unsolicited following", this is creepy, 3. and bringing all that as a "joke", that is just so bizarre, it reminds me of the caricatural obsessive date "oh we should definitively move in together ... just joking ... and decide the name of our future children ... just joking ahahah ..."
So, yeah, just consider that I'm a rotten person if it helps you, or blame others for not showing you the compassion you crave when you admit that you have been shitty with them. You are not relevant to me, I've forgotten about you so fast last time and I can easily block your username if I decide I have better entertainment elsewhere, and I truly don't care about whatever fantasy you invented about me in your strange brain.
I wouldn't expect someone who finds themselves in that state to pick up on it.
You mentioned the caricature that it reminds you of. That is a reflection of something that is taking place inside you and baggage that you bring into an interaction that doesn't merit it. If you can't discern that, that is not something I, or anyone else, can help you with.
You mentioned that I wanted compassion from you. The fact that you're so comfortable making that assumption says a lot about the intellectual integrity you have and the lack of honesty you bring to discussions in your life. Nobody was expecting compassion. However, I emphasize once again and my point remains: how you respond to someone's genuine apology speaks volumes about you.
I know that reflection in the mirror is one you will try to deny and rationalize away, but it's one you should reflect on and, who knows, maybe even use as moment in your life that catapults you into change.
You pointed out, almost in "gotcha" fashion that I admit I have been shitty with people -- I have. 100%. The difference between you and I is not that I have been shitty and you haven't. It's that I still have something inside me that compels to own my shitiness and change. You don't. You're comfortable in your rotteness.
You'll block my username only when the truth of my words hurts too much. Otherwise, being the rotten person you are, you will continue to enjoy the back and forth because you get off on the rage.
Anyways, I'm about to go workout and enjoy my day. I am releasing you Cauch!
I feel that you are trying to convince me that you are very wise by doing more and more unhinged things. I'm not sure why you think this would even work.
As I've said, I'm 100% fine to know that you think I'm rotten. You already insulted me previously, I got the message and I can't care less, so why come back to do it again? Why would you think I will take you seriously now? Are you "trying to save me from myself"? That's not really convincing: coming back to a stranger on the internet after few months for pure altruism, that is not something that a sane person would do (especially as you were pretending that you did not care at all). Instead of "trying to save me from myself", the readers will suspect that you came back because you still have things on your chest, and that this conversation is more for you than for me. That's sad.
At this point, every single one of your responses is just a reflection of you, not me.
You keep saying you don't care. But you can't help yourself from responding to me every single time.
You do care, Cauch. You care because the toxicity in your bones that you refuse to let go of needs an online enemy you can't direct your toxicity towards.
The point stands: Cauch responds, Cauch cares!
And I enjoy thinking you get more and more convinced that I care the more I answer. Why would I stop? You are literally giving me reward for answering you.
> You care because the toxicity in your bones that you refuse to let go of needs an online enemy you can't direct your toxicity towards.
I cannot let go so much that I recontacted you out of the blue after weeks. Oh, wait, it was you. "We broke up but my ex is so not over me, it is very annoying. They even said my name and got angry when they saw me stalking them behind the bush, if it's not the proof".
Again, you did not answer: what is your goal here? What do you think you will receive? You know that it will never go further than that, that you will never feel that you've "won", that you will never be really convinced that any of your insults have ever landed. It will end like the last conversation, and it will be as unsatisfying for you.
In fact, even if I say exactly what you want to hear, you will not be satisfied, because you will always have a doubt in the back of your mind that I just said that to fool you to think you've "won".
The guy who initially accused me of being creepy all of a sudden understands that there's an entertainment component to how I communicate.
You ask me what my goal is. The question is, for someone who keeps saying they don't care -- what is yours?
The good old Cauchenator needs somewhere he can release his anger.
You mention that tried fooling me so that I can think I've won. I apologized to you. Someone who has even the slightest desire of winning doesn't apologize bubs.
Good ole, Cauch. If we ever run into each other, that'll be in an interesting discussion. We're not that far from each other.
You realise I laugh at you and not with you, right?
For example, the hilarious fact that you try to convince me that I "refuse to let go" when not only you are the one starting talking to me, saying we're in "too deep", saying you want an "unsolicited following" of me, and now wishing to "run into each other" and implying you care enough to be interested to know where I live.
You are really obsessing over me, don't you?
> You ask me what my goal is. The question is, for someone who keeps saying they don't care -- what is yours?
What? My goal for what? For answering? It was literally the content of my previous comment, you pillock.
Your turn to answer now, what was your goal to contact me. Wait, I can do it for you: "because I'm so great that I needed to apologize to you because you are so pathetic and I worry about you and wanted to help by explaining how much you suck". Move on, bud, you are pathetic. Whatever you are looking for, you will never get it. Cut your losses and stop obsessing over me.
> The good old Cauchenator needs somewhere he can release his anger.
And yet you are the one who had the need to talk to me.
> Someone who has even the slightest desire of winning doesn't apologize bubs.
Someone who has even the slightest desire of not looking like an idiot does not pretend that the person he practices an "unsolicited following" over is the one who "cannot let go". Idiots don't always do things that align with their goal.
But, yeah, you know what, if you want to convince me that you did not contact me because I got under your skin in the previous conversation and you are still upset about it, you know what you can do: tell me what is your goal for talking to me.
> If we ever run into each other, that'll be in an interesting discussion. We're not that far from each other.
You would love that, wouldn't you? Obsessing over me much?
It's also a glib dismissal of the unexpected mathematical elegance of string theory that makes it so compelling. Worse, it completely ignores the material contributions to applied physics that string theory has made possible which is obviously worth "spending your life's work on" - as if people need to justify the value of their life's work to disinterested onlookers lest they be demeaned.
Our grandparent is sort of the perfect example of an insight-free comment: confidently claiming string theory is useless (without supporting evidence) and then claiming (more like imagining, since there's again no evidence provided here) that an LLM would have abandoned such a research program long ago. What's there to discuss? The comment is based on a made-up scenario; it is, in other words, pure fiction.
The degree of confidence matters here.
And for the inevitable critics of Sabine...maybe Leonard Susskind is good enough for you: https://youtu.be/2p_Hlm6aCok
You can take any of the theories that Hossenfelder would spend time on instead of the ones she does not like, and you would find (basically) a similar percentage of physicists saying it's a mistake to continue in this direction.
In other terms: for each physics theory, on 100 physicists, you have 5 physicists saying it is a mistake to continue working on it (number made up for illustration, and there is probably some variations, but you get the gist). You took one theory and found few physicists saying it is a mistake to continue working on it. You conclude, incorrectly, that it means this theory is fundamentally differently treated as any other theories.
(on top of that, it is unfortunate that Hossenfelder later screw up her image by doing way too much mistakes that someone reliable would not do)
As for Susskind, the fact that he was a main contributor is not a factor, on the contrary, what I had in mind is about the percentage of experts in the subject that later criticize the field. You have plenty of other examples in other fields: Shiffman on SUSY, Loeb on WIMP, Hirsch on applied fusion, ... or even Einstein on quantum physics ("Yes, I may have started it but I always regarded these ideas as temporary. I never thought that others would take them so much more seriously than I did.")
Some outsiders are seeing a normal scientific process where people are continuously questioning the validity or the efficiency of things, and they start in their fantasy "look, they say it should not be done this way, it's the proof it's all wrong".
Again, what we observe with String Theory is not at all exceptional. The reason it is "a big deal" is because of the populist message and the scam around "these physicists who stole the public money". It is a bit like "vaccines cause autism": it got some media attention, it resonated with the populist conspiracy theory of "the physicists know but they are farming money" and the anti-intellectual trend, and now it has become both some kind of cultural war and an easy way to farm views and followings and show themselves as "so rebel, so edgy".
Don't get me wrong, I personally think that String Theory is overrated (and I was thinking that way before it was popular to criticize it). And the return of the pendulum means that it may now be in the edge side of the average. But nothing significant to pretend there is a particular dysfunction.
"Why string theory isn't real physics | Roger Penrose, Brian Greene, and Eric Weinstein" - https://youtu.be/5GGGhI9ablQ
It did not work out....
It looks like you just took a video with someone defending string theory and simply concluded that we have the same arguments.
My point is that you could build a similar panel (with some eminent physicists pro and con investing in the theory) about more or less all cutting-edge theories. This is just a normal situation to have. Some people don't think string theory is a good use of time, others think it is. The video you presented is just that. It does not demonstrate that having this situation is specific to string theory.
But on the core of the video, I don't find it very interesting. It's a shame because I personally find string theory overrated and I don't like it much, but it is sad to see that there is no good arguments against it.
In the video, Penrose's argument was just "I disagree on some aspect and I don't find it elegant". Big whoop, this happens all the time. He also admits that he does not know enough about it, and when he brings specifics, Greene reacts as if the objections were trivial things he and his colleagues also thought about but realised were not in fact a problem.
Not sure what to say about Weinstein. He basically ends up saying what I just said in my previous paragraph here: Penrose did not provide much argument, just "I don't find it beautiful". That being said, it's a bit strange to see him there as he has a bad reputation as a scientist (not sure I should go into details, but he claimed to have a terrific unified theory for years, TGU, and when he finally explained it publicly, the whole scientific community saw it was nonsense, which is not something you expect for someone who is reliable when talking about science). It does not mean that he may not have good points sometimes, but having pseudoscientists presented as scientists on the panel is not the best.
In fact, the situation is a bit like in open source free software: you have always people saying "you should not work on that, you should work on this instead". People working on KDE are "wasting everyone's time" for not working on Gnome and inversely. People working on a new software when alternatives exist are "bad for the community". And people using a given development paradigm are "fundamentally wrong" according to people who like the other paradigm.
So, in fact, another way of putting my argument: string theory is not particularly bad, what we see around it is in fact so common that you even see it around KDE vs Gnome.
03:56 - https://youtu.be/5GGGhI9ablQ?t=235
Conceptually is the same. For a moment I though you were him.
His intervention (which is not even really an argument) is that "physicists chose what to work on and some of them think string theory is interesting" (and I think his interlocutor failed to provide any rebuttal to that. Weinstein counter-argument is "their choices have side effect so they should make the choice I prefer" which does not really hold water).
My point is that this specific debate that we observe around string theory happens in plenty of cutting edge physics and string theory is not "special".
In the section you mention, Greene does not even mention or make any reference of the situation in any other field than string theory. How is that even barely related?
When people discuss what to do after LHC, some people say "let's prepare for building a Future Circular Collider", to which some physicists are saying "no, that's a bad idea and a waste of money and time". Other people say "let's focus on other ways to probe particles with different kind of detectors", to which some physicists are saying "no, that's a stupid bad and a waste of money and time". Other people say "let's not continue to explore particle physics", to which some physicists are saying "no, that's a bad idea and a waste of money and time".
Whatever you say about what to do after LHC, they will always have people saying it's a bad idea. Maybe you have a personal opinion of what would be best, in which case, you are exactly in the same position as Greene: there will be people who will say "no, I don't like that".
("what to do after LHC" is just an example. There are plenty of other topics: do exotic physics or precision measurement, approach the problem top-down or bottom-up, cold fusion, modified gravity, supersymmetry, ...)
When the flath-earth craze started I've been trying to at least get that bit actually personally verified. Haven't managed to do it to this day, though. So I'll just keep parroting various things without properly understanding them.
C'est la vie.
Explaining Moon phases gets very complicated in any flat earth model. With binoculars you can see the shadows of craters on the moon's terminator. Or the phases of Venus whereas Mars doesn't have any.
Timezones are ridiculously hard to explain on a flat earth.
A proper theory must explain all of them and no flat earth model can do that. A round Earth OTOH easily does.
Disproving flat Earth does not verify round Earth, after all. And all your listed refutations of flat Earth do not really disprove anything, either. They might, if you do the actual work, but you did not, choosing to just parrot someone that did put in the work.
Which was my point. It is much easier to speak vaguely and reference things than it is to actual prove something rigorously.
There's a difference between "I haven't verified this myself" and "there is no good reason to believe this." You're conflating the two.
But then I've given you a few examples of thought and actual experiments that are very easy to do. That's the opposite of parroting as you can use your own mind to ponder those. But you seem to want to be ignorant, claiming that two theoretical models are equally bad just because you don't want to consider their properties for a second.
I never did a formal proof of it, yet I just use it because it works and I'm pretty sure it's true. Someone else proved it and I'm just parroting that without ever even having bothered to read the proof.
We have 2500 years of epistemology. Individual humans can reach knowledge to various degrees. It’s not a binary state of knowing or not knowing.
There are examples of things written in school books that were just plain wrong because no one bothered to properly verify it. We all settle for "good enough" most of the time.
How do I say this in the most gentle way I can...?
Your brain is broke. No, seriously. If you can help it, try not to argue with anyone about anything, ever. You have a demonstrated inability to think clearly.
The Lambda-CDM model seems to be a dead end, but instead of recognising that, picking themselves up, and moving on, the Lambda-CDM Model Industrial Complex simply papered over the gaping holes with magical thinking.
Sciencism.
> String theory is a great example of a dead end kept alive by ego and sunk cost fallacy. An AI would have declared it dead and moved on 10 years earlier.
Not only are LLMs perfect machines with all the intelligence of humanity without any of our problems, they are also everything else. I wait to get my hands on one of those LLMs people on hn seem to be using. I want to believe too. Let me into the religion of the perfect thinking machine gods.
Theres going to be this field day of low-hanging fruit that ML can round up, but after that I suspect it will be in fits and starts as a “connection maker” rather than some proof producer.
In the last 100-200 years, that has been proven wrong at every single step.
Anyway, it's true that replacing an automated production line with a crowd of generalist robots doesn't make sense. Generalist humanoid robots are intended to replace the remaining human workers.
No people. If you want something with fine motor control and dexterity, it's easier to make that the robot and then have another robot bring the workpiece to the arm than it is to build a single robot that can walk around and do it. There are compromises in human features because we're generalists.
The 2030s have some bad news for us...
That's the marketing pitch.
A plumbing robot doesn't need to be humanoid, an octopus shape may well be better for all the awkward corners. A robot police officer could be the municipality itself for sensory nodes (essentially the sales pitch of Flock etc.), plus some drones or robot dogs to perform arrests*.
The robot vacuum cleaners and lawnmowers we already have are nothing like a human. A robot taxi driver can be just the car. Robot dogs are already used for maintenance and security sweeps.
If you've got wheelchair access, you've got wheeled robot access. If you've got guide dog access, you've got access for Boston Dynamics' Spot.
* this may be a bad idea with current robotics, but I aver it's not improved by making those robotics humanoid.
How do you train a robot to use three hands effectively when we only have two? Then again, why is the robot limited to being one robot? If two humanoid robots are in the same area, they don't have to be distinctly controlled. If they're both controlled by the same AI, a third arm on one body is the same as that arm being attached to another body.
Safety. Human-robot interactions are generally dangerous and avoided, unless the robot is specifically designed to interact with people. In those cases you often sacrifice speed, strength, and flexibility for safety and softness. Having someone come in with a specialized plumbing robot makes sense, you owning one probably doesn't, and you owning a generalize android capable of plumbing makes less sense still.
Cost. The more compact, complex, and interactive your robot is the more it costs. Make a strong, compact, complex robot safe for interactions with people in the wild is non-trivial and adds costs. The software required to do all of this is hypothetical, but obviously also costly.
Need. I understand the dream of a robot to do whatever you want is very much part of our culture, but when you consider the downsides do you really need it? I don't need a plumber living in my house any more than I need a carpenter or a landscaper to live on premises. At most these are services I would need occasionally or on a schedule. I also doubt my need for them will overlap much, unless we're talking about building a new dwelling.
So why do I need a generalist in my life that's going to cost more than you can imagine, when the means to hire existing human generalists is cheap, quick, and frankly less likely to accidentally punch a hole in you.
It’s not hard to come up with a bunch of improvements for humans, it’s just that making robots in our image is a lot more trivial because you only have to solve for those same averages attributes that we have.
Vision is hard regardless of the angle, but scaling it from a normal camera to 360° doesn't add much cost or difficulty once you've done the hard part of turning pixels into a suitable latent space.
> Look at octopi with their insane nervous system required to support their tentacle.
500 million neurons across the whole animal, brain included. We'll only know the synapse count when someone does a full connectome scan of one, but based on the vague estimates I see with a quick search, their whole mind is less complex than a SotA LLM today.
> The one who wins is the one who builds a robot that can do the most, while being the cheapest.
This is a reason for specialists, not generalists.
A literal Swiss army knife is a perfectly reasonable thing to own, but you don't want to hire a builder who only has that and nothing else, not even if it's the silly model: https://www.vintageknives.nl/p/wenger-giant-swiss-army-knife...
The best container ship is a terrible pleasure yacht, and vice versa. You use container ships pretty much constantly, even though you (almost certainly) don't own one, by the power of indirection. You can rent a pleasure yacht as desired without owning own.
In both cases, the cheap option is to use the right tool for the right job, rather than to take a holiday on the Hanoi Express and get your next international shipment delivered by this: https://www.boattrader.com/boat/1996-hatteras-82-convertible...
> This is a reason for specialists, not generalists.
Precisely not. The amount of work a human can do is basically unenumerable. Requiring a specialist for each task will quickly run up costs to be completely unreasonable.
Please don't.
I mean, you yourself specifically said to "Look at octopi with their insane nervous system", and that's exactly what I'm doing and my conclusion is "doesn't look that bad compared to what else we do now".
Also note that I expressly noted that synapses, not neurons, are the important factor in parameter count.
> The amount of work a human can do is basically unenumerable.
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/a-z-index.htm
> Requiring a specialist for each task will quickly run up costs to be completely unreasonable.
The existence of specialists in professional settings proves this claim false.
As does the existence of special-purpose robots, all the way down to injection moulds designed for one specific part, which overall make the end product cheaper, a process which probably started with whoever invented whichever came first of the wind or water powered grain mill.
Much of the economic gain of the industrial revolution was replacing the very expensive salaries of general-purpose humans with machines that, despite being extremely single-purpose and having high purchase and maintenance costs, were still cheaper than the wages of the huge number of humans needed for equal output.
Since the industrial revolution we have been the species that makes tools even though it sometimes also uses slavery, not the species that relies on slaves and has tools for decorative reasons.
That makes sense, although I'd argue that at least in the realm of HEP theoretical physics has extraordinarily expensive kit compared to what scientists make. See: The LHC.
Out-ralphing them, you might say!
AGI ≈ artificial stupidity × infinite persistence
I don't know how or why this would be trained on behavior, but no, it isn't true anymore that models don't say things like, "Ugh," or "this is going to take hours and maybe we should stop here."
It's not out-thinking, it's just out-remembering
It's not out-thinking, it's just out-working
It's not out-thinking, it's just able to consider more things simultaneously
It's not creative, it's just randomly generating things and then selecting viable ones
We have known for a very long time that computers and machines are much faster than humans, more accurate, are scalable in certain ways that humans aren't, and they don't tire. I think most people who are not in the "AI cult" would agree that LLMs and modern generative AI are really just an extension of those faster/more accurate/more scalable and never tiring traits. But there does seem to be (and I'm sure folks much smarter than I have quantified this or described it better than I can) a fundamental difference in how humans think, especially as it applies to what true "understanding" really entails, and for the ability to think up truly novel and unique things that are not just a rejiggering/recombination of training data. I believe those skills really are at the heart of human cognition, and as impressive as LLMs are in replicating what this looks like, there are plenty of "LLM failure modes" where it's clear that LLMs lack a true understanding of concepts or the ability to generate useful, completely novel ideas.
However I can only guess that this is important, I'm not absolutely certain. They're at risk of being an economic disruptor just by being extremely stupid (by how much they need to study) faster than us to the same ratio we jog faster than continental drift.
Could is carrying a lot of weight here.
Because, what's really happening is we're saying "Oh these things are what defines intelligence" then implementing them and /discovering/ "oh wait, there's more to this than we knew".
We've known, for decades, for example that an IQ test is not a measure of Intelligence, even though people still refer to it as though it is. A computer passing an IQ test, therefore, would have been thought of as possessing intelligence way back when, but would not now.
Oh, on the point of "creativity" - is a RNG "creative"? It creates a value unbounded by human intervention (in theory, yes Pseudo RNGs have limitations) - therefore it must be creative... right?
That is also approximately what people have always done to succeed.
This will almost surely change with AI.
Your timelines are a bit unambitious. There's nobody expecting to make significant progress with a week of work.
You underestimate my ADHD.
Source: I am mathematician.
Source: the post-it notes, ALL OF THEM.
(1+x*y)^3*z+y^2*(1+x*y)*(4+3*x*y);y+3*x*(1+x*y)^2*z+3*x*y^2*(4+3*x*y);2*x-3*x^2*y-x^3*z|0,0,-1/4|1,-3/2,13/2
If LLMs are monkeys, somehow trained LLM weights allow them to model and prune massive numbers of universes in parallel.