Comment by jdw64 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jdw64 | Hacker News Reader

If self-reference and strange loops aren't intelligence, and emergence is merely a byproduct of universality, then what on earth is intelligence? What is this thing we question as intelligence, and what are the values that take shape from it?

Can we truly define intelligence as prediction, prediction as compression, and compression as the process of finding the upper bound of Kolmogorov complexity?

Can the statistical compression of data really explain everything? I don't know. What exactly is intelligence? Honestly, in everyday life, I rarely think about what intelligence actually is. I usually just focus on what the task at hand is and how to get it done, which makes this a fascinating question.

When you code with AI, you realize there is something fundamentally different from humans. The qualities that make a good senior programmer and the qualities that make a programmer good at orchestrating AI agents are similar, yet there is a subtly different feel to them. I might not be able to fully articulate it, but...

What exactly is the fundamental difference that creates this subtle distinction?

I concurrently prompt a senior human programmers and a set of AI programmers and the difference is the following:

The human applies critical thinking, questions choices, suggests his own ideas and has a certain taste. I also can prompt him, leave for 2 weeks, come back and have a result. And I can trust that it works! Velocity is OK. I often wish he would be faster :-)

The AI needs baby sitting and steering. It codes like a champ but I cant trust it. So we have 2000+ unit tests to make sure stuff worlks. The AI happily goes down into any rabbit whole I send it, so I need to constantly steer it. It has no taste st all, essentially everything is „A great idea“. However, its velocity is awesome. We build tons of featurs in no time. but lets not talk about the code, ok? :-)

I dont think Ill fire the human nor the agents. Both bring a lot of value

I would be extremely offended if I heard someone claim they "prompt" me. It's very disrespectful.

It was obviously meant as a funny joke ;-)

But on a more serious note. Humans "prompt" each other all the time. Especially in a Boss->Employee relation.

Defintion of "to prompt":

1. To cause or inspire: To make something happen or motivate someone to take action. For example, a loud noise can prompt you to look outside.

2. To assist or cue: To help an actor or speaker remember forgotten lines or words.

there is deeper thought on this topic beyond douglas hofstadter (~20 years ago for strange loop and prior for GEB) and scott aaronson

any cognitive science textbook will bring some thoughts, or a cursory google scholar search

Confusion around concepts such as intelligence, consciousness, self-awareness, sentience, sapience and aliveness is causing a huge difficulties in the debates around LLMs and AI. Hofstadter didn’t exactly say that self-reference and strange loops were intelligence, but something deeper.

The fact that we constantly switch between the colloquial definitions of those terms and more specific, technical ones doesn’t help

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