"Past performance is not indicative of future results."
28,278 karma · joined May 16, 2014
The industry is notoriously corrupt, and not a stranger to pay-per-play of various kinds.
We'd be nowhere without Laplace and Fourier transforms, Maxwell's equations, elliptic curve cryptography, and many more.
Most math doesn't, but often these techniques are invented first and the applications come later.
And the criticism of the current round of proofs is that while they may be true - likely for some, questionable for others - they're not adding new techniques or insights.
But it doesn't follow that these proofs - or any proofs - are automatically on the far side of that limit.
The human usefulness of a proof depends entirely on its human legibility. Much of the value of proofs is in inventing new techniques and concepts and having new insights into relationships. Occasionally you get some game changing insight into practical physics or engineering. But that's rare.
Without that, proving or disproving a conjecture is an excuse for new and original thinking.
Compilers are not the same problem. The point of code is to produce reliable-ish consequences from various possible inputs. It's not a creative exercise in logical consistency, which is what maths proofs are, ultimately.
The Navy was the best in the world.
There was a capitalist investment culture which linked elements of the aristocracy with inventors and traders, so ventures were relatively easy to fund.
The Royal Society helped spread scientific research and insights.
Private military ventures like the East India Company were closely linked to the state and 'too big to fail' (at least for a while.)
The educational system produced administrators, adventurers, soldiers, and politicians with an unshakeable, almost cult-like, sense of patriotic entitlement.
Britain was isolated physically, which meant the possibility of a distracting land war stopped being a risk after Waterloo, and sea war more or less after Trafalgar.
Basically England was a mature nation state with stable borders and a workable (if brutal and very imperfect) investment-oriented economy, while the other European powers were still fighting each other and - in many cases - trying to self-organise a national identity.
This looks like an AI IPO PR powerplay, because at this point the proofs haven't been checked and it may not be possible for a human to check them - because proofs should be clear, not horribly written and noisy.
The noise is suspicious because it's the difference between brute forcing and cognition. A human proof won't just be logically correct, it will be cognitively distilled and coherent. It may still take years to understand it, but the logical flow will be straightforward, not obfuscated.
You want the path through the maze to be as short as possible and the map to be as clear as possible.
This sounds like the opposite. There may be a genuine path through the maze, but if it's too convoluted and takes too long it will be impossible to confirm.
I think the next step is to demand that proofs either be human-scale or they prove that a human-scale proof is impossible and the machine proof is as good as it gets.
I suspect that's possible without tripping over the halting problem. (But I can't prove it.)
I suspect it will struggle with anything that isn't simple enough for demo-mode or lifestyle fluff.
[Looks at interior photos]
Ah. Anyway.
Curious how he got planning permission. Or if he got planning permission.
If - for example - you find a major news outlet that's pro-union, pro-single-payer, pro-wealth-taxes, and pro-debt-free-education, let me know.
They're pretty damn interesting. Cats sometimes think hard about their responses. And they use metaphors. And express emotions.
There's always the suspicion this is a fake marketing exercise. But if it is, it's a very ornate and extended one.
I have no idea how we're supposed to communicate with aliens if we can't communicate with other mammals.
"They're really stupid and can't do calculus or invent FTL travel" isn't much of an excuse.
I've always been a JB fan. But the last few updates have been quite rough, and they really don't seem to have worked out the AI thing at all.
Almost. In a way.
And everyone had a fairly good idea what fission and fusion bombs would do once built. (Teller was worried Trinity might set off a nitrogen fusion reaction and kill all life on Earth, but Bethe and others proved him wrong before testing.)
No one knows what the limits of AI are. It's not just untested, it's unmodelled, and unplanned - build it first, worry about consequences later.
It's just as likely - far more likely IMO - that we're physically incapable of understanding physical laws and physical systems on their own terms.
Hypothetically.
But yes - superpersuasion is the real danger. We're very, very persuadable and easy to manipulate, and the voters with the lowest cognitive abilities are trivially easy prey, with a huge ROI for minimal investment.
The AI bot farms are already running. What we haven't seen yet, so far as we know, is spontaneous superpersuasion aimed at leaders.
Are leaders any less susceptible to it than everyone else? Especially if they're narcissistic and easily flattered?
As for defences - capital is just political power by other means. If the capitalist is wasting money on yachts while workers can't afford food and housing, the return is morally disproportionate, and the usual outcome is socially catastrophic, in various possible ways.
Capitalism reduces every transaction to personal opportunism, with no concept of broader consequences. That's a shockingly stupid way to run anything - as we're all about to find out.
Also, everyone makes mistakes. But some people are, quite literally, a danger to themselves and others, and everyone needs to be protected from them. Including themselves.
If you don't believe me, try hacking some government sites and see what happens to you.
But OpenAI is a huge corporation and low-status laws don't apply.
Although to be fair the US has a number of prominent high status individuals who clearly belong in jail, so it's not as if Altman is getting uniquely personal treatment.
No one in the West has had the Eastern European experience of queuing for bread for hours and discovering there isn't any.
In the West we have exceptionally strong normalcy bias and can't imagine a world with severe scarcity.
In countries like Poland that's still lived memory.
It's at everyone else's expense, but so is everything else they do.
I very much can.
That applies to most software.
This doesn't solve the problem of "Who gets paid now, and for what?" at all. If anything it makes it worse.
It took maybe a century and a half for the modern consumer economy to appear. And it didn't happen until money started being shared into the wider economy for political reasons, not technological ones.
Meanwhile the enclosure of common land was catastrophic for rural populations. Sources of food and pasture disappeared as the Big Houses took them over and turned them into huge single family estates.
What business do you have telling everyone your personal experience justifies the horror others experience?
If you couldn't put down that $25, would you really not be able to find some other way to entertain yourself?