Investors and share holders want to hear that you're an "AI" company now. That implies some kind of transformation so a ritual needs to be performed. Transformations and rituals are right up "jack"'s alley, so in this case, and unfortunately for employees, it dovetails perfectly.
Notice growth is still purportedly the priority, but if it was just about growth and AI was a growth driver they wouldn't need to cut half the company, it would just be growing. It's the transformation ritual that matters. That's what gets investor's attention. You cut thousands of jobs and announce its because of AI, congratulations you're a hot new AI company. Now the hiring can start. Faang has the same number of employees as they did before the cuts started.
How can it have lost 80% of its valuation when Elon Musk bought it for $44 billion and then sold it to Elon Musk at a valuation of $45 billion, and then that entity was bought by Elon Musk for a valuation of $250 billion?
You're right, it is tempting to dunk on AI boosters every time an article like this comes out and puts a damper on their sci fi fan fiction fantasies. There's just something about a grown person getting all excited like a child that makes it really satisfying.
> If there is no inside to a box, then knowing everything about how the box interacts with things outside the box, is pretty much everything there is to know about the box, yeah.
Yeah, that's kind of a biggie. And kind of the point. It's not just some box somewhere, it's the thing we've been trying to figure out since the beginning. If physics can't tell us the fundamental nature of the universe, then what is it doing?
Sounds like you might have gotten lost in abstractions. It's a simple question. There is a box. I cannot see inside. I can model the output based on my input to it. Is that enough to tell me everything I want to know about the box? If that is all we can know about it, if we can never see inside, or there is no inside, then what do we know? Is that enough to satisfy everything you want to know about the nature of the universe?
"And, as for what precisely a quantum field is, this is somewhat mysterious, but generally it is a quantum version of a classical field, where there is a value (e.g. “value of the electromagnetic field”) at each point in spacetime."
But what does this mean concretely? Do you believe there is a real field out there with a value at each point in space time? What's it made of, what is the value a value of? If there no real field where is the accounting done and by what? I understand that when we run it through our models that assume a field like thing we get the right predictions, but what's the mechanism out there?
But this is just mystifying measurement. It's a convention that's been adopted because we've had to regress on the question of what is a real thing. It's not something you can look at or hold in your hand, it's not even something with material reality necessarily, it's just something that can be measured, or rather something that can be inferred to exist given the measured behavior of other things - i.e. gravity. You make it sound like it's a given, but this definition is a position that's been arrived at by progressive regression.
> Again, your complaints sound like dissatisfaction with the fact that the world doesn’t run on stuff that fundamentally resembles substances we have everyday familiarity with.
Ok, so you tell me, what does it run on? Intrinsic curvature and virtual particles, or what?
I'm not interested really in how something behaves, that's an accounting or record keeping task. I am interested in why it behaves a certain way, or what it is. Why does the earth go around the sun? We're told it's because of space time curvature. Curvature of what? Where is space time and what it is made of that it has a shape or geometry? There is no ether, space is not made of anything. Yet it has a shape, or at least there is some accounting going on somewhere that keeps everything moving like it's supposed to. Where is that, what's the mechanism? What we have is a mathematical model that fits the data, but doesn't explain anything. Yes, A behaves in a certain way when B is in a certain position relative to A, we can model that and we call that relativity or whatever, but what is the mechanism? That's where the abstraction is. Are we satisfied with modelling an alien system that we can't understand in any other way? To me that's not that interesting, it just leads to getting lost in abstractions. Maybe relativity will be replaced by a more complicated model that covers more edge cases, but that doesn't tell you what it is. It just tells you how it behaves, as you said. It's like if what you thought was your dog meowed and liked to climb trees instead of barking and chasing squirrels. You don't know what it is anymore, it's not a cat it's not a dog, you don't know what it is but you can model it's behavior. That's what you're forced into. The familiarity is gone. Acting like that's some big accomplishment or achievement is a cop out. We found out the universe is not amenable to our knowing it with any familiarity. Is that something to celebrate? No, it's like finding out your parents were androids. So what are we left with, just accounting rules and accounting models. All they'll give us are ways to make better tools.
I think probably in the past what one might have expected to find is akin to something like a magical material that couldn't be further probed. That would have been satisfying in a sense because it brings a wonder back into it while connecting you to the fundamental "thing".
What we have now is not that, it's still very much a mechanistic explanation where the "magic" is hidden within abstractions that make no sense to anyone, i.e abstract fields with properties but no material realty, instantaneous wave function "collapse", wave-particle duality, virtual particles etc. The reality of these things is glossed over.
But my point is that if that's what we've been driven to, why are we still engaged in this enterprise? We're just receding further into these abstractions. What are we going to find next year or next decade? A better mathematical model to fit the data? The mission has gone from finding out what the universe is made of to finding a better abstract model. Particles aren't real, they're excitations in a field, etc. It's an engineering enterprise now. So we're not going get a satisfying answer, were just going to get better lasers or whatever the next tech is.
But seriously, how does this degenerate scammer keep getting away with it, it's unbelievable. Has any con man in history operated as long as Elon at this scale? You'd probably have to go back to ancient times. Or maybe it's just recently that people have become so gullible, social media probably plays a big role.
It's not a matter of taste. This is like going to a restaurant, expecting a delicious meal, and being brought a dish with a fancy name made out of the actual menu itself. Would anyone go back there to eat?
Why are we even trying to look deeper? To fit our mathematical curves better? Abstract spacetime, fields, virtual particles, wave function collapse, quantized energy, wave particle duality, etc. This is all BS. And I'm not disputing the theories or the experimental results. These concepts are unintelligible. They are self contradictory. They are not even abstractions, they are mutually exclusive paradigms forced together into a bewilderment. I'm not disputing that the math fits the observations. But these are not explanations. If this is what it's come to, all we can expect from here on is to better fit the math to the observation. And in the end, an equation that tells us nothing about what we really wanted to know, like "what is it really"? Nobody is going to be satisfied with an equation, so why are we still funding this enterprise, for better lasers to kill bad guys?
We're already in the realm of virtual particles, instantaneous collapse, fields with abstract geometric shape and no material reality, wave particle duality, quantized energy etc. The project of physics was to discover what the universe was made of. None of these things can answer that. If intelligibility was the goal, we lost that. So in an important sense, they might as well have closed up shop. If you're interested in the specific value of a certain property to the nth decimal place, there is work to do, but if you're interested in the workings of the universe in a fundamentally intelligible sense, that project is over with. What they're doing now is making doodles around mathematical abstractions that fit the data and presenting those as discoveries.
Elon proved that "corporate puffery" is more valuable than any product you make or could make. The job of CEOs now is to generate science fiction fantasies and sell those to the public.
"the apparent is the same as the real", "this two dimensional photo is the same as the world it was taken in" says the tech bro, as he unskilfully attempts to emulate a philosopher.
Because it's a marginal improvement and though useful it's being sold by degenerate tech grifters as the science fiction dream come true to increase their influence and wealth. Everyone is sick and tired of these overgrown teenagers running amok.