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| ▲ | akiselev 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Can you give an example of an incomprehensible piece of writing (any writing, never mind a proof) that has commercial value commensurate with the costs involved here? It depends on what exactly you mean by "commercial value commensurate with the costs involved" but I'd volunteer the 3G/4G/5G specifications and the other documentation required to implement the mobile network protocols. 5G is currently sitting at over 50,000 pages and it's one of the reasons Qualcomm/Broadcom/Apple are the only ones who can realistically make a mobile radio. I don't think there is a single human to whom more than a few thousand pages would be comprehensible at a time except for the occasional genius. | | |
| ▲ | chongli 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Read the rest of the discussion. The claim is about text which is in principle incomprehensible to humans. If there exists a text which only one person can understand, that person can communicate their understanding to others, even if that doesn't help them with the original text. That dissemination of knowledge is what provides the value, not the mere existence of the text. If that person forgets or dies before they can share their knowledge then it will be lost. We have many examples of this from history: ancient texts written in a lost language. These texts provide us with no value until the day they can be deciphered, unless you count linguistic puzzle-solving as a virtue. | | |
| ▲ | a2ff6eeb0 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | > If there exists a text which only one person can understand, that person can communicate their understanding to others, even if that doesn't help them with the original text. If there exists a text which only an AI can understand, that AI can communicate their key conclusions to others, even if that doesn't help them with the original text. The only difference here is the amount of meat involved. Perhaps tossing a few steaks on the server racks could help with that. | | |
| ▲ | chongli 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | If an AI can communicate its findings to us in a way that we can understand it, then its findings are by definition intelligible to humans. Your claim was about texts for which this is not possible. | | |
| ▲ | a2ff6eeb0 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | So, you're willing to claim that a conclusion that you don't understand the reasoning for is equivalent to comprehension? Because, again, I can point to hundreds of examples of texts where nobody but the author understands it, and they're only giving summarized "commandments" that you should follow if you want good results. If I told you "don't use spin locks, call futex instead", do you think have gained an understanding of the Linux scheduler? | | |
| ▲ | chongli 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | If I told you "don't use spin locks, call futex instead", do you think have gained an understanding of the Linux scheduler? Yes, because I already knew what schedulers are, what spinlocks are, and if I want to know what futex is I can go look it up. Comprehension is within my grasp. Your original claim, which you’ve repeatedly distanced yourself from (by trying to use comprehensible examples) but won’t admit to, was about incomprehensible stuff. That is, text that no human could possibly understand, ever. You’re repeatedly engaging in intellectual dishonesty rather than simply admit that “human comprehension probably will continue for the foreseeable future”, which is really not a controversial idea at all. | | |
| ▲ | a2ff6eeb0 an hour ago | parent [-] | | Bullshit. Human comprehension will not continue, it will reduced to "when the AI tells us to add Bismuth, strontium, and copper together in this way, we get a superconductor", but that doesn't mean we understand high temperature superconductivity. For what it's worth, we've known about BSCCO for nearly 40 years, and we still don't have a great physical understanding of how it works, thought we made decent progress in 2022. | | |
| ▲ | chongli 44 minutes ago | parent [-] | | That’s still comprehensible. Incomprehensible chemistry instructions simply could not be followed by any human. They would be of no use to anyone. | | |
| ▲ | a2ff6eeb0 23 minutes ago | parent [-] | | You're using a very bad definition of incomprehensible. We don't understand the chemistry behind how these things work, it's that simple. If you're going to argue it's comprehensible, you'd better show how it works and go collect your Nobel prize. All we know is that if we melt the right rocks together, we get a superconductor that works in some mysterious way that we can't explain. We know it's not Cooper pairs. |
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| ▲ | a2ff6eeb0 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Yeah, how many people do you think understand the Linux kernel in full? What percentage of the people using it to great commercial effect can understand it? How's your understanding of Schroedingers "An Undulatory Theory of the Mechanics of Atoms and Molecules"? You seem to be using the results of it as applied to semiconductor engineering just fine. And, I promise you, most semiconductor engineers haven't read it in full, they just accepted the results as passed on by several layers of teacher. I have a paper on routing algorithms, which I have attempted to read to my cat. I don't think my cat retained much, but they seem to be enjoying the cat food that got delivered using the results. I'd suggest that we're going to be a lot closer to the cat than the author of the paper when AI takes off. | | |
| ▲ | chongli 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | You've moved the goalposts. The original claim was about producing mathematics that are in principle impossible for any human to understand. All the stuff you've listed is understood by some person, and that understanding is the source of its value. Now that we've cleared that up, can you furnish an example that satisfies the original claim of incomprehensibility and value? | | |
| ▲ | a2ff6eeb0 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | You asked for examples, for a technology that we're still building. Maybe you can see the issue with that? Anyways, people benefitted greatly from Newton's laws of gravity, even though we still don't have a quantum-compatible set of laws for it. The laws of gravity are still incomprehensible for people, but the approximation that we've observed is still immensely valuable. | | |
| ▲ | chongli 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | No, I gave you a lot more leeway than that. Take any utterly incomprehensible piece of writing from the entire history of civilization and demonstrate its value. You keep falling back on "incomprehensible for some people" but that wasn't the claim. It was about a text which is incomprehensible in principle; that is, utterly impossible for any human to ever understand. | | |
| ▲ | eks391 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | His examples work fine but you aren't accepting them because they don't confine to your paradox. Every writing must be comprehensible to at least the author, regardless of whether it has commercial value or not. If I hit the keyboard a few times, I've created writing, but it doesn't mean anything. It is just gibberish and without meaning, so there is nothing to try to comprehend. So if there is something to be comprehended, then at minimum the author should know it. Therefore what you keep claiming is the only refute of your argument of "an [...] incomprehensible [...] writing" is actually a paradox, and cannot be disproved itself. However "humans comprehending things" is not a paradox, which means that your specific request to beat your paradox is not actually related at all. His examples disproving the non-paradox version of your challenge (writing incomprehensible to folks other than the original authors) are sufficient to disprove your statement, as he gave examples of both people not comprehending human made and 'God' made writing (the universe/gravity) | | |
| ▲ | chongli 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | That's because his examples are obvious and not at all interesting, since we've already seen them. His original claim amounts to creating an AI that takes its place above humans as some kind of electronic God, delivering edicts to humanity that we cannot comprehend, but which somehow have value to us. It's unskeptical, pseudo-religious nonsense. | | |
| ▲ | rowanG077 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | I don't see that at all. Nowhere did this person evoke placing AI above people or even remotely evoke religious imagery. You imagined that yourself, and that creeps me out. | | |
| ▲ | chongli 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | It’s right here: The age of humans comprehending things is coming to an end [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49312914 | | |
| ▲ | rowanG077 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | That does not place AI above humans and neither does it evoke anything religious. Look at it this way. AI has destroyed humanity at chess for decades now. That doesn't mean we have placed AI above humans in the general sense. You have basically totally fabricated what you thought the other person was saying. |
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| ▲ | 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | a2ff6eeb0 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Can you give me an example single piece of writing that the author didn't claim they understood? I don't think that any utterly incomprehensible writing exists. If you want examples where nobody but the author understands it, examples are a dime a dozen. | | |
| ▲ | chongli 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | So you concede the point then. The age of humans comprehending things is not coming to an end. And therein lies the rub. When it comes to intellectual labour: Understanding == Value If a mathematician produces something incomprehensible then it has no value. It's meaningless. Indistinguishable from random noise. An AI which produces incomprehensible text is producing no value. We didn't need to spend trillions of dollars on LLMs to figure that out. Markov chains can do that job perfectly well. | | |
| ▲ | a2ff6eeb0 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | You may have missed the present tense. I didn't say it's over, but that it will be. Please pay attention and don't make straw men. Again, do you believe that there are documents, of any value, that humans don't understand? Maybe an LLM could help you notice what I was saying, since it's clearly beyond at least one human's comprehension! | | |
| ▲ | chongli 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Again, do you believe that there are documents, of any value, that humans don't understand? There is no value in an undeciphered document until understanding is achieved, just as a lode of gold ore in some asteroid orbiting a distant star has no value until we can fly there and extract it. If an LLM can help us understanding something then it was not incomprehensible, by definition. | | |
| ▲ | 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | calf 40 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | But this is just arguing over word tenses. You think "cannot", they think "could". Somewhere between there is the actual crux of disagreement. |
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| ▲ | sjjsjsjjsjaj 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Nothing is in principle impossible to understand. It just takes too long, is inconvenient and/or economically unviable. I don’t find it hard at all to imagine that an AI comes up with a fundamental proof applicable to physics which results in some widget we can now produce that would otherwise not have been produced yet nobody takes the time to fully comprehend why it works. Somebody could, in principle, devote their lives to it and possibly get it, but for what purpose? | |
| ▲ | scarmig 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | There are plenty of artifacts that, if not impossible for humans to understand, then at least no human has ever completely understood. To start with, the universe as a whole. Despite that, we are able to choose legible pieces of it to model and perform useful actions from. This will shift your argument--that doesn't count! etc., to the point where it's by construction unsatisfiable and vacuous. And it doesn't matter: an LLM might e.g. break some cryptographic algorithm in a way utterly unintelligible to humans, but the fact that it works would be sufficient on its own to make all of us choose to abandon that algorithm and choose different ones. | | |
| ▲ | chongli 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | One person need not completely understand something for it to have value; it's sufficient for there to exist a shared understanding. an LLM might e.g. break some cryptographic algorithm in a way utterly unintelligible to humans, but the fact that it works would be sufficient on its own to make all of us choose to abandon that algorithm and choose different ones. No, that is the entire point. If it is an algorithm which accomplishes something useful, then it is intelligible as such. That which is incomprehensible cannot be understood even in part, so it provides no value as a bit of knowledge (unless you're looking for a strong random number source, I suppose). | | |
| ▲ | scarmig 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | So, what you're asking for is an example of someone extracting value out of something that is fundamentally irreducible random noise? |
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| ▲ | bluefirebrand 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > how many people do you think understand the Linux kernel in full? "Not many people understand some things fully" is so massively different from "the human mind is incapable of understanding some things that AI will understand for us" | | |
| ▲ | a2ff6eeb0 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yeah. We're only starting the journey of building tools better at thinking than the human mind, so expecting me to have examples of things it produces is a little hard, don't you think? The best I can do is things that are incomprehensible to nearly everyone, but still provide value. There's a small leap of imagination to consider an author that understands it and can show others how to leverage results without understanding be mechanical rather than biological. |
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| ▲ | nickysielicki 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Can you give an example of a 4-wheeled vehicle that could move at tens of miles per hour before the automobile was invented? | |
| ▲ | lowbloodsugar 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I know right? And there’s only a market for maybe 5 computers in the whole world. Paul Krugman (1998): predicted the internet’s economic impact would be no greater than the fax machine’s. The 1876 Western Union memo dismissing the telephone as having too many shortcomings, and the banker telling Horace Rackham not to invest in Ford because the automobile was a novelty. We are in good company! | | |
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