“Imagine little Albert asking his physics teacher in 1880: "Sir - for how long do I have to stay at high speed in order to look as grown up as my elder brother?"”
Is that not the other way around?
“…how long do I have to stay at high speed in order for my younger brother to look as grown up as myself?”
Staying at high speed is symmetric! You'd both appear to age slower from the other's POV. It's only if one brother turns around and comes back, therefore accelerating, that you get an asymmetry.
Indeed. One of my other thoughts here on the Relativity example was "That sets the bar high given most humans can't figure out special relativity even with all the explainers for Einstein's work".
But I'm so used to AGI being conflated with ASI that it didn't seem worth it compared to the more fundamental errors.
Given rcxdude’s reply it appears I am one of those humans who can’t figure out special relativity (let alone general)
Wrt ‘AGI/ASI’, while they’re not the same, after reading Nick Bostrom (and more recently https://ai-2027.com) I hang towards AGI being a blib on the timeline towards ASI. Who knows.
Intelligence is clearly possible.
My gut feeling is our brain solves this by removing complexity. It certainly does so, continuously filtering out (ignoring) large parts of input, and generously interpolating over gaps (making stuff up). Whether this evolved to overcome this theorem I am not intelligent enough to conclude.
If you haven't yet encountered it, check out Michael Levin's lab and work. Among other things, they are trying to figure out what "basal cognition" is; the idea being that even if we can't point to some dividing line in the end, we'll have a better understanding of what cognition is and where it shows up. And it shows up surprisingly far down!
The definition of "intelligence" that he works with comes from William James: the ability to achieve the same goal by different means. It's a useful definition, given the remarkable stuff coming out of his lab.
If only we could get our politicians to only express themselves using formal texts.
The clarity it would bring… the honesty it would enforce… the efficiency they would achieve.
“How about starting with reliably, deterministically, and instantly (say <50ms) finding obvious things like <…> searching by a prefix of their name? As a second criterion, I would like to find files by substrings of their name”
Even I can, and have, build search functionality like this. Deterministically. No LLMs or “AI” needed. In fact for satisfying the above criteria this kind of implementation is still far more reliable.
I've also written search code like this. It's trivial, at least at the scale of installed apps and such on a single computer.
AI makes it strictly worse. I do not want intelligence. I want to type, for example, "saf" and have Safari appear immediately, in the same place, every time, without popping into a different place as I'm trying to click it because a slower search process decided to displace the result. No "temperature", no randomness, no fancy crap.
Interested, but going to the website told me nothing other than a book about the command line.
Would be nice be able to get a preview of a some pages/chapters.
Noted. For now I put links here, in the comments, and in the Gumroad page to sample pages. I will need to change the homepage later. Thanks for the input!
Nothing necessarily perverse here. I don’t know Williams but don’t image him disliking the other guy or being unhappy with progress in general, but just being someone who truly challenged himself only to find him being trumped a week later; and kicking himself for that.
Either way, the week is not yet over, at least since the quanta article, so maybe no kicking will ensue.
I wonder how the researchers who supplied the tree evaluation algorithm felt when Williams supplied his proof. Dismay at having not kept their result under wraps for longer so they could claim credit for such an advance themselves? I hope not.
We love to debate headlines, don’t we? But along those lines, it seems like they could just say it’s “new” and that would be good enough; a headline doesn’t need to be any more specific.
Is that not the other way around? “…how long do I have to stay at high speed in order for my younger brother to look as grown up as myself?”