No I'm fairly certain it was invented and that this style of breathless science fiction roleplay will be looked back on as an embarrassing relic of the era.
I didn't even read the article and know that the headline is 100% correct.
It's the result of stochastic hill climbing of a vast reservoir of talented people, industry, and science. Each pushing the frontiers year by year, building the infra, building the connective tissue.
We built the collection of requirements that enabled it through human curiosity, random capitalistic process, boredom, etc. It was gaming GPUs for goodness sake that enabled the scale up of the algorithms. You can't get more serendipitous than that. (Perhaps some of the post-WWII/cold war tech even better qualifies for random hill climbing luck. Microwave ovens, MRI machines, etc. etc.)
Machine learning is inevitable in a civilization that has evolved intelligence, industrialization, and computation.
We've passed all the hard steps to this point. Let's see what's next. Hopefully not the great filter.
I don't have a problem with the headline but the article is kind of bad.
And the headline is vague enough that you could read many meanings into it.
My take would be going back to Turing, he could see AI in the future was likely and the output of a Turing complete system is kind of a mathematical function - we just need the algorithms and hardware to crank through it which he thought we might have 50 years on but it's taken nearer 75.
The "intelligence did not get installed. It condensed" stuff reads like LLM slop.
Haha, luckily not! It's a very speculative link, so we didn't want to talk about "AI" too much in the main post. But we originally got interested in this concept because we are interested in other forms of input to the brain (other than the classic reading, listening, watching, etc). The nose is interesting because it seems to have many independent basis vectors and very sharp discrimination ability, so it might be a sensor into which you can pack many inputs. LLMs are just a proof-by-example that ~1k input dimensions is enough to really encode semantic meaning.
I'd personally be very sceptical that the human brain could derive much meaning from smell beyond "smells bad don't eat" or "reminds me of something", but I guess I would have said the same about creating smells via ultrasound so what do I know.
In isolation, yes. But other things have happened as well. People dress like slobs; interestingly, in my country, where GDP per capita skyrocketed since 1989, standards of clothing seem to have gone down, especially for formal occasions. We have a major problem with physical fitness, Westerners of the 1970s were much thinner and moved more. People read fewer books and spend their days consuming brainrot on Tiktok, Instagram and YouTube shorts.
(Notice that the very word brainrot is a neologism?)
I don't think we should pooh-pooh such developments as irrelevant, and I am very unhappy that they have been subsumed to the universal polarization of the culture wars that consume everything while producing nothing of value.
Examined more closely, this appears to mean nothing more than "people spend less time wearing the clothes that a previously dominant culture considered to be high status markers".
I think you just re-formulated what I said, in a more intellectuallish and dismissive way.
People will now turn out for a funeral in a tracksuit. Yes, previously dominant culture frowned upon such things. Yes, the culture has obviously changed.
Our main disagreement seems to be whether such change is good, bad, or irrelevant.
I could live with people dressing in a disgusting way, but I really dislike the death of book reading. That will make us all worse at thinking.
You were the one who insisted that "standards of clothing have gone down" (emphasis mine).
When it comes to culture, I believe that things change rather than go up or down. In general, I suspect there are two very long term (i.e. many millenia-long) trends that occur in parallel, one of them generally improving the human condition and one of them degrading it. The world is literally going to hell in a handbasket, at the same thing as nearly everything is getting better.
Your concerns about book reading are, of course, the opposite of those of the Greek philosophers who imagined that it would make us all more stupid.
> When it comes to culture, I believe that things change rather than go up or down.
In the '80s movie Trancers, Jack Deth is a visitor from the future, and as he's slicking his hair back with water from a flower vase a woman from the present day asks something like, "People from the future put vase-water in their hair?!" and Jack Deth replies very seriously, "Dry hair is for squids."
Yes, I can live with it, but I think the standards have gone down. It also seems to me that you basically consider that change irrelevant. We can surely disagree on that.
As for the Greek philosophers, I feel you are being too dismissive saying that they imagined us being more stupid. First, it was mostly about Socrates and second, his position was a bit more nuanced than how you present it. He was concerned about education becoming impersonal, which definitely has some downsides (until today, we haven't discovered any educational mode more efficient than 1:1 tutoring, at least from the student's individual point of view; the economic dimension, of course, differs). Second, he believed that our memory capabilities would go down, which they probably did. We don't have much contact with purely oral cultures now, but the little we do, show that pre-literate people were indeed better at remembering their collective past, including their culture, in the sense of "actually having it in their own heads" instead of "hearing about it once in the class and then promptly forgetting what they heard".
How many people today can recite a thousand songs from memory? Not that long ago, people like that would exist and keep ancient songs alive.
Today I hear Ed Sheeran ten times a day (ugh), but I wouldn't be able to recollect the lyrics even if threatened with an execution.
That is certainly one way of being stupider than before. Yes, it is compensated by other improvements, no doubt about that.
> People will now turn out for a funeral in a tracksuit.
I bet if they had showed up in a sport coat you wouldn't have found it notable despite the fact they were the tracksuits of their day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sport_coat
“Standards of clothing” is not a set with a total order, and society has never had one way to dress. You’re unfairly projecting your values (of a certain style of dress) onto society as if it’s shared by everyone.
This is not maths, and nothing is shared by everyone in a human society.
I am actually an algebra major and I always felt that the need of some of my peers to stuff the entire outside world into mathematical definitions does not lead anywhere. Please don't mathematize societal concepts ("a set with a total order"), you will only mislead yourself and others. Maths isn't a good tool to understand people.
Let us talk about humans in a human language instead.
Perhaps a controversial view on this particular forum but I find the tendency of a certain type of person* to write about everything in this overly-technical way regardless of whether it is appropriate to the subject matter to be very tiresome ("executing cached heuristics", "constrained the search space").
*I associate it with the asinine contemporary "rationalist" movement (LessWrong et al.) but I'm not making any claims the author is associated with this.
I think it's a trick. It seems to be the article is just a series of ad-hoc assumptions and hypotheses without any support. The language aims to hide this, and makes you think about the language instead of its contents. Which is logically unsound: In a sharp peak, micro optimizations would give you a clearer signal where the optimum lies since the gradient is steeper.
> In a sharp peak, micro optimizations would give you a clearer signal where the optimum lies since the gradient is steeper.
I would refuse to even engage with the piece on this level, since it lends credibility to the idea that the creative process is even remotely related to or analogous to gradient descent.
I wouldn't jump to call it a trick, but I agree, the author sacrificed too much clarity in a try for efficiency.
The author set up an interesting analogy but failed to explore where it breaks down or how all the relationships work in the model.
My inference about the author's meaning was such: In a sharp peak, searching for useful moves is harder because you have fewer acceptable options as you approach the peak.
Fewer absolute or relative? If you scale down your search space... This only makes some kind of sense if your step size is fixed. While I agree with another poster that a reduction of a creative process to gradient descent is not wise, the article also misses the point what makes such a gradient descent hard -- it's not sharp peaks, it's the flat area around them -- and the presence of local minima.
I see your point. I'd meant relatively fewer progressive options compared to an absolute and unchanging number of total options.
But that's not what the author's analogy would imply.
Still, I think you're saying the author is deducing the creative process as a kind of gradient descent, whereas my reading was the author was trying to abductively explore an analogy.
True, but my point is that not only does the analogy not work, the author also doesn't understand the thing he makes the analogy with, or at least explores the thought so shoddily that it makes no sense.
It's somewhat like saying cars are faster than motorbikes because they have more wheels-- it's like with horses and humans, horses have four legs and because of that are faster than humans with two legs. It's wrong on both sides of the analogy.
I enjoy maths and CS and I could barely understand a word of it. It seems to me rather to have been written to give the impression of being inappropriate for many, as a stand-in for actually expressing anything with any intellectual weight.
A bit harsh, but I see what you mean. It is tempting to try and fit every description of the world into a rigorous technical straightjacket, perhaps because it feels like you have understood it better?
Maybe it is similar to how scientist get flack for writing in technical jargon instead of 'plain language'. Partly it is a necessity - to be unambiguous - however it is also partly a choice, a way to signal that you are doing Science, not just describing messing about with chemicals or whatever.
I have observed it too, it is heavily inspired by economics and mathematics.
Saying "it's better to complete something imperfect than spend forever polishing" - dull, trite, anyone knows that. Saying "effort is a utility curve function that must be clamped to achieve meta-optimisation" - now that sounds clever
If I was going to be uncharitable, I think there is are corners of the internet where people write straightforward things dressed it up in technical language to launder it as somehow academic and data driven.
And you're right, it does show up in the worse parts of the EA / rationalist community.
(This writing style, at its worst, allows people to say things like "I don't want my tax spent on teaching poor kids to read" but without looking like complete psychopaths - "aggregate outcomes in standardised literacy programmes lag behind individualised tutorials")
That's not what the blog post here is doing, but it is definitely bad language use that is doing more work to obscure ideas than illuminate them
It's a middle school essay that is trying to score points based on the number of metaphors used. Very unappealing and I wouldn't call it technical.
EDIT: For all the people saying the writing is inspired by math/cs, that's not at all true. That's not how technical writing is done. This guy is just a poser.
To be fair, it's always an artistic choice if you think it is appropriate here or not, but, yeah, this article is a really heavy offender. Reading the "Abstract claim" I caught myself thinking that this word salad hardly makes any sense, but I don't know and am just gonna let it go, because I am not yet convinced that it's worth my time to decipher that.
Also, "asinine contemporary "rationalist" movement" is pretty lightweight in this regard. Making an art out of writing as bad as possible has been a professional skill of any "academic philosopher" (both "continental" and "analytical" sides) for a century at the very least.
no, we need more of this, the opposite of this is Robin Williams destroying the poetry theory book in dead poeta society, the result was weak kids and one of them commited suicide. More technical stuff in relation to art is a good thing, but its expected that anglosaxon people have allergy to this, they think is somehow socialist or something and they need art to be unfefined etc
Respectfully, I have no idea what you're talking about. Dead Poets Society is a story and the message of the story isn't that Robin Williams' character is bad.
Are you saying my perspective is anti-socialist? What is "refined" art?
of course in the movie they sell the idea that art is not subject to scientific or technical analysis, but if you do an indepent analysis you realize those kids didnt become stronger or freer. Art like the article explained is related to effort and technique. but people in the US LOVE stuff like Jackson pollock, they need for art to not being a thing you put effort and mind into
You can put art through all sorts of scientific and technical analysis. Being analyzed is how we teach the techniques to new artists. A mechanical reproduction of it from that analysis is not art, though, and sometimes you get the break the rules in favor of the expression.
Did you know, for example, that Shakespeare coined a great many words and phrases used in English to this day? Before Sam Clemens, people tended to speak in proper schoolhouse English no matter the setting or character. Poetry and prose are not just the ability to arrange words on a page. Novels and plays are not limited to the three-act or five-act story arc. Simile and metaphor are often encouraged, but overused ones are actually frowned upon.
You're confusing art with technical skill. You like art that demonstrates technical skill, that's fine. But art doesn't have to demonstrate technical skill to be artistic - indeed defining what 'art' is exactly is surprisingly difficult.
It isn't a generational thing. The choice of emoji is a generational thing, but people of all ages do it. AI most certainly does not use emoji in the same way a young person does (unless you encourage it to, but even then it comes across as cringeworthy). If anything it's closer to how a middle-aged person uses them.
I'd also say the use of text emoticons has all but died out in anything other than ironic usage, or in situations where it's difficult to use unicode emoji (e.g. games or this very site)
When text is very obviously generated by AI it communicates to the reader that there is nothing of value to be read. It always writes in the same vapid, overly enthusiastic, overly verbose way. It's grating and generally conveys very little information per word. It's a cliché at this point, but if nobody bothered to write it then why would I bother to read it?
There is a 0% chance that the vast majority of this site and the repo that was linked elsewhere was written by a human. I would have zero confidence in anything about this language, and frankly your former colleague should be embarrassed about putting this out.
Edit: I just noticed in another comment: "Perfect for : Trading systems, industrial control, Medical devices, aerospace applications". I'd go further than embarrassed, and say this person should be ashamed of themself and take this down.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying but applications like this tend to be horrible to use. How do you handle somebody navigating in two tabs at once? What about the back button?
I guess they use something like sessionStorage to hold tab specific ids.
But something that can bite you with these solutions if that browsers allow you to duplicate tabs, so you also need some inter-tab mechanisms (like the broadcast API or local storage with polling) to resolve duplicate ids
If this was enough to temporarily replace breathing I wonder how that would feel if you were otherwise healthy. I imagine not breathing would instinctively feel quite strange and even distressing.
It would be quite distressing because of the accumulation of CO2 in the blood, even with completely adequate oxygenation delivered intrarectally. The slight change in acid-base balance is what makes a person feel the need to breathe, and CO2 is an acidic byproduct of metabolism. This is why people with metabolic acidosis (e.g. in diabetic ketoacidosis or sepsis) have an increased respiratory rate.
Would CO2 still build up if someone isn't breathing at all? I'm guessing so, since you say CO2 is a byproduct of metabolism. Alternatively, could respiration exhaust enough CO2 even in a situation where the lungs are too damaged to take in sufficient oxygen?
All that apart, I'm guessing this would be used in emergency situations, where a patient is likely already unconscious and could be kept under sedation until transferred to ECMO. Is CO2 buildup dangerous on its own? If so, in what kind of time-frame? What's the upper limit on the additional minutes this therapy could buy?
In an acute situation where oxygenation isn't sufficient, the imminent threat of anoxic brain injury and end-organ dysfunction is the concern. Measures would obviously be taken to correct that, up to and including rapidly sedating and paralyzing a patient in order to mechanically ventilate them with an increased fraction of inhaled oxygen and/or additional pressure (PEEP) to increase the surface area in the alveoli available for gas exchange.
Respiratory acidosis (i.e. the accumulation of CO2 and acidification of the blood due to inadequate breathing) is generally not harmful on its own, the concern there is just adequate oxygenation. However there are metabolic causes of acidosis, usually due to lactic acid accumulation, which lead to end-organ dysfunction because lots of enzymatic reactions in the body expect a very narrow pH range to work effectively. This occurs over a period of days, though.
So, it sounds like if this works (big if, of course, at this point), sedation + an enema could be a better "bridge" to mechanical ventilation than CPR. That would be amazing (if it works); science fiction stuff.
I would disagree for a few reasons, at least for its application to cardiac arrest. It might have some niche applications, but that's only speculative.
The main determinant of successful CPR is maintaining coronary perfusion pressure with unrelenting chest compressions so that the heart has a fighting chance at starting to beat normally again. Moving the blood so that it has enough pressure at the aorta where the coronaries branch off of is way way way more important than keeping it oxygenated, which we're already pretty good at. In fact, over-oxygenation in CPR has been shown to be detrimental to outcomes because it causes oxidative stress at the cellular level. Oxygen is nasty, it's amazing that life evolved to harness it.
I do agree that modern medicine (especially emergency medicine) is really cool, that's why I switched careers after working in software engineering. We have lots of tools at our disposal, it's already science fiction. Modern resuscitation involves drugs that manipulate the ion channels of the heart in various ways, we can shift fluids around by changing the osmolarity of IV fluids (and we can pump them into you through your bones after drilling into them if needed...), cardiac monitors and AEDs will time a shock just right depending on the dysrhythmia to increase the odds of success, we can even just repeatedly shock a heart to make it beat in some situations like an AV block. And that's just the stuff that they let paramedics do (i.e. trained monkeys, I am one).
In my thoracic surgery rotations in med school I was taught that the strongest stimulus for increasing the respiratory drive was the acidification of cerebrospinal fluid. Which, of course, correlates with the blood pH. This information comes from some studies in the 60s with goats, and the old guard are happy to hang their hat on it.
There are also chemoreceptors for oxygen concentration in the circulatory system as well.
I think everything you have said is correct, I just wanted to add a few more details for anyone who is interested.
From the littlei know from a breath holding workshop I did awhile ago (for trying to get into freediving) it's the carbon dioxide build up in our blood that gives us the urge to breath, and not the lack of oxygen. If this method allowed for the removal of carbon dioxide from the blood then holding your breath might not even be discomforting.
The acid base balance of the cerebrospinal fluid is the primary driver of the respiratory drive, like allude to with your comment on the CO2. I did want to add that the lack of oxygen can affect respiration, which is detected by the peripheral chemoreceptors, like in the carotid bodies.
Additionally, the thoracic stretch receptors are important for respiratory drive, where the lack of expansion of the chest will promote respiration. When a healthy young person holds their breath for short periods, say 30 seconds or so, their blood CO2 and O2 are not much different, but they still will have to fight the instinct to breathe!
Something to think about (hah!) is there are people without an internal monologue i.e. no voice inside their head they use when working out a problem. So they're thinking and learning and doing what humans do just fine with no little voice no language inside their head.
It's so weird that people literally seem to have a voice in their head they cannot control. For me personally my "train of thought" is a series of concepts, sometimes going as far as images. I can talk to myself in my head with language if I make a conscious effort to do so, just as I can breathe manually if I want. But if I don't, it's not really there like some people seem to have.
Probably there are at least two groups of people and neither really comprehends how the other thinks haha.
I think there are significantly more than 2, when you start to count variations through the spectrum of neurodiversity.
Spatial thinkers, for example, or the hyperlexic.
Meaning for hyperlexics is more akin to finding meaning in the edges of the graph, rather than the vertices. The form of language contributing a completely separate graph of knowledge, alongside its content, creating a rich, multimodal form of understanding.
Spatial thinkers have difficulty with procedural thinking, which is how most people are taught. Rather than the series of steps to solve the problem, they see the shape of the transform. LLMs as an assistive device can be very useful for spatial thinkers in providing the translation layer between the modes of thought.
Are the particles that make up thoughts in our brain not also a representation of a thought? Isn't "thought" really some kind of Platonic ideal that only has approximate material representations? If so, why couldn't some language sentences be thoughts?
> The landscape itself doesn't capture anything, it just is.
Sure, but the landscape is something, namely an aggregate of particles. A thought in principle isn't its physical expression, but its information content, and it's represented in a human brain by some aggregate of particles. So no matter how you slice it, thoughts can only manifest within representations, and so calling language a representation of thought isn't some kind of dunk, because it also proves that human brains don't have thoughts.
It's not clear whether the information content of all possible human thoughts can be captured by language, but clearly at least some language expressions have the same information content as human thoughts.
We are paying the price now for not teaching language philosophy as a core educational requirement.
Most people have had no exposure to even the most basic ideas of language philosophy.
The idea all these people go to school for years and don't even have to take a 1 semester class on the main philosophical ideas of the 20th century is insane.
LLMs clearly think. They don't have a sense of object permanence, at least not yet, but they absolutely, indisputably use pretrained information to learn and reason about the transient context they're working with at the moment.
Otherwise they couldn't solve math problems that aren't simple rephrasings of problems they were trained on, and they obviously can do that. If you give a multi-step undergraduate level math problem to the human operator of a Chinese room, he won't get very far, while an LLM can.
So that leads to the question: given that they were trained on nothing but language, and given that they can reason to some extent, where did that ability come from if it didn't emerge from latent structure in the training material itself? Language plus processing is sufficient to produce genuine intelligence, or at least something indistinguishable from it. I don't know about you, but I didn't see that coming.
They very clearly do not think. If they did, they wouldn't be able to be fooled by so many simple tests that even a very small (and thus, uneducated) human would pass.
I recently bought whey protein powder that doesn't come from milk. It was synthesized by human-engineered microbes. Did this invention "arrive"?