Comment by dTal
14 hours ago
And yet, the moon was reached a mere 66 years after the first powered flight. Perhaps it's a better heuristic than you are insinuating...
In all honesty, there are lots of connections between powered flight and space travel. Two obvious ones are "light and strong metallurgy" and "a solid mathematical theory of thermodynamics". Once you can build lightweight and efficient combustion chambers, a lot becomes possible...
Similarly, with LLMs, it's clear we've hit some kind of phase shift in what's possible - we now have enough compute, enough data, and enough know-how to be able to copy human symbolic thought by sheer brute-force. At the same time, through algorithms as "unconnected" as airplanes and spacecraft, computers can now synthesize plausible images, plausible music, plausible human speech, plausible anything you like really. Our capabilities have massively expanded in a short timespan - we have cracked something. Something big, like lightweight combustion chambers.
The status quo ante is useless to predict what will happen next.
By that metric, there are lots of connections between space flight and any other aspect of modern society.
No plane, relying upon air pressure to fly, can ever use that method to get to the moon. Ever. Never ever.
If you think it is, you're adding things to make a plane capable of space flight.
>By that metric, there are lots of connections between space flight and any other aspect of modern society.
Indeed. But there's a reason "aerospace" is a word.
>No plane, relying upon air pressure to fly, can ever use that method to get to the moon
No indeed. But if you want to build a moon rocket, the relevant skillsets are found in people who make airplanes. Who built Apollo? Boeing. Grumman. McDonnell Douglas. Lockheed.
I feel like aeronautics and astronautics are deeply connected. Both depend upon aerodynamics, 6dof control, and guidance in forward flight. Advancing aviation construction techniques were the basis of rockets, etc.
Sure, rocketry to LEO asks more in strength of materials, and aviation doesn’t require liquid fueled propulsion or being able to control attitude in vacuum.
These aren’t unconnected developments. Space travel grew straight out of aviation and military aviation. Indeed, look at the vertical takeoff aircraft from the 40s and 50s, evolving into missile systems with solid propulsion and then liquid propulsion.
AGI may use the same hardware, or same compute concepts.
But LLMs (like low/high pressure wing flight) will never result in AGI (you won't get to the moon with a wing).
You're making my point.
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