Comment by rembicilious
5 days ago
"So that is my call to arms. If we want the full power of AI scientists, then we should share the goals with them so they can create, evaluate, discover, and in these ways fully participate in achieving the goals. Let’s be bold! Let’s fully automate Creativity and Discovery!"
Should we automate exercise and play as well? How about learning?
The machine didn't have a soul, so we donated ours.
Eureka! My AI found it!
I understand the skepticism. I am worried about the implications of AI as well. The deeper issue at stake is that the depth of scientific knowledge has been increasing for a very long time. Now you get to have a PhD in esoteric subproblems and that slows down research especially if the discoveries require depth in multiple subdomains. Socially and economically training people in every combinatorial combination of subfields at the required depth may not be possible. I am especially interested in two problems to be resolved and do not care if an AI scientist performed the discovery. It will be humbling, but totally worth it:
- Fusion (a clean sustainable form): Without this I think we are heading in a very wrong direction, whether it is conflict or climate change does not matter. Everyone is aware of this and instinctively afraid of the implied loss of quality+quantity of life.
- Cure for Cancer: It is a world wonder even in Civ. I and for good reason. As a father of a teenager, every time I hear a story of someone losing a parent/child I cringe. We have to accept this as a reality of life until a proper/generic cure is found that eliminates the most common offenders.
I am skeptical that we will have AGI anytime soon and I think the social aspects will help balance the technical developments even it becomes a reality (Three laws, A Butlerian uprising, you name it).
Chess bots can beat grandmasters, but I have a friend who takes his son to tournaments. Humans are still playing chess, kids in the same tournament with grand masters. We have to have faith in the humanity, or all else will not matter.
And I will definitely keep playing Factorio even if AGI comes to pass ;-)
Commercial fusion energy is almost certainly a pipe dream. We already have good alternatives. Short of some unpredictable major breakthrough in physics on the level of something like cold fusion, the current activity in the fusion space will basically just serve to demonstrate definitively that it's not viable.
And then there's France, which gets about 70% of its electricity from nuclear energy.
2 replies →
Note that all fusion energy is unsustainable as it irreversibly turns water into helium.
We do have a LOT of water though. And surplus helium would be nice.
3 replies →
Eh, it seems increasingly clear that no matter the fusion breakthroughs to come, it's going to be complicated and big and therefore expensive compared to renewables. By the time we figure it out it'll be a nice breakthrough but will end up on the shelf.
[dead]
[dead]
It seems human beings spend a significant portion of their lives trying to figure out how to live as little as possible.
They do say "live a little", and it strikes me now that perhaps I've completely misinterpreted that phrase. For some reason I've always thought it to be a call to live a lot, or at least more.
But now I see that my interpretation is almost opposite of what the words mean... Huh...
It seems like human societies are run by elites who convince the masses to live as little as possible so that the elites can fully enjoy themselves.
Like how during Covid the beaches were closed while the billionaires partied on yachts.
Most discovery takes a ton of iteration and repetition. That's a lot less fun than the hedonism of sitting on a beach drinking a mahi thai.
Same with learning, humans historically where generalists without that deep of knowledge when compared to one another. Now we study a quarter of our short lives just to get to the point where we can specialize for the rest of our lives. This situation doesn't seem exactly tenable as complexity increases in the future.
I don't know what the future looks like, but I can tell you that entropy and complexity will only increase.
[dead]
> Should we automate exercise and play as well? How about learning?
Obviously. Exercise, play and learning is in large part what makes us smart. If we want AI to be smart we should definitely automate those.
But that's not what you had in mind. To address that I can only say that you are allowed to still do the automated things manually.