Comment by chongli
2 days ago
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?
2 days ago
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?
> 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.
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.
> 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.
8 replies →
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.
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?
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.
13 replies →
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?
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.
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> 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"
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.
Can you give an example of a 4-wheeled vehicle that could move at tens of miles per hour before the automobile was invented?
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!
Past performance does not guarantee future returns.