Comment by awbvious
4 days ago
Not sure about that title, it did bait me into a click. "Mathematicians are now facing something similar to generational trauma of structural racism born of exploitation, slavery, and colonialism?" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Know_Why_the_Caged_Bird_Sing...
But regardless, the detection of breast cancer via AI made me think of phlogiston https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phlogiston_theory . "Phlogiston theory states that phlogisticated substances contain phlogiston and that they dephlogisticate when burned, releasing stored phlogiston, which is absorbed by the air. Growing plants then absorb this phlogiston, which is why air does not spontaneously combust and also why plant matter burns. This method of accounting for combustion was inverse to the oxygen theory by Antoine Lavoisier."
It could be phlogiston. AI is super smart theory states that AI is super smart and that is a single thing can do tasks very efficiently. But it's so smart, we can't understand it, so we humans can't help it, it'll take AI to make it even smarter. That's what's holding it back. But then it'll solve everything.
Or it could be oxygen. AI is super-fast-and-parallel theory states that AI is not a magical monolith but a bunch of pedestrian programs that run fast and in parallel, thanks to hardware (GPUs) that's good at that stuff. But since it's all going so fast and at the same time, something a single human cannot do, humans can't really see how it works. But if we could, we'd probably just see its just doing stuff programs did before. So what's holding it back is that you have to keep throwing hardware at it, and eventually you run into the limits of how fast you can build that hardware or power it.
It all might be stuff humans were better at, when approached one-on-one, but against a swarm it loses. You get a billion doctors together to look at a single mammogram, then tell them if it cancerous, then do that again a billion times with each doctor. Then ask those billion doctors on the billion-and-one mammogram to give a diagnosis. Heck, do that with a billion toddlers. I think either might be able to beat the AI. I don't have a billion doctors or a billion toddlers--frankly I don't know which would be more difficult to handle.
To know if it's oxygen or phlogiston takes probably a demonstration like this "Phlogiston remained the dominant theory until the 1770s when Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier showed that combustion requires a gas that has mass (specifically, oxygen) and could be measured by means of weighing closed vessels." Maybe the data center financing trouble will be the demonstration that the mass in the gas is just VC-money hardware.
I know why you got a billion cages with a billion birds and a billion bird listeners to compare a billion songs to the few songs we like to hear, and then packaged all that into a single bird-looking thing to make singing-like sounds: So Altman can get that VC money.
I don't really like this comment I made. I was tired and I tried to make an analogy with phlogiston for what seems like a pushed portrayal of AI as being, well, some kind of "super intelligence." But the kind of person that might try to "make fetch happen" with "super intelligence" is very different from, say, J. J. Becher theorizing about the mechanism with the hope of understanding it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._J._Becher . Phlogiston wasn't a marketing term bordering on propaganda, but rather a theory before good measurement was available. It's more like someone today trying to guess what may have existed before the big bang, there is no known measurement for that, but for something that was staring people in the face nearly daily: fire.
I mean, it kind of works, in that AI is doing neat things and terrible things and it's staring people in the face all the time--except in this case because the tech monopolies force it on us. So people will want to make explanations. But there was no Big Fire that wanted us to buy more fire-making products and thus would be incentivized to come up with, say, "fire works by using your magical spirit and you get closer to heaven with each fire you set with our fire products, buy our fire products, or rather, let us keep pushing all competition for warming one's self via political corruption allowing our monopolies to exist."
Nonetheless, I do think there's something to be gained with the idea of a billion toddlers looking at mammograms, and the lack of measurement that underlay phlogiston.
First of all, I don't know if I ethically should be using the term "toddler." I heard Coxon use it. Frankly, I don't trust him. I won't trust him until he starts saying /prominently/ that people at tech companies should be liable for breaking laws that already exist and accountability is the bigger problem. Corporations already could do dangerous stuff with biology, weapons, bioweapons or the like, it's not complicated. You do dangerous stuff, you should be held accountable. Why are we farting around wondering if some bio-engineered virus that was released by some corporation could replicate on its own, when we should be say "yo, some organization released a virus on people, why are the people at the top of this organization not getting arrested or something?" I'll admit it might be an "or something" and not "arrested," but it sure looks like nothing is happening--because that's what usually happens when the sufficiently rich do something really bad. No accountability. If Coxon is going to use talking points (and I suspect he is) it should be the very first talking point Coxon or anyone else uses--otherwise I don't trust them.
But let's use "toddlers." A billion toddlers started to get right on mammograms being cancerous or not, but being toddlers they can't really articulate why.
One toddler notices he gets his marshmallow for being right when he notices the pictures are not "shiny." What does that mean? He can't explain it, but it turns out he noticed that some images were made at a lower resolution or otherwise fuzzy because it was older/cheaper tech. And who uses that? People who are poor in poor areas. And turns out, poorer people from poorer areas don't bother to come to the doctor until it's an advanced problem, because they can't afford to come in otherwise (because, say, it's America and American healthcare is broken). And sure enough, those people are more likely to have cancer.
One notices there's more white stuff in some places and dark stuff in another place, not always the same place, but kind of similarly. They say "it's um got that white stuff dark stuff thing." It turns out that's just a reflection of something that happens when the patient is richer or poorer, and again richer people have more chance of false positive because they have the luxury of getting checked more often.
One notices they are more "squishy". That's because radiologist in socioeconomically better areas have a different technique... And so forth.
And, then to make it worse, most toddlers are so inarticulate they can't even say "shiny" or "squishy," so you can't get any information out of them.
That inability to articulate is kind of like the inability to measure, the inability to see the importance of mass in the air, per this: "Phlogiston remained the dominant theory until the 1770s when Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier showed that combustion requires a gas that has mass (specifically, oxygen) and could be measured by means of weighing closed vessels."
So, it kind of works as an analogy that way, but--again--it's a bit messy.
This comment isn't much better, but I love to dig deeper into my holes.