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AI Is Throwing a Roadside Picnic

https://metedata.substack.com/p/ai-is-throwing-a-roadside-picnic
16•young_mete•1h ago

Comments

Cpoll•50m ago
Unrelated to the article: Roadside Picnic inspired a movie called Stalker, which in turn inspired the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game series.
young_mete•45m ago
Yep it's the OG literary version. Very much worth a read.
monomania•13m ago
I wasn't a big fan of the book, tbh. I love the movie though, it's one of my favorites.
sedan_baklazhan•5m ago
The movie is almost unrelated to the book. I really like the book though, even being as depressing as it is.
rjsw•33m ago
Both of those are listed on the image of the book cover in the article.
1245-a17z•48m ago
A new analogy for the HN audience that is susceptible to reinforcement learning applied to humans (daily)!
johnbonton•41m ago
This rests on the (completely false) premise that AI is doing anything other than simply parroting our human knowledge back at us

It has no capacity to think, argue, demonstrate, or certainly do anything even remotely close to “intelligence”

young_mete•37m ago
It doesn't assume, it just observes. It has the capacity to use computers better than us, more persistently, in a more scalable way, to solve problems we haven't solved before like Navier-Stokes and many more to come. You can argue all you want about whether it's intelligent or not and what it means, but the solution is now here for us to process, understand, and integrate forward into our model of the world.
asimpletune•37m ago
> All this new knowledge is arriving at a pace much greater than the field’s ability to process it

That’s the whole issue: it’s not knowledge, it’s data. AI can not provide an account for the proofs, or be questioned about them, or organize a talk exposing the idea because there’s no understanding behind any of it.

This is what Tao has been saying; that the results, in the strictest sense, were never the goal. It is ultimately the understanding (that previously was required to form a proof) that is valuable.

young_mete•30m ago
Fair, “answers” is probably more precise than “knowledge.” That gap between answers and understanding is the whole point of the post, so I think we mostly agree.
flowerlad•26m ago
Does that mean AI is not doing something useful? If it provides a proof, it gives direction to human mathematicians who can then develop an understanding, give talks, be questioned about the topic, and teach. Is that not a useful service?
McDyver•4m ago
I don't think that's the argument. In my opinion this is like paying to unlock characters, à la EA. Who's going to feel a sense of accomplishment by just trying to interpret what an LLM spat out? Sure,maybe the results will be used by someone in some field, the same way a product manager uses what the development team developed. Is the PM going to give talks about it? Are they going to expand on those developments and come up with something new?
KolmogorovComp•29m ago
I can only recommend Strougastky brothers books’, I enjoyed ‘Hard to Be a God’ and wish to read more from them.

That is why I find the prospect of spoiling the plot without warning to be bad taste and didn’t finish the article.

sedan_baklazhan•19m ago
I highly recommend also reading the “Inhabited Island” as well as “Hard to be a God” by these authors. These books are brilliant as well.
young_mete•17m ago
I tried "Monday Begins on Saturday" and had a pretty hard time getting through it. But I have to give it another chance - and check out the ones you mentioned.
sedan_baklazhan•9m ago
Monday… is a very Russian book, heavily based on memes and folklore. You will have very hard time understanding it.

The 2 books I’ve mentioned are very international.

BTW, “The kid from hell” is also really good.

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AI Is Throwing a Roadside Picnic

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