Enjoyed reading this. I wish you can write a bit more, when this new project you are launching allows, about how adding to more opaque intelligence changes, if, and how, our society. I was at a workshop a few weeks ago, and a big focus was how to make the current, modern AI more interpretable. I managed, though not my intent, to cause a bit of a shock in the small crowd by saying that as an AI researcher I had my doubts we could every really do so (trillion parameters and such), but that we should keep trying. My quick analogy was that science has made provisional and productive use of black boxes for decades to centuries. What I said was very similar to your argument "nobody knows anything" but we still keep chugging along. I wish however, we could think a bit deeper, about how an increasingly complex machine intelligence will contribute to an increasingly more complex society. There are some authors writing now on how the more complex a society becomes, people sense less agency and may have all sorts of responses, varying from anger to disengagement.
Even the second is fraught with mistakes. Don't start a social network, don't build electric vehicles, don't launch a rocket, don't try to build artificial intelligence ...
Great piece!
By the way, I think this sentence lost its ending: “The two ecologies are not really”
Thank you!!
And thanks, copy paste error. Fixed!
No mention of William Goldman? 💚 🥃
Aw man good call out should've added in. I deleted a bunch of references and quotes because it felt too onanistic :)
Enjoyed reading this. I wish you can write a bit more, when this new project you are launching allows, about how adding to more opaque intelligence changes, if, and how, our society. I was at a workshop a few weeks ago, and a big focus was how to make the current, modern AI more interpretable. I managed, though not my intent, to cause a bit of a shock in the small crowd by saying that as an AI researcher I had my doubts we could every really do so (trillion parameters and such), but that we should keep trying. My quick analogy was that science has made provisional and productive use of black boxes for decades to centuries. What I said was very similar to your argument "nobody knows anything" but we still keep chugging along. I wish however, we could think a bit deeper, about how an increasingly complex machine intelligence will contribute to an increasingly more complex society. There are some authors writing now on how the more complex a society becomes, people sense less agency and may have all sorts of responses, varying from anger to disengagement.
I will! And I fully agree with your thesis there.
The point about advice is so true. Most advice comes in one of two forms:
"Do what I did, and things will work out for you the way they worked out for me."
and
"Don't do what I did, and avoid the fate that befell me".
The first one is almost pure survivor bias. The second is, I think, much more useful, but also much much rarer.
Even the second is fraught with mistakes. Don't start a social network, don't build electric vehicles, don't launch a rocket, don't try to build artificial intelligence ...