mrqwerty

Or perhaps this time it is different. I think most think human level AI is not just around the corner. But automating a lot of the mental processes that constitute work? Possibly not very far away at all. That's where the hype is coming from. And for me I think there is a very good chance the hype is justified...

I have maybe 30 really good ideas in a note book I keep at home. All of them could make me money, maybe lots of money. But like all the other wage slaves out there, I do not have the time to make them happen.

Ideas are cheap, they are easy. The hard part is being born into wealth.

I disagree wrt software engineering. I have been a dev for 10 years, so still new. But. I don't think the problem can be solved with better techniques. I think the problem is humans just aren't smart enough to do the work. There is a fundamental limit to how much you can compress certain things. It's called the algorithmic complexity of the thing. Some things are just complicated. Some things are just large and hairy which ever way you turn them, whichever basis you construct. This is why we are spinning our wheels, why the next big architectural technique never lives up to the hype. There comes a point where the complexity of the thing you are trying to construct exceeds the capacity of any network of human beings to construct. I think there is a way to go with tooling, freeing people from the overhead of mundane work, which fractures people thinking time and reduces the complexity of the things that they can hold in their head at any one point in time. But the fundamental limit remains. I think ML is going to be the next big tool set. It will allow us to add layers of perception over the code and allow us to perceive the code and problems in different ways, freeing us to think at a higher level. But the fundamental limit remains. What we need is the ability to not just apply the human mind, with it's 20watts of power, but to open up a multi megawatt power station on the problems. We need genuine AI and I think this should be our main focus, not pissing around with little problems around the edge, not building the next phone app. Every other programmer and scientist in the entire fucking world should be working on AI.

Damn. I thought that was my idea. Slam is ripe for some deep learning love. So many ways to apply it. God if only I didn't have a job. I've considered going to prison for a minor and morally acceptable offence if only so I could have time to work in this field - and I would but they don't have computers in prison. Perhaps a permissive monastery will take me in. Perhaps in another partition of reality, somewhere out there, is a version of me that has the time to play in these glistening pools. Such a shame to miss the start of something even bigger than the internet...

I tried to find some truth in this, but failed completely. It just doesn't fit into my understanding. A program can be seen as a mathematical expression, sure. But so can the automobile, so can anything, it is the nature of the world. Just as the world can be inconsistent, so can the realities we create inside the computer. We have no more right to expect perfect entities inside the computer as we have to expect perfect entities outside of it. Orbits are not circular, all cats do not look alike and not all seemingly equivalent aspects of a software system will operate in the same manner. Get used to it.

This article takes a broad view of an interesting subject. You twits are arguing over the tiniest of minutiae and completely missing the big picture. Both the fractal dimension inaccuracy and the issue of information density within DNA are entirely irrelevant to the thesis being put forward. This is something I really dislike about hacker news.

Not true, or at least depends on the field. I am able to find 80% of the maths, physics, comp sci papers that interest me. I think reducing all human interaction into a measure of value is absurd - but there you go, each to his own.

Yes I had this in my mind when I wrote the above post. I was trying to draw your attention to the fact that we already believe such things. (Two different accounts, two different pcs, lost password)

Evolve means gradual change to me. For the more sophisticated amongst us, we are able to take the root meaning of the word and understand it's implication in different contexts.

Also when the machines can do everything we can do, one of the few things which will have value is art.

I don't get this. I could easily transcribe anything I could write in a day into a diagrammatic representation. Hell, I could do it for anything I could write given a large enough whiteboard. It might consist of complicated flow diagrams or fragments of mathematics, but it would convey the salient points. This seems like fanatical code worship, "code is the only appropriate representation for all analytic thought". Nonsense. Maths, state diagrams, uml, even prose are useful and in combination adequate languages.

Evolution is a brain.