Tag: vgr

Is text all you need…? Do you even need text? (Ribbonfarm on AI)

A thought provoking post from Venkatesh Rao (@vgr / Ribbonfarm) on AI:

Yes, there’s still superhuman-ness on display — I can’t paint like Van Gogh as Stable Diffusion can (with or without extra fingers) or command as much information at my finger-tips as the bots — but it’s the humanizing mediocrity and fallibility that seems to be alarming people. We already knew that computers are very good at being better than us in any domain where we can measure better. What’s new is that they’re starting to be good at being ineffectual neurotic sadsacks like us in domains where “better” is not even wrong as a way to assess the nature of a performance.

There are, by definition, only a handful of humans whose identity revolves around being the world’s best Go player. The average human can at best be mildly vicariously threatened by a computer wiping the floor with those few humans. But there are billions whose identity revolves around, for instance, holding some banal views about television shows, sophomoric and shallow opinions about politics and philosophy, the ability to write pedestrian essays, do slow, error-prone arithmetic, write buggy code, and perhaps most importantly, agonize endlessly about relationships with each other, creating our heavens and hells of mutualism.

Link: https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/text-is-all-you-need

I don’t think humans are all that special. Yes, each human is special in some limited way, and together as a species we have built some very special things.

But it’s increasingly clear that some of those very special things we have built — such as AI and coming soon, smart robots — will expose our own flaws and imperfections, a kind of inverse magic mirror, and there is and will be a deepening divide between those who use or even love the magic mirror, and those who want to look away or smash it.

This divide is already a driver of the world’s growing income inequality (though I think the generational divide has been a much larger cause of this, at least in developed economies), and I think it will become *the* driver in the coming decades.

Data aging or how technology amplifies our lived experience

Fascinating concept from VGR: https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/superhistory-not-superintelligence

To quote:

Those of us who have been using Google search for 22 years are /already/ like 100 years older than our biological age. Every year lived with Google at your fingertips is like 5 lived within the limits of paper books. In many ways, I feel older than my father, who is 83. I know the world in much richer, machine-augmented ways than he does, even though I don’t yet have a prosthetic device attached to my skull. I am not smarter than him. I’ve just data-aged more than him.

And:

But when Magnus Carlsen defeated Vishwanathan Anand in 2013, something weird and new was on display. I’m not a chess player, but from the commentary I read, it seems like not only was Carlsen more of a raw talent than Anand (same as Kasparov vs. Karpov) but he was also “older” in a weird way, despite being nominally 21 years younger. Carlsen is young enough to have been effectively “raised by AIs” — the most sophisticated chess AIs available on personal computers when he was growing up in the aughts. His playing style was described as kinda machine-inspired, pushing hard all the way through the end, exploring unlikely and unconventional lines of play where human tradition would suggest conceding.