AI Is Throwing a Roadside Picnic

Cpoll

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.

1245-a17z

A new analogy for the HN audience that is susceptible to reinforcement learning applied to humans (daily)!

johnbonton

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”

asimpletune

> 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.

KolmogorovComp

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

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.

m3047

I like that metaphor. But what it calls to my mind is an "alien artifact" which was found by a road, and "how did these refined metals get placed inside of a rock, in such an unnatural formation?" and there was much debate about this artifact. Years later it was determined that it was in fact a spark plug which had been remineralized by the effluent from a mine upstream: an unusual process acting on a discarded object, and people who want to believe. Nobody thought that the remineralization process could take less than hundreds of years, which ruled out "spark plug".

_dwt

It also reminds me, in a very similar way, of William Gibson's "Hinterlands". Some people are just hell bent on flying into the Alien Coordinates That Make You Crazy or Kill You but Sometimes Give You Cool Stuff you Don't Understand, from William Gibson's short story Don't Fly Into the...

prodmod

Usefulness relies on understanding, even if that means understanding what is possible to ask for. What is being generated right now is really just a translation from one inscrutable phenomenon into another. In neither case do we have power over the data, because we don’t know what it means, truly where it comes from, and even the beginning of the limits of what the discovery allows. We’ve traded one black box for another, and still need to unpack it.

glimshe

I really dislike this analogy. Trash and apple cores versus potential, objective discoveries? I'm not saying that OpenAI's results are good or bad. But I can say that at least humans could try to understand them and get not only the discoveries themselves but some techniques that could help other progress down the road. It's fair to ask whether we'll be better off as a result of AI Math. But many people are failing to see any sort of positive outcome and I think this is close minded and borderline irrational. I don't blame Mathematicians for trying to protect their careers. Anyone would to the same in their place. But the rest of society should take a hard look at what's happening and, as the financiers of mathematical research, make an independent assessment of whether humanity needs "old school" mathematical research at all versus a model with a lot more AI.

skybrian

I like this metaphor better: the mathematics community is like a group of ancient astronomers that are unexpectedly getting the output from a modern telescope. "Why even look at the sky anymore," some say. "And we don't even own the telescope!" Meanwhile, the Rubin observatory is creating an archive that grows by 20 terabytes each night, and nobody really worries about this. Dealing with that amount of data is definitely a problem, but also a nice problem to have, provided that there's a scientific community that can deal with it. Mathematics has unexpectedly become Big Science and there needs to be a better relationship between the funders of the scientific instruments and the scientists themselves. It's a bit confusing that the output from the scientific instrument looks like badly-written academic papers. Maybe it should be treated more like raw data? The format is not ideal, but historians (for example) often have to deal with far worse.

pavel_lishin

I think Ted Chiang's story "The Evolution of Human Science" may be a significantly better metaphor here. What AI is dropping is (allegedly) just answers , not mysteries. In both cases, we don't really understand it, but in "Picnic", most of the things left behind aren't even useful, merely mysterious or more often dangerous. In "Evolution", answers (and only answers) and technologies arrive pre-packaged, with zero understanding. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Human_Science - https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/science-fiction/2000-chiang.pd...