The AI title is veeeery tenuous/baity, but this is a fun read nonetheless. Upvoted.
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Well the book does promise to give the reader intelligence and knowledge acquired through means other than the natural way. So in, that way I think “artificial” makes sense.
I think it’s a bit tongue in cheek and maybe a slight jab aimed at people that use AI(LLMs) to appear smarter than they are.
The text was interesting.
I think the connection is pretty clear: people have always wanted to know things without having to learn them.
I think the underlying motivation may be straw manned or misrepresented as only that.
Do you use AI? Do you build anything with it technically? I do.
I don't want to know things without learning them, I want to produce things of value and that solve important problems, and if I can do that rather than the alternative (not do it, because of competing focuses, limited time and energy, etc) I would go with the option of using AI to do so. People in religious study or having other pursuits, surviving at a time when this book came out, at least some of them, could very likely be thinking the same. It feels disingenuous to emphasize the motivation as "knowing things without having to learn them"
>I don't want to know things without learning them
I lives in this world, but we live in a society. While you may diligently learn, there will be 10+ more that won't and will use the AI like an oracle. It then comes up how much damage will become of this.
And we're not even in the era of rampant agentic AI spreading itself around and the fun and neat problems that will cause.
What's the necessary thing here that people need to "learn" to prevent the hypothetical AI damage scenario you are talking about?
Eh, well, stop building AI.
We're not going to do that, so it's pretty much unavoidable.
If I had to make a "most probable guess" of what the future looks like, we'll have some kind of AI mess caused that will cost billion of dollars. This will get governments up in a tizzy about their dangers, while still being hopelessly addicted to them in military and tracking their citizens. Most people think that governments will attack the models being built, but I don't think so, they want powerful models mostly for themselves. So they'll go after the next best thing. Hardware. What exactly that looks like, I'm not sure, but the big clusters of the machines will have to be registered and licensed. Likely the models will have to be encoded to run on particular hardware and getting caught with an unencoded model would be considered an illegal munition, like we did with cryptography in the past.
Am I hearing this right:
- people will use AI bad
- because people will use AI bad, stop building it
That's what Google is for.
"There is no Royal Road to Geometry".
“I admire the elegance of your method of computation; it must be nice to ride through these fields upon the horse of true mathematics while the like of us have to make our way laboriously on foot.”
-- Einstein admiring Levi-Civita's mastery of differential geometry.
I think it's a round about commentary. Many times these past fee years I've found myself telling junior engineers that AI cannot understand for you. That there is no shortcut to understanding.