The Japanese. They're the first known group to explicitly represent Emoji, unlike the older Latin derived systems which could only represent emotion through character combinations and thus were lame rather than complete.
The pursuit of growth is the foundation of all life as we know it. Every species (but not necessarily every individual) will seek to produce offspring and grow their "genetic footprint" so to speak. It's a baseline requirement for the continuity of existence. It is not a "weird" idea and we are not "hypnotized" but rather aware of of the fundamental necessity of growth.
Sustainability is a behavior only learned when absolutely necessary, when the constraints of material existence impose themselves on the living. Growth will always happen outside of these constraints.
That is to say, some behaviors will reduce growth now in exchange for stability (i.e. more growth later, or less growth loss later), but those are hard-won and they are not the default. The default is always growth up to capacity, and we don't actually know what that capacity is.
Malthusians have been dooming for centuries. We can accept that at some future point, they might be right, but it is always wrong to assume they are inevitably correct at the present moment. Growth can and will be pursued until it is no longer an option. It's not weird, it's not a fixation, it's not a hypnosis. It's just life.
I'm not sure what your nitpick is supposed to be getting at. Good businesses create a solution to your problem and then "insert themselves" between you and that solution. That's how they make money. If they could not stand in the middle and charge you for access, there would be no incentive to create the solution.
I don't think I was nitpicking at all. "inserting themselves between" two things is very, very different than providing a solution to a problem.
> Good businesses create a solution to your problem and then "insert themselves" between you and that solution.
I cannot wrap my head around this framing at all. Businesses that provide a solution aren't inserting themselves between anything. They're offering a solution directly.
Think about any software company with a large sales team. The people writing the software are not the people selling the software. Writing software and offering it to people does not sustain a business. Creating IP and then finding creative ways to charge people for it does. The sales team that "inserts themselves between" your problem and the solution the product team has created is a core part of the business, a sine qua non.
> The sales team that "inserts themselves between" your problem and the solution
That's just an incredibly jaded way to look at things. The solution is developed by people who specialize in developing solutions. The communication of the existence of the solution to people who need it is handled by people who specialize in communication and customer outreach, i.e. sales.
You may think that without a sales team the solution would be cheaper; the reality is that without a sales team the solution would either not exist or be substantially less refined as _someone_ has to handle the customer interactions, and if that's the dev than that's taking them away from working on the product.
I don't think it's jaded at all. I don't disagree that a sales team is necessary, either. I'm just describing how a business works: it creates a solution and then finds a way to extract value by selling the solution to those for whom value would be created. Creating something and extracting value from it require different skillsets; that's all fine and good.
We view a business as problematic when it's only inserting itself between you and the solution, without actually creating the solution, i.e. rent-seeking. So, it's the relationship between the business and the solution that causes an issue, not the action of putting the business between the solution and the problem. The latter is a given, always.
As much as I enjoy Asimov, I have to say that he is wrong. The gap between what we know and what is true might have decreased immensely, but it is still infinite. Any quantifiable increase is 0 in relation to infinity. Asimov's counter-argument that we are quantifiably less wrong than we were in the past simply does not overcome this core issue. If there is an infinite amount of knowledge separating what we know from what is true, then we can learn an infinite amount of things and still have an infinite amount of things left to learn.
To feel justified in thinking the universe is "essentially" understood is to be OK with one's concept of the "essential nature" of the universe to be inherently divergent from a future concept, which according to Asimov's own argument is going to be more correct than our own.
To me, it reads as a bitterness towards mortality, a sort of sour grapes: the insights we will have about the universe at some future time must not be very interesting compared to what we know now, because I won't be around to know them.
edit: I guess I shouldn't be surprised that Asimov's perspective is shared here. It's very easy to understand the essential nature of the universe when you define the universe as the parts you understand.
I don't think human beings in 1000 years will look at our current understanding as special in any way. As transformative as our era is, it will be dwarfed by the scale of transformation in future eras. It's just the most transformative era so far. That's temporal bias, nothing more.
One way to see Asimov's "infinity of wrongness" is perhaps as a fractal. You could view the bulbs in the mandelbrot as being a kind of knowledge, and the "main bulb" occupying the majority of the area belonging to the set as the set of truths known about our universe. The mandelbrot set is infinite in complexity, however its area is finite and bounded!
Or as ironing out the wrinkles on a great big t-shirt, where each wrinkle is sub-wrinkled with smaller wrinkles and so on. We've "ironed out" the biggest wrinkles, there are infinitely more but they are much smaller. We're perhaps over half-way ironed, in a quantitative sense.
I disagree fundamentally. You may as well ask me to imagine Earth as a disc, with multiple rotating spotlights shining down on it and a giant ice wall around the edges. I understand what the image is trying to convey, I simply do not agree that this is the shape of the thing I experience.
I think you missed the entire point of the essay. You should actually read it.
Science is incremental, revolutions in science mostly just adjust the edges of our knowledge, at more and more extreme corner cases (extreme high energies, extreme high/low temperatures, etc). No, we absolutely don't know it all, but as always, new knowledge and theories will only affect those edges, and refine the predictions for the nth+1 decimal place.
By and by, the science that directly affects our daily lives has remained stable and most progress has been in the engineering to put all this knowledge to practical and efficient use.
I like how in English one can make it appear if one is skilfully and logically dismissing an argument without actually even trying to. I don't presume that this was your intent, but the phenomenon is quite interesting and I quite confidently believe dangerous (in that it contributes to some degree to inaccurate models in the minds of those who ingest such text, and those models are what drive action, much of which is harmful...which is easy to see in {choose your outgroup}, but far less easy to see in one's ingroup).
I think your use of infinity isn't particularly helpful here as it leads to the contradiction that knowing more doesn't lessen the knowledge gap, whereas it does appear to do so.
Maybe, a better interpretation would be that as we learn and understand more, we approach the limits of knowledge. Now it may take an infinite amount of knowledge to actually reach the limits of knowledge (c.f. an infinite series can approach a finite value, but takes forever to get there), but it can still be shown that we are getting nearer.
The other aspect is that as we understand more, we appreciate that there's even more to understand, but that can be thought of as our precision increasing and looking at the available knowledge in greater detail.
There is no contradiction because there is no limit of knowledge.
The limit of y = e^x is infinity. You can keep increasing x and y will increase exponentially. So you plot the function, let's say with the x axis going up to 10 and the y axis going up to e^10. The graph shows very clearly that, while there was progress before, we have even more progress now. Exponentially more, even! What came before is dwarfed by what we have now; if you look at the range of y for x values 9-10 you can see how little of a difference all those others values (1-8) had between one another, compared to the changes we have now. The rate of change is so high that we're basically in an era of semi-complete knowledge. We must be at some kind of inflection point, this is truly a unique era of understanding.
Then you repeat. Set the x axis to 100, and the y axis up to e^100. Oh wait, it's the same graph. That's because it's always the same graph. It's scale-invariant. The slope at every point is always whatever y is.
We're always at right at the limit of explaining the "essential nature" of the universe because the "essential nature" of the universe can only be (to us) what we can understand it to be. We chose e^10 as the limit of the y-axis in our first exercise because that's all the knowledge we knew about. We chose e^100 as the limit of the y-axis in our second exercise because that, too, was all the knowledge we knew about. Choosing these random values as the limits of our function (i.e. the limit of the "essential nature of the universe") leaks information into the visualization that will always paint a picture showing that we're at the most transformative time there ever was.
When we do it that way, we will always come to the same _wrong_ conclusion. We will always dwarf what came before and be dwarfed by what comes after. To think that we're actually living in an inflection point is hubris, it's wishful thinking, it's the sour grapes of mortality.
> There is no contradiction because there is no limit of knowledge.
I don't think we know enough to be able to state that definitively. It's feasible that the universe behaves mathematically (it seems to so far) and thus possible to gain a thorough understanding of the underlying principles, if not the specific facts (c.f. with understanding how to produce integers yet not "knowing" all the integers).
Even if the universe doesn't have underlying rules to be discovered, there's still a limit to number of configurations available to particles etc. within our visible universe. Although that number might appear to be infinite to us, it's actually drastically closer to zero than to infinity.
So, if there is indeed some finite limit, then using y = e^x would be the wrong function as that doesn't approach a finite value.
This leads to a more fundamental question: What is the universe?
Is the optimal move in an a given chess board considered knowledge? If so, can't we create entirely new sets of knowledge from the emergent properties of an arbitrary set of rules called a "game"? If we can create an infinite set of arbitrary combinations of rules and states (games), then knowledge should be infinite. Maybe not all knowledge is scientifically applicable, but we have learned a great deal about science and engineering from studying chess. In fact, we are starting to learn more about learning as a process and not as some magical thing that human beings can do, just from studying the best way to make decisions in this totally-contrived and scientifically-useless game.
Taking this a step further, let's look at the animal kingdom. If learning about the intricacies of the mating habits of birds can help an arbitrary bird increase its impact on the future gene pool, is that knowledge not worth something to the bird? To bird society? Are the things we learn about ourselves knowledge? They certainly have utility. Is there any limit to what we can learn about ourselves, about the stochastic process of life? Is life not part of the universe?
Is computer science even knowledge? It seems if we're more directly concerned with the physical nature of the universe, we ought not to care about what the system of a computer actually does; we only need to care about what it is, about its physical structure. Except, that's not actually how we pursue knowledge or science at all.
In my view, Asimov's sentiment can be reduced to a complete tautology: we're at the point where we know almost everything there is to know about the things we think we can know.
There aren't an infinite number of chess positions, moves or even games, so that's not a good example. It's possible to come up with a number game that could have infinite possibilities, but that doesn't mean that the universe could even contain some of the options within our visibility. Our current state of knowledge about the universe strongly suggests that there's a finite limit to the available knowledge (I.e. between the Planck scale and the visible horizon due to the speed of light).
A googolplex looks to be the first number we've found that is too big to be contained in our universe.
You're right--chess is a decidedly finite game. Even so, we have not "solved" this simple, finite game--not even close! If we're not close to solving such a trivial game, how can we be close to the limit of the knowledge of the universe?
A googolplex is "too big to be contained" in our universe yet here we are talking about it. We can perform operations on this number, compare it to other numbers, and even come up with mathematical proofs showing that it's too big to exist. There are an infinite amount of numbers larger than a googolplex and we could have an infinite amount of conversations about them. The material limit of the universe does not limit our ability to create information, to learn things.
There isn't enough space in the universe for an infinite series, either, yet we can (and do) still use them, we reason about them, we learn from them. We can even reduce some infinite series to a finite number. The material bounds of the universe are not a limit of knowledge.
I think you're mistaking the map for the territory. A googolplex is a representation of a number, but not the number itself, although it's simple enough that we can get away with using the representation as it's obvious what the form of the number would be. However a number such as tree(3) is unimaginably bigger, but more crucially, we don't know anything about the form of the number beyond its size and we can't sensibly use it in calculations.
Now both of those numbers are finite and we could try to figure out how many numbers we could "describe" such as tree(3), but that would be limited by the number of symbols (i.e numbers, operators, letters and words) that could be used (i.e we would have less than a googolplex different numbers that could be represented using maths, language and thought). That's still going to be a finite number.
If the Universe is the territory than Knowledge is the map. I'm not at all mistaking the map for the territory: I'm pointing out that the set of maps that can describe a given territory are virtually infinite. Asimov is saying the map is almost complete and I'm saying there are an infinite number of maps left to go.
Cartographers in the 18th centuries were "basically done" mapping out the Earth. In the 20th century we were able to use satellite imagery to get the "full picture". Does that mean we have perfect knowledge of the Earth? Absolutely not. There is never a final frontier of knowledge.
> The gap between what we know and what is true might have decreased immensely, but it is still infinite.
The other two commenters have taken different approaches to infinity, but it seems that your argument doesn't hold even for a plain-as-in-real-numbers infinity.
Being satisfied with finite knowledge gains, I have no hope to achieve 1% of infinity (or any other fraction of infinity).
The universe is infinite in size, another assumption. If I'd fly on vacation to Tenerife, a quantifiable shift of my position by mere thousands of miles would be "zero in relation to infinity". Yet, it's not unimportant for my rest. Talking about infinity doesn't automatically cancel all the finite measurements and bring them to zero.
One might plausibly assert that while the particulars of the universe may be infinite, the fundamental rules which govern the universe are finite and thus at least in principle entirely knowable. While I don't think the 20th century makes an air tight case for the latter, I think it isn't an unreasonable conclusion to draw from 20th Century Physics either.
It's surprising that we find ourselves in a universe which does appear to obey certain laws. There's a whole bunch of assumptions made to help us understand how things work and it turns out they're mostly correct. i.e. It's more astounding that we CAN understand the universe and how well maths can act as a model/language to understand it.
Not that surprising. A universe without predictable laws would be unlikely to host life. I mean physics really only knows how to do statics and oscillations and those things work because many systems are at equilibrium or just slightly perturbed from it, probably because of the mysterious low entropy condition which defines the past.
Well, we can start by asserting that we do not know everything. We can assert this from the contra positive: If we did know everything, then we would have an acceptable solution to all of our problems. Since we do not, it stands to reason that we don't know everything.
Once we accept that the assertion is valid, then it raises the likelihood that our understanding of the world is incomplete in some way. And furthermore is incomplete to different degrees along multiple dimensions of knowledge. Whether incomplete or wrong is a word choice, it doesn't change what's missing. So with each new discovery, our understanding improves, our wrongness decreases.
> If we did know everything, then we would have an acceptable solution to all of our problems. Since we do not, it stands to reason that we don't know everything.
This can be proven false by contradiction: it may be possible to _know_ that one of our problems has no solution.
Takes like this confuse me. ChatGPT is not stopping anyone from making art. It may stop you from profiting off of your artistic labors. Though, if you need a profit motive to make art, were you really making anything truly expressive and creative to begin with?
We're seeing the same thing with the actors and writers striking. Sorry folks, if you're making me choose between embracing neoluddism or living with some artsy folks not having their dream job, I'm going to pick you being out of a job. I do not care that background actors are going to be replaced by AI and I do not care that AI is going to let 1 writer do the work of 5. Background acting is not anyone's passion and writing predictable soapy sitcom stories is probably not anyone's passion, either.
AI is going to give us better creative work not because AI will become super creative, but because people who actually have creative thoughts worth expressing will just do that instead of being crowded out by humans chasing the lowest common denominator. Now we have computers chasing the lowest common denominator, something they are very good at, and we have humans who will create when they feel compelled to create, not because they want to make money but because their creativity compels them to act, make, and do.
If a songwriter is being replaced by an AI, their skills are not something we're going to miss. Sorry, not sorry. Artistic sensibilities have arguable never been the driver of what music is popular and I don't see the issue in having AI replace the bubblegum rubberstamp dime-a-dozen trash that the modal artists must produce to make money. Again, now you are totally outmatched by the AI and you can actually focus on creating an authentically human work without being distracted by the needs of industry. If there is no market for that then it is not because of AI but because of our own preferences.
The "human spirit" is just a story we tell ourselves to justify our dominion over everything we see. I'd be more than happy to see it die. Humanism is great if you're a human, but life is moving in other directions and we can either adapt to the notion that our primate brains aren't magical engines of wonder or die alongside our brittle egos.
There is a difference between "making money and making art" and "making money by making art". No one is entitled to having other people value their artistic output. I would argue that art created for the marketplace is less creative than art produced by a human's need to create for creation's sake. It's not un-artistic, but it is the kind of art that an AI can make better, faster, and cheaper.
Give an example of a work of art produced by a human's need to create for creation's sake alone, and not at all for the marketplace, that outclasses any classical works of art, music, literature or anything else that the creator was paid for. Michaelangelo didn't paint the Sistene Chapel ceiling for free. The Rolling Stones and the Beatles didn't perform for free. Shakespeare didn't write for free. That indie band you like so full of passion and verve would probably kill to be able to at least make ends meet on tour, because if they don't, they just break up and get "real" jobs. Even Banksy sells his work.
All art is work. Any art worth doing is work. It's time and experience and probably student loans and equipment and people. And under capitalism, work must either be done in the service of profit or else it doesn't get done. To expect artists alone to suffer for the purity of their craft and do everything they do for free is perverse.
Although you are correct - AI will put a lot of those people out of business. But not because they let themselves be tainted by commercialism. Rather the opposite, because commerce no longer finds value in the artist.
Simply look at the career of Van Gogh or any "Bohemian starving artist". Listing only the most popular, most influential artists proves my point: for most people art is an untenable career. In that regard AI, has virtually no impact on those who want to create. They will find a way to make something unique and valuable or they will fail like millions of artists already do in the world we have today.
There are many artists in my family and all of them have day jobs to support their creative passions. Mosts artists fail to make money; it really should go without saying that not everyone can be Helen Mirren or Paul McCartney. If requiring a day job makes you give up art, you probably didn't have the drive to create anything people really wanted. For most artists creation is a need, not something that is pursued for monetary reasons. Everyone tries to make money on their art, but again, even without AI the vast majority of artists fail to do so.
>Listing only the most popular, most influential artists proves my point: for most people art is an untenable career.
That wasn't your point. Your point was that no artist who makes a living with their art can be considered a "true" artist. I pointed out popular and influential artists because the quality of their work, despite having been being done by working artists, disputes your thesis that no art done for money has real value.
>In that regard AI, has virtually no impact on those who want to create.
AI has already been used to steal the commissions of working artists and fabricate CVs, and plenty of jobs are being outsourced entirely to AI. I guarantee you the artists who lost that work have plenty of passion for their craft.
>Mosts artists fail to make money; it really should go without saying that not everyone can be Helen Mirren or Paul McCartney.
Why are you trying to equate working artists with celebrities. Most working actors aren't Helen Mirren or Paul McCartney. Most writers aren't Tom Clancy or Stephen King. You've never heard of anyone working in VFX, or many people involved in comics or game art.
Again, you just keep restating your argument, but never proving it. Why are none of these people real artists, and why do none of them deserve to make a living? Why are the only "true" artists your friends who make macaroni collages or paint portraits on the boardwalk, and not the people who had the commitment to master their craft and do it full time?
>For most artists creation is a need, not something that is pursued for monetary reasons.
Here's the flaw in your reasoning, you assume that artists who work for a living are only interested in monetary gain. For the vast majority of working artists, creation is a need, and that's why they pursue a living at it. You seem to be assuming the only artists being replaced by AI are low-talent bottom feeders, but markets aren't optimizing for talent, they're optimizing for cost and replacing their entire creative pipeline with AI where feasible.
A lot of modern creative work involves years of effort, material, and investment. Small bands can't tour if everyone also has a full time job, and they never charge for tickets and only ever give their music away for free. Indie game studios couldn't publish games that way. A lot of art just ceases to exist when your only option is to squeeze it in during free time when you're already working 40, 50 or 60 hours just to feed yourself.
The question was whether there were animal species that do not have internal hierarchies. I gave an example.
I don't myself believe that the question is relevant to social relations among homo sapiens, but it's better that people be aware of the variety of animal behavior.
>It didn't take millions to build Linux or wikipedia, just a couple hundred to a couple thousand absurdly dedicated people.
Maybe it didn't take millions of people to build those things, but it did take millions of people to create an environment in which building those things could be considered a productive use of time.
The people who built Linux and Wikipedia didn't build it just for themselves, and indeed neither Linux nor Wikipedia would survive (in their current form) if they were not useful to millions of people.
Hierarchies in society get stronger, deeper, and more complex the larger the societies are. There is a function to hierarchy, it doesn't exist for its own sake. In small groups those hierarchies are not as useful so they aren't as pronounced.
Think of the neural complexity required for an amoeba to navigate with flagella vs a fly to navigate with wings. Even the fly's complexity is dwarfed by, say, the neural complexity of an elephant's control of his trunk. And that pales in comparison to the neural complexity required to get a spacecraft into orbit.
Complex behavior requires complex systems and complex systems require the simplicity that hierarchies provide.
When we define intelligence as having the ability to do the things that only humans do, it's no wonder that we can't see intelligence in other species.
Most animals don't have digits they can use to manipulate things with the precision we do. That doesn't mean they aren't intelligent.
There are dogs that have learned to ride public bus and metro systems. They know how to act to be accepted in these scenarios when other animals would not be. They have a sense of where they will be going and what the purpose of the vehicle is. They can use their noses to detect things that we cannot even with our fancy tools, and we even rely on them for their noses when our human tech fails.
If intelligence is the domain of humanity then I'm not so interested in intelligence. I'm interested in whatever it is that allows sentient beings to understand, operate within, and adapt to their environments.
We vastly overestimate the intelligence of us and underestimate the intelligence of any other living creature.
Or rather, humanity acts as a highly intelligent collective but individual humans are only moderately intelligent in comparison.
As a thought experiment: put an average urban person on an uninhabited island. No tech. The person would have absolutely no idea how to recreate any of our technology. Nor would they know how to hunt, do agriculture, do mining, do anything.
We have no idea how anything works and outsourced even basic survival skills. The magic of humanity is that actually smart people are able to store and communicate knowledge to build ever more advanced tech, which through sophisticated supply chains and management systems is widely distributed to all other people whom don't require to know how anything works.
