Even if we don't, the progress is not going to stop, for example on:
- lowering the price of each chip - you can get that by more automation.
- lowering the cost of energy used by a chip - you can have that by raise of renewable energy generation and its decentralisation (and again, more automation).
The point is that automation caused by AI will start a reinforcing feedback loop where more and more work can be done more cheaply, speeding up automation itself too.
>The point is that automation caused by AI will start a reinforcing feedback loop where more and more work can be done more cheaply, speeding up automation itself too.
there isn't much evidence that AI has accelerated the rate of automation, and people have been saying this about information technology for the last 4 decades already. By any account, automation and growth contribution of the technologies are low by historical standards.
The primary mechanism that has kept Moore's law alive up until now is miniaturization of transistors and we're going to run into a wall on that front pretty soon.
I will not counterargue your main point because this is indeed a matter of debate from a 'technical' standpoint.
However, in broader economic terms, I think the idea that AI may 'accelerate' the world in general is largely indirect: for instance, by saving time and money in other areas of life (because better tools, cheaper means, infra, etc), people become more able to perform their job. There are obviously diminishing returns to such optimization, as to any natural/economic process.
Automation also often means that useful jobs get turned into bullshit jobs, that stay there e.g. for political reasons, sometimes leading even to decreased efficiency.
Yeah. Who knows how fast the growth is gonna be or how it’s gonna look but people are already working on eg communication-avoiding algorithms for matrix or tensor operations to work best in the new regime. I’m not an expert in this area but if you allow me to paraphrase of someone who is, one of the reason algorithms people have employment is that all of these things get redone over and over to exploit advances in hardware.
Not for clock speed, but yes for parallelism. It might look like the Cerebras [0] wafer-scale monster becoming a commodity you could fire up 1000 of in the cloud.
We've got a few more iterations of Moore's law for sure. After that progress will likely happen in jumps and address non-xtor bottlenecks like memory access. E.g. wafer scale integration, 3D systems, photonics, etc.
There are easily thousands of people working on building higher-level programming languages/models. A very short and very incomplete list of entire subcommunities of PL working on languages that are higher-level than java/python:
1. The ML family -- OCaml, SML, Scala, F#. I think it's very fair to say that these are "higher-level" than imperative OO languages. And you can definitely get a job writing OCaml or Scala or F#...
2. A whole bunch of programming languages/primitives/paradigms aimed at making concurrency/parallelism/distributed systems easier. Erlang, X10, session types, Manticore, etc. Rust might even belong here.
3. Programming languages that incorporate resource/complexity analysis.
4. Literally decades of work on visual programming languages (which have mostly resulted in modern IDEs and teaching tools like Scratch).
5. behavioral types
6. linear types (again rust kind of fits here)
7. dependent types
8. I would also argue that systems like tensorflow and pytorch are really a sort of programming language -- they have a very different model of computation than the host language. Just because they don't have a parser/compiler/etc. doesn't mean they aren't a programming language, imo.
9. Tons of other stuff that doesn't fit in the major categories above (e.g. netkat).
10. I mean even SQL belongs in this list.
Even for language/models listed above that don't have large adoption, the ideas are often incorporated into more mainstream languages in one way or another. So there are significant projects developed in each of these types of languages (with the exception maybe of behavioral types and session types).
Higher-level programming Languages is one of the most explored areas of Computer Science -- if anything, it's an over-explored field.
This is less a list of "underexplored ideas" and more a list of "over-hyped ideas with over-crowded communities". Every item on the CS list is the sort of thing that an ungrounded undergrad research intern would want to work on.
Some of the descriptions in other fields have a similarly dilettante vibe to them. E.g.,
* Bio: math bio is a huge community and all those folks are well-trained in chaotic dynamics. you can say it's under-explored, but there are probably hundreds of people working on this right now and at least thousands have in the past few decades.
* Math: there's a section on subspace packing with a side-story about a proof assistant and the author doesn't even mention Hales...
* physics: Building machines to automate experiments is definitely the sort of thing people get paid to do whenever there's a large enough market (and even sometimes when there isn't). similarly, Nuclear-powered propulsion is underexplored... as long as you don't count the militaries of the major nuclear powers, that is.
There's no such thing as a perfect analogy because the entire point of an analogy is it takes an argument and reframes it in a different context. Different contexts have different edge cases and thus no analogy fits an argument perfectly.
Given this door analogy works for the majority of the arguments being presented (which is impressive in itself given how different the physical and electronic worlds are), I'd say it's actually a pretty good analogy.
Any analogy has its limitations, but I think it is helpful for talking about things like "back doors" (and how that is no different from not having doors at all) or how a proposal is basically only "unintended" consequences and no gain. Feel free to suggest a better analogy.
The main difference where this analogy breaks down is that it is much easier to build practically unbreakable encryption (assuming P != NP), versus practically unbreakable doors or safes.
Logic is great if you want to shoot a canon at the right target or design a circuit. But our current logical tools -- and especially that extremely simple set of 2000+ year old syllogisms designed by Aristotle to help him classify bugs that you're probably referring to when you say logic -- are not even a remotely good tool for analyzing anything that involves humans or society.
Maybe logic can be useful in the way you want it to be, but first you'll need to figure out how to serialize a person's entire life experience into some sort of sequence of symbols.
> Prioritizing personal experience and saying “you cant know what its like if youre not X” is a bad bad social meme.
But you don't know what it is like, and logic alone cannot help you know what it is like, because the full range of human experience is not expressible is any extant logical system.
hell, you can't even beat SoTA object detection if you don't have tons of actual experience in the form of labelled data.
And object detection is trivial compared to "being a human".
Is it really so hard to believe that you need actual experience in order to really understand how someone experiences the world? Or that your experience might make certain completely true things seem false to you, in a way that would make others experience your view of the world as akin to that of a child?
> So what? It doesn’t advance the discussion at all, its only purpose is to end discussion.
Sometimes that's true, but very often it is not true at all.
Very often, conversations about social/political topics end exactly when someone refuses empathize and instead imposes what they view as "logical" based on their "obvious experience of the world". E.g., "being gay would make me feel bad, and no healthy person wants to feel bad, so therefore gay people must be somehow sick". Completely logical from the priors, but immediately ends the conversation because the speaker assumes their experience of being a human in society is the only valid one.
> If a persons feelings trump logic...
Try replacing "feelings" with "experience". And then consider all those annoying arguments where someone says "but A is of course true and A clearly implies B so B must be true!" Even though you can go out and verify -- with reproducible experiment -- that the earth is in fact really, really not flat. i.e., that B is false.
And look: in this case, logic does not matter! If you can check with experience that B is false, then you don't need to look through the chain of logical deductions that resulted in a derivation that B is true. When people say "logic doesn't matter", what they usually mean is "your conclusion is prime facie false based on how I experience the world"; not "I'm not a blind child, you're a blind child!"
This doesn't mean that there is no room for logic. It just means... when talking about topics that involve how other people experience the world, try walking in other people's shoes.
And if they come to different conclusions that you do when you try to empathize with them, consider that perhaps they're not just dumb children. Perhaps you're not using enough synthetic training data to really understand where they are coming from. Or even that you can't do this task of imagining the other person's experience with purely synthetic training data.
Logic is a bad tool for solving social and political problems. Empathy is a much better tool. Especially empathy grounded in the realization that even empathy isn't quite enough to really understand how other people experience life. Logic can sometimes help you empathize, or explain to yourself why you need to empathize, but logic is just a tool for thinking. And it's not even always the best tool.
I believe in human empathy so much that I think I'm capable of understanding a persons struggle even if I haven't directly been through what they've been through. Indeed I think almost all of us are capable of this, even if we don't practice it. I think the argument that you can only talk about things you have personal experience in is essentially a pessimistic view about human empathy.
There is a huge difference between empathy and experience. Ignoring that difference is an important failure of empathy. It's the confusion that lets you say that you believe in empathy while also literally infantilizing people who disagree with you.
Furthermore, realizing this gap exists is not synonymous with claiming that "you can only talk about things you have personal experience". Where in my above post do I say that?
We have always been in an "age of conformity". For example, Obergefell v. Hodges was decided less than 5 years ago. There are still children who are homeless because they aren't sexually conformant.
What is changing is not the degree to which society demands conformity. All that is change is who has to conform, and the standards to which they have to conform.
Conformity is not bad. Abstaining from wanton murder and theft is conforming to social norms. What matters is whether the norms are good ones.
> The Hacker culture from which everything we have today in tech arose.
This is a nice origin fantasy, but it's really not true.
The uniforms at DoD and the suits at IBM/Intel/AT&T/Xerox/etc. played a huge role in envisioning, organizing, and bankrolling all that work.
Also, that work was done by of hundreds of thousands of white-collar and blue-collar professionals. Many of those engineers and technicians were not self-described "hackers" or "nerds". A lot of them contributed by digging ditches and climbing polls. A lot of them were brilliant engineers who at 5pm turned off the computer screen, went home to their families, and didn't think about work until 9am the next day.
> The culture which makes this site "Hacker" news, is one in which doing something interesting is more important than anything else... why aren't you doing something interesting?
Because some times boring things are important to help society function or to make money. Examples: Attending city council/school board meetings. Being a middle man. Running warehouses. Selling advertisements. Giving away vaccines and moz nets. And honestly 99% of other work done by companies, nonprofits, and active citizens. Including software companies. Boring, not interesting, and yet to varying degrees important. In fact, some of those things are super interesting (ad auctions, for example, are wonderful fun for math nerds) but not nearly as important as the boring things (passing out vaccines or setting up moz nets or taking minutes at a city council meeting -- seriously, not fun).
> But maybe it's this fear that leads us rushing back to deep moral systems likes religious fantastics when their faith is questioned.
We all have our convictions and stories in which we find meaning.
We're all unreasonable defensive about those stories we tell ourselves.
...In fact, on that note, one more thing to add to the list of boring things that we for some reason feel the need to do: political arguments on a news forum that financially benefits VC by tapping into a fantastical ethos about the origin of modern computing.
Now, tell me no one here is going to get unreasonably defensive about that ;-)
or naive.