Rad Geek People's Daily

Now we hardly dare suggest milestones like these anymore. Maybe if an AI can write a publishable scientific paper all on its own? But Sakana can write crappy not-quite-publishable papers. And surely in a few years it will get a little better, and one of its products will sneak over a real journal’s publication threshold, and nobody will be convinced of anything. If an AI can invent a new technology? Someone will train AI on past technologies, have it generate a million new ideas, have some kind of filter that selects them, and produce a slightly better jet engine, and everyone will say this is meaningless. If the same AI can do poetry and chess and math and music at the same time? I think this might have already happened, I can’t even keep track.

So what? Here are some possibilities:

First, maybe we’ve learned that it’s unexpectedly easy to mimic intelligence without having it. This seems closest to ELIZA, which was obviously a cheap trick.

Second, maybe we’ve learned that our ego is so fragile that we’ll always refuse to accord intelligence to mere machines.

Third, maybe we’ve learned that intelligence is a meaningless concept, always enacted on levels that don’t themselves seem intelligent. Once we pull away the veil and learn what’s going on, it always looks like search, statistics, or pattern matching. The only difference is between intelligences we understand deeply (which seem boring) and intelligences we don’t understand enough to grasp the tricks (which seem like magical Actual Intelligence).

I endorse all three of these. The micro level — a single advance considered in isolation — tends to feel more like a cheap trick. The macro level, where you look at many advances together and see all the impressive things they can do, tends to feel more like culpable moving of goalposts. And when I think about the whole arc as soberly as I can, I suspect it’s the last one, where we’ve deconstructed intelligence into unintelligent parts.

— Scott Alexander, Sakana, Strawberry, and Scary AI
Astral Codex Ten, 18 September 2024

For what it’s worth, I don’t think it’s actually true that intelligence tout court is a meaningless concept, or that the predicament that he describes in the third response to the moving-goalposts problem really seems much like discovering that it might be a meaningless concept. (It might show that it’s a complex concept — I would go further to argue that it’s a complex, fuzzy-boundaried family resemblance concept — and one whose component parts just don’t always fractally exhibit the critically distinguishing features of the whole. But, well, big deal; there are lots of concepts like that, and it’s interesting to find out that a concept is like that, but it doesn’t mean you’ve found out the concept is meaningless. But I do think Scott’s right that the moving-goalposts problem is a big problem, and one that ought to provoke more thought amongst people proposing critical tests for what intelligence is or where it can and cannot be found.

What I’m Reading: Ancient Cities Unearthed in Mountains of Central Asia by Alexander Nazaryan, New York Times, 23 October 2024.

The site was uncovered using lidar mapping of the site during a UAV drone flyover; excavations have turned up a central citadel, artifacts and fortifictations.

The casual tip would lead Dr. [Michael] Frachetti, an archaeologist at Washington University in St. Louis, to Tugunbulak, an enormous fortified city dating back to a medieval empire.^[1] He and his team would spend nearly a decade trying to map out the site, as well as the one he’d originally come to Uzbekistan to explore, known as Tashbulak.

The results of their research, published on Wednesday in the scientific journal Nature, describe the two sites as the largest and most comprehensive urban plans of any medieval city in Central Asia situated at high altitude (defined here as about 6,500 feet above sea level).

. . .

The willingness of medieval merchants to detour up the mountains suggests a complexity of trade routes absent from popular conceptions of the Silk Road. Stereotypically, we think that it’s like a highway, Dr. Maksudov said. No — it’s very highly networked.

Initiated by the Chinese explorer Zhang Qian, who went in search of heavenly horses for the Han dynasty, the Silk Road eventually connected people living thousands of miles apart, in ways both predictable and not.

Because of their position between East and West Asia, the Central Asian cities of Samarkand and Bukhara served as important Silk Road hubs. Much later, they became cities in the Soviet republic of Uzbekistan. Dr. Maksudov explained that the U.S.S.R. imposed a Marxist version of history on the region, celebrating large urban developments while downplaying the contributions of medieval nomadic peoples, like those who possibly settled Tashbulak and Tugunbulak.

Scholars used to think about nomadic and sedentary societies as separate and distinct, Dr. Frankopan said. These sites show clearly that reality was much more complicated, with mobile communities not only creating settlements but large ones, too.

— Alexander Nazaryan, Ancient Cities Unearthed in Mountains of Central Asia
New York Times, 23 October 2024.

1. ^[1][The reporter is probably referring to the Kara-Khanid (Qarakhanid) Khanate, a Turkic khanate that dominated the Central Asian steppe and Transoxiana from the 800s to the 1200s CE. —RG]↩

The Medium Is The Message? Well no, not really, that’s not really right. But maybe to give the billboard slogan a tweak: The Limits of the Medium are the Limits of the Message.

People will be naturally prone to focus most of their efforts on the medium through which they interact with the most people. A vast majority of people who interact with my work, for example, do so by reading my pieces, not by viewing my social media posts. My written work is the central focus of my professional life, while my social media posts are essentially an afterthought.

But what if that balance is reversed? It bends a person (or a movement) around the attitudes of social media and away from the kinds of arguments that require the length of a column or essay. Social media creates not a marketplace of ideas so much as a gallery of takes, where you can spend hours doomscrolling through short videos and snappy retorts.

That’s how a movement transfers its allegiance from the ideas of a man like William F. Buckley Jr. to an X influencer like @Catturd2 and his 2.4 million followers. It’s one reason a person like Tucker Carlson devolves from an interesting, idiosyncratic writer and thinker to an online shock jock and outrage merchant.

This transformation has the effect of further radicalizing the right. There’s a Can you top this? dynamic to posting that pushes people to extremes. In the offline world, paranoia is a liability. It inhibits you from seeing the world clearly. In parts of the online world, you’re considered a rube if you’re not paranoid, if you’re not seeing a leftist plot around every corner, if you’re not believing that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s romance is a Biden administration psy-op that culminated with rigging the Super Bowl.

— David French, Why Elon Musk Is The Second Most Important Person in MAGA
New York Times, 3 March 2024.

What I’m Reading: some poems by Richard Brautigan, a real weirdo of the San Francisco and Pacific Northwest counterculture. Here’s one that he first wrote in 1967, which was first distributed as a mimeo broadside circulated in Haight-Ashbury by the Diggers^[1] then republished in a series of chapbooks, newspapers and books. This copy’s from the paperback of his 1968 selected poems anthology.

I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

— Richard Brautigan, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace^[2]
Reprinted in The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster (1968). New York: Dell Publishing Co. 1.

1. ^[1]More specifically, by the Diggers’ mimeo publishing operation, the Communications Company. (Source: Wikipedia)↩
2. ^[2]I went to find a copy of the poem because of its title-drop appearance in Adam Curtis’s 2011 BBC documentary series. The Curtis documentary is artfully constructed, involving, and really watching on the whole, considered aesthetically as a sort of techno-dystopian cyber-socio-political collage made out of rambling thoughts and historical materials. But also, considered on the substance of its content and argument, it is a wrongheaded, deeply confused and soemtimes really deranged sort of random walk through Great Recession vintage artsy-progressive techno-paranoid conspiracy theorizing, or sub-theoretical conspiratorial musing, about intellectual pseudohistory and the international bankers and The Machines and the world-haunting Spectre of Neoliberalism. Anyway, I like the poems better.↩