
How to Become a Centaur (2018) - ArtWomb
https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/issue3-case
======
Afton
"That’s why Doug tied that brick to a pencil — to prove a point. Of all the
tools we’ve created to augment our intelligence, writing may be the most
important. But when he “de-augmented” the pencil, by tying a brick to it, it
became much, much harder to even write a single word. And when you make it
hard to do the low-level parts of writing, it becomes near impossible to do
the higher-level parts of writing: organizing your thoughts, exploring new
ideas and expressions, cutting it all down to what’s essential. That was
Doug’s message: a tool doesn’t “just” make something easier — it allows for
new, previously-impossible ways of thinking, of living, of being."

Hah. I injured my hand a couple of years ago, and had to type with one hand
for a couple of months. I could code review, I could participate in meetings,
I could identify the source of a bug. But I could not write any but the
simplest code. I was mystified. I could write emails and to some extent
documents (typing of course slowed down a lot). But I became basically
incapable of writing code. Using too much brain power on the physical act
makes you have less left over for the CONTENT. Cool to see that this problem
was understood much earlier.

~~~
Aperocky
We need a stdout from brain.

We have such a fine grained control over our body, we should be able to find a
signal stream or two to interface with some computer system.

~~~
nerfhammer
check if there's a USART on the pinout diagram of the brain. if we're lucky it
will be rs232 compatible. then all we need is an FTDI or similar chip to
interface with USB which should give you a tty in /dev.

~~~
judge2020

        cat /dev/bra1n > /dev/null 2>&1

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infinity0
The title is like the opposite of clickbait & would have been better named
"AI’s forgotten cousin, IA: Intelligence Augmentation"

> At first, Garry wasn’t surprised when a human grandmaster with a weak laptop
> could beat a world-class supercomputer. But what stunned Garry was who won
> at the end of the tournament — not a human grandmaster with a powerful
> computer, but rather, a team of two amateur humans and three weak computers!
> The three computers were running three different chess-playing AIs, and when
> they disagreed on the next move, the humans “coached” the computers to
> investigate those moves further.

> [..]

> When you create a Human+AI team, the hard part isn’t the “AI”. It isn’t even
> the “Human”.

> It’s the “+”.

~~~
oddevan
I don’t know; I clicked hoping for some step-by-step instructions on giving
myself a more horse-like body. 0/10, article did not deliver.

~~~
projektfu
I, too, wanted this, but would settle for motaur.

------
Jon_Lowtek
How to become a centaur (abridged):

"the human chooses the questions, in the form of setting goals and constraints
— while the AI generates answers, usually showing multiple possibilities at
once, and in real-time to the humans’ questions. But it’s not just a one-way
conversation: the human can then respond to the AI’s answers, by asking deeper
questions, picking and combining answers, and guiding the AI using human
intuition."

Example:

"In 2016, Zhu et al created a painting tool where you draw in the rough
outlines, and an AI photo-realistically fills in the gaps. The human and the
AI have an artistic conversation through pictures. The human can draw some
green lines on the bottom, and the AI replies with several possible photo-
realistic grassy fields to choose from. Then, the human can draw a black
triangle above that, and the AI replies with several pictures of a mountain
behind a grassy field. Through this push and pull between human & machine, art
is made."

------
catern
Unfortunately for the article's point, despite a brief moment of viability,
even human+computer chess teams are now far outclassed by computers alone.

~~~
falcolas
IIRC, that's because computers finally became capable of achieving 100% depth
inspection of the possibilities; of finding the answer to the game itself. If
you can answer the game, you don't need humans to lead your seeking of a
partial answer to the game.

For games like Go, where computers are not yet capable of viewing the full
depth of the possibility tree, I imagine that human+computer is still a viable
strategy.

~~~
ggggtez
You aren't following AI research, clearly.

The top Go player in the world retired saying that he thought he was almost
perfect, but then a "superior being" showed him he wasn't even close. I doubt
there is a human on the planet that can improve the strength of the best AI at
Go.

Perfect solutions to games is a 40 year old approach. It's something you learn
in school, so you can quickly see that brute-force searching is not feasible
on even small problem.

~~~
bradknowles
MCTS isn't doing full width search. Not by a longshot.

What it's doing is using the computer's ability to randomly test various lines
of inquiry many, many times faster than a human being can, and then use
statistical methods to help rule out the lines that cannot produce anything of
value.

That's why it's Monte Carlo Tree Search.

That said, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from
magic [0], and with modern Machine Learning techniques we are getting closer
to crossing the line over to "magic" in certain fields, such as Chess.

[0] Clarke's Third Law, see
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws)

~~~
panopticon
I don't think they were arguing about search breadth. I think they were
arguing that Go AI was already formidable in spite of GP's odd claim that
search breadth/depth is the reason why. Chess AI like AlphaZero aren't even
close to 100% search breadth/depth but achieve startling superiority.

------
Animats
_" We hoped for a bicycle for the mind; we got a Laz-y-Boy recliner for the
mind."_

Best line I've heard this month.

------
egypturnash
Shit, I've been calling myself a "cyborg artist" for like a decade; no need
for artificial intelligence when I can just learn how to tell Adobe
Illustrator how to do the repetitive parts of my work and concentrate on the
fun parts.

~~~
lastres0rt
Oh, good, I KNEW this was the article to read today!

It felt amazing the day I started wearing a Pebble watch and my friend got his
Google Glass -- by that evening we were no longer just two people walking
along the streets of San Francisco.

He was there, tapping on the device around his head, taking pictures and
posting them into our friends' Google Hangout without even having to pause and
pull out a phone. A quick buzz later, I glanced down at my wrist and told him
which of our friends had responded in the room and relayed the message, and
within seconds we were doubled over in laughter.

What previously required opening up a laptop, or at least a phone, in order to
take a picture, select that picture, send that picture, and wait for a
response, and we were now able to have that entire loop of feedback in under a
minute, without becoming distracted by the rest of the device.

It was the first time I felt like a cyborg, and one of those moments I've been
trying to recreate since.

------
cm2012
Most online advertising professionals are centaurs.

Take FB ads. The best way to use it is to take full advantage of FB's AI - set
a digital conversion event, and tell it to optimize for it. It will then
paperclip optimize towards that.

The marketers job is to give the right conversion event + creative for the fb
algorithm to do its job best.

------
awinter-py
brick + pencil is not a bad metaphor for a screen keyboard

~~~
someguyorother
So why do people use screen keyboards at all? It's such a frustrating
experience! You'd think they'd carry laptops around everywhere instead, and
yet they don't.

~~~
zipwitch
No good alternatives. For years, I had smartphones with slider keyboards. Now,
I carry a foldable bluetooth keyboard in my bag. Onscreen keyboards are for
emergencies only. But a lot of people view lugging the keyboard as
unacceptable.

