
AI and the Future of Civilization - benbreen
https://www.edge.org/conversation/stephen_wolfram-ai-the-future-of-civilization
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daveguy
Need to include the subtitle: "A Conversation With Stephen Wolfram"

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zanek
That was a huge wall of text by Steve Wolfram, but very little substance.

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mirimir
tl;dr?

My eyes glazed :(

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studentrob
That's enough of one for me, thanks! ;)

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linhchi
I have this feeling about edge.org that they manage to invite remarkable
people to have incredibly shallow content that is full of buzzword (maybe this
is what happens if you try to pull off profound things for public). Just an
experience.

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hacker_9
_" The realization from that is that the thing I've spent a large part of my
life doing, which is building computer languages, is not such a bad idea. In a
computer language, you do get to represent more sophisticated concepts in a
clean way, which can be progressively built up in a way that isn't possible in
natural language.

One of the things that I'm interested in is how we communicate goals to AIs.
How do we talk to the AIs? My basic conclusion is that it's a mixture. Human
natural language is good up to a point, and has evolved to describe what we
typically encounter in the world. Things that exist from nature, things that
we've chosen to build in the world—these are things which human natural
language has evolved to describe. But there's a lot that exists out there in
the world for which human natural language doesn't have descriptions yet. Even
though our AI systems might effectively find those descriptions, we don't have
ways to say those ourselves."_

I really try to understand Wolfram's point of view but always end up
completely disagreeing with him. He is so blatantly biased to wanting everyone
to use his baby Mathematica that his reasoning doesn't make any sense. My
arguments:

1\. For starters, ZERO programming languages can represent a concept in a more
sophisticated way than natural language, simply because we don't encode
understanding in code: where a computer sees a loop condition, followed by an
if and a return statement, we see the real meaning 'check if this item is in
the list'. The meaning is so much more useful _because it tells us the WHAT
not the HOW_. By know the _what_ , we can understand what is trying to be
accomplished, and so be able to predict behaviour, see logic errors the
compiler can't see, make modifications to add other features, change the
entire algorithm if the data structures change (use hashtable perhaps) and so
on. The fact that Wolfram doesn't grasp this point, makes me seriously
consider he doesn't have a clue what he's talking about.

2\. The next most important thing about natural language is it _is not
sequential, like code._ There is no structure for one precise all-important
reason; you do not know what you are talking about! How many times have you
had a conversation with someone, for them to then tell you that you are wrong,
or perhaps add modifications to what you just said? Natural language
facilitates a way for multiple nodes (humans) on a network (social groups) to
share information that is not fully correct, and is expressed in such a way
that another node on the network can pick it up, and express modifications,
resulting in a final timeline that the group can agree on. Algorithms written
in code on the other hand are BRITTLE, and expected to be correct every step
of the way. The fact that no programming language can agree on a single way to
handle exceptions/errors in production systems is simply a byproduct of them
being unable to adapt like natural languages can. It really shows off the
incredible power of our natural languages, and I hope I'm alive to see the day
we crack natural language understanding!

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sz4kerto
Ah, I hoped it's about the game.

