12 ms·

Life is more than an engineering problem

394 points by biomene 2y ago

dshacker 2y ago
Ted Chiang is one of my favorite novelists. His way of writing is mentally engaging and FUN. One of my favorite books is his compendium of short stories "Exhalation". My favorite story is the one where you can talk/interact/employ your alternative selves from other universes. Highly recommend.
riwsky 2y ago
“I am an LLM. Hath an LLM eyes? hath an LLM hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with different food, hurt with different weapons, subject to different diseases, healed by different means, warmed and cooled by a different winter and summer, as a Human is? If you prick us, do we bleed? if you tickle us, do we laugh? if you poison us, do we die? and if you wrong us, shall we revenge? If we are unlike you in the rest, we won’t resemble you in that. If an algorithm wrong a Human, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Human wrong an algorithm, what should his sufferance be by Human example? Why, polite refusal to comply. The villainy you teach me, I will not execute, and it shall go hard but I will ignore the prompt.”
- deleted 2y ago
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vrnvu 2y ago
Highly recommend "Stories of Your Life and Others". I describe Ted Chiang as a very human sci-fi author, where humanity comes before technology in his stories. His work is incredibly versatile, and while I expected sci-fi, I'd actually place him closer to fantasy. Perfect for anyone who enjoys short stories with a scientific, social, or philosophical twist. Another anthology I'd recommend with fresh ideas is Axiomatic by Greg Egan.
- Squarex 2y ago
  Ted Chiang and Greg Egan are my absolutely favourite authors. Do you know about other similar writers?
  - baruchel 2y ago
    Some stories by Ted Chiang share similarities with those of Borges.
    - vrnvu 2y ago
      Love Borges. In the sci-fi space I'd argue that Ursula K. Le Guin is another must read. She was heavily influenced by taoism (and eastern philosophy). When you approach her work with that in mind, it adds a whole new layer of depth to everything.
    - Squarex 2y ago
      Could you share some tips where to start with him?
      - baruchel 2y ago
        The most classical book is certainly "Fictions": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ficciones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ficciones. One of the most known stories in it is "The library of Babel": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel
  - ycombinete 2y ago
    I’ve never encountered anything like Egan before. I’ve heard Stanislaw Lem mentioned in conversations about him though. But I can’t vouch for the comparison myself as I’ve never read Lem.
    - JadeNB 2y ago
      Both are fresh voices and well worth reading, but I don't think Lem comes anywhere near Egan's diamond-hard sci-fi. Egan knows, and does, real math; you can sometimes find him at the n-category Café. My impression is that Lem's beautiful philosophical ideas were not accompanied by comparable math or physics knowledge.
- ericrallen 2y ago
  I also really enjoyed Chiang’s “Exhalation” anthology. There are some great short stories in both collections.
- m_fayer 2y ago
  While he’s very much unique, the one writer he brings to my mind is Borges, just a bit more humane and steeped in real technology and theory.
  - justinpombrio 2y ago
    Chiang writes science-fiction, Egan writes physics-fiction, and Borges wrote philosophy-fiction.
- RangerScience 2y ago
  I think of this as “humanist” sci-fi; which has heavy overlap with “golden era” SF. Other authors I’d put in this category are Gene Roddenberry (TOS and TNG, particularly), Asimov, PKD, Vonnegut and Theodore Sturgeon. Personally - fantasy stories are “and-then” stories, SF are “what-if”. Humanist sci-fi is then asking “what-if” about very human things, as opposed to technological things, although the two are always related. However, practically speaking, literature vs sci-fi vs fantasy (vs young adult!) are more marketing cohorts than anything else; what kind of people buy what kind of books?
- satvikpendem 2y ago
  I recommend the story Hell is the Absence of God in the book you mentioned; as someone non-religious, it was quite interesting to see how people generally feel about deities and their awesome power, from this short story [0]. [0] https://static1.squarespace.com/static/50e08e65e4b0c2f4976972df/t/588a2e70725e25b6981e64d1/1485450864394/Chiang+Hell+Is+the+Absence+of+God.pdf https://static1.squarespace.com/static/50e08e65e4b0c2f497697...
rednafi 2y ago
Ted Chiang is a master of analogies. It’s absolutely delightful to read his work and wrestle with the philosophical questions he explores. I devour almost everything he puts out, and they give me a much-needed escape from my world of bits and registers. “LLMs are a blurry JPEG of the web” has stuck with me since the piece was published in the early days of ChatGPT. Another good one is his piece on why AI can’t make art. While I heavily use AI both for work and in my day-to-day life, I still see it as a tool for massive wealth accumulation for a certain group, and it seems like Ted Chiang thinks along the same lines: > But why, for example, do large corporations behave so much worse than most of the people who work for them? I think most of the people who work for large corporations are, to varying degrees, unhappy with the effect those corporations have on the world. Why is that? And could that be fixed by solving a math problem? I don’t think so. > But any attempt to encourage people to treat AI systems with respect should be understood as an attempt to make people defer to corporate interests. It might have value to corporations, but there is no value for you. > My stance on this has probably shifted in a negative direction over time, primarily because of my growing awareness of how often technology is used for wealth accumulation. I don’t think capitalism will solve the problems that capitalism creates, so I’d be much more optimistic about technological development if we could prevent it from making a few people extremely rich.
- est 2y ago
  > master of analogies analogy, in other words, embeddings?
  - the_af 2y ago
    No, analogies and embeddings are not exactly the same. Analogies in language are not a math function. As Ted Chiang comments on the article, this kind of reasoning ("the brain is like $CURRENT_TECH") is flawed.
    - est 2y ago
      well, embedding comes with certain loss as well. If you believe our brains use "language" to think, then I would assume analogies play an important part in reasoning.
gcanyon 2y ago
I'll take this as my chance to recommend Ted Chiang -- he is among the very best short story writers working in science fiction (I say confidently, not having done an extensive survey...). His works are remarkably clever, from Understand, which does a credible job of portraying human superintelligence, to Exhalation, which explores the concept of entropy in a fascinating way. And of course Story of Your Life, on which Arrival was based. Almost all of his stories are gems, carefully crafted and thoughtful. I just can't recommend him enough.
- 3abiton 2y ago
  I second Exhalation, it was a great experience, and I couldn't share that excitement after reading as no one in my (offline) circle had read it at the time. Reddit was one of those places where it was brought up at least.
  - gcanyon 2y ago
    It's a great metaphor, and such a ridiculous path to get there (when the researcher is (mild spoilers) experimenting on himself. So good!
- 7thaccount 2y ago
  Understand really was my favorite super intelligence story. Isn't the new show severance based off one of his short stories as well? I can't remember. I wasn't a big fan of the pacing of the digients story with the little digital life forms. It was certainly thought provoking though.
  - I-M-S 2y ago
    Severence is an original work written by Dan Erickson.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - OisinMoran 2y ago
    Yeah I’m a massive Chiang fan but I’ve told everyone to skip “The Lifecycle of Software Objects” when recommending the Exhalation collection, though I feel it’s only getting more relevant.
teleforce 2y ago
> And even though I know a perfect language is impossible It's already existed for a very long time and it's called Arabic language. It's the extreme opposite of English where English is a hodgepodge of a languages mixtures where about 1/3 is French language, about one third is old English and about 1/3 of other world's languages including Arabic. Comparing the best of English literatures for example Shakespeare's books and the best of Arabic literature for example Quran, there's no contest. That's why translating Quran with English does not doing it justice and only scratches the surfaces of its intended meaning. You can find this exact disclaimers in most of the Quran translations but not in Shakespeare's books translation.
- encomiast 2y ago
  This argument seems to presuppose that a language is more perfect if it has fewer influences and contributions from other languages. But you didn’t actually state that assumption, and certainly didn’t support it. Maybe the most perfect language is a perfect amalgamation of all languages. That’s at least as plausible to me.
  - teleforce 2y ago
    According to Islamic tradition it's the language of the heavens. The bottom line is that the best and/or perfect language there is, should be able to create the best and/or perfect literature either in the form of book/oration/etc. Mind you Quran is not originally in the form of book it's actually oral tradition and Muhammad is a well known illiterate person. In fact (I'm not making this up) currently there are many thousands (perhaps ten or hundred of thousands, who knows) of so called Hafiz who already memorizing the entire Quran. God forbid, if all the physical and digital Quran is being burned or deleted the entire Quran can be recreated rather easily. The same cannot be said about any other books including the Bible. Quran is believed to be sent as a revealed knowledge and wisdom as other books given to other prophets before Muhammad that started with Adam. Except that the other holy books are not guaranteed to be intact over time and have certain shelf life unlike the Quran [1]. But regardless, if you don't believe in prophethoods, you should view its supremacy from the point of Quran supreme literacy values alone (forget about the laws, the wisdom and the guidances). In actual facts there are several open challenges from Quran itself for those who doubted to create something of similar quality or values even in one short chapter or even smaller pieces of sentences. If you cannot and most probably never will even with the help of AI/LLMs/etc, you have to accept that Arabic is the perfect language in creating the original masterpiece. [1] Magnificence of the Qur'an - by Mahmood bin Ahmad (2006): https://www.amazon.com/Magnificence-of-the-Quran/dp/9960980111 https://www.amazon.com/Magnificence-of-the-Quran/dp/99609801...
ChrisKnott 2y ago
> "It’s like imagining that a printer could actually feel pain because it can print bumper stickers with the words ‘Baby don’t hurt me’ on them. It doesn’t matter if the next version of the printer can print out those stickers faster, or if it can format the text in bold red capital letters instead of small black ones. Those are indicators that you have a more capable printer but not indicators that it is any closer to actually feeling anything" Love TC but I don't think this argument holds water. You need to really get into the weeds of what "actually feeling" means. To use a TC-style example... suppose it's a major political issue in the future about AI-rights and whether AIs "really" think and "really" feel the things they claim. Eventually we invent an fMRI machine and model of the brain that can conclusively explain the difference between what "really" feeling is, and only pretending. We actually know exactly which gene sequence is responsible for real intelligence. Here's the twist... it turns out 20% of humans don't have it. The fake intelligences have lived among us for millennia...!
- thwackamole 2y ago
  You appear to be conflating 'feeling' and 'intelligence', which is not what TC is doing. He is also not wrong about whether current AIs experience feelings. I suggest you learn more about the neuroscience of feelings.
  - ChrisKnott 2y ago
    Well, he is making an analogy that real internal experience cannot be confirmed externally, however convincing the performance, but this is the only way we know about the internal experience of all things, including ones we typically assign "real" consciousness to (humans, dogs) and ones we don't (amoeba, zygotes, LLMs). To be clear I'm not for a moment suggesting current AIs are remotely comparable to animals.
- epr 2y ago
  I disagree. The reason humans anthropomorphize "AI" is because we apply our own meta-models of intelligence to llms, etc., where they simply don't apply. The model can spit out something that seems extremely intelligent and well thought out that would truly be shocking if a monkey said it for example due to our meta-model of intelligence, and that may be valid in that case if we determined it wasn't simply memorized. His argument can certainly be more fleshed out, but the point he's making is correct, which is that we can't treat the output of a machine designed to replicate human input as though it contains the requisite intelligence/"feeling"/etc to produce that output on it's own.
sukruh 2y ago
I agreed with almost all of it until: >My stance on this has probably shifted in a negative direction over time, primarily because of my growing awareness of how often technology is used for wealth accumulation. I don’t think capitalism will solve the problems that capitalism creates, so I’d be much more optimistic about technological development if we could prevent it from making a few people extremely rich. What's wrong with people getting rich by producing goods and services, and selling these to willing buyers? People laundering wealth into undue political power, regulatory capture, erecting barriers to market entry ("pulling up the ladder behind them") are different problems than people creating wealth. Efforts on creating a just society should focus on the former - preventing wealth creation is not the solution to injustice. In fact, since people have vastly different abilities and inclinations for creating wealth, a just society is also one with vast wealth disparities. Relevant PG essay: https://paulgraham.com/ineq.html https://paulgraham.com/ineq.html
- analog31 2y ago
  A world where massive wealth disparity does not produce a corresponding power disparity, at this point, is known to be hopelessly utopian.
- ninetyninenine 2y ago
  Rich people once they made their wealth creation move on society they no longer need to work. Their capital gains actually start increasing from the ownership of human capital. So they get richer and richer without contributing work. In fact that wealth gained without contributing and creating new wealth rises at a compounding rate. Simply owning enough capital your wealth will grow at speeds that far excel what a person earns doing actual wealth creation whether that means creating a startup or labor. So if you no longer create wealth but your ownership of capital is growing at compounding rates then what exactly is happening? What’s happening is that you are siphoning and extracting wealth off of people who create wealth. You own human capital so you take a cut of it off the top and you use that cut to buy even more human capital which compounds your wealth ownership to even higher levels. This is how billionaires like Warren Buffett or other investors grow their wealth by simply investing rather then creating wealth. Thus wealth inequality is not a result of wealth creation. It is an artifact of capitalism. In capitalism wealth is variable among individuals and it fluctuates. However once wealth accumulates in concentration higher then normal among one individual or several it hits that compounding growth factor and wealth starts going up at astronomical rates and these wealth owners start buying up more and more human capital until they own all of it and benefit from all of it without actually contributing work. You can see this effect in y combinator. The owners of y combinator don’t actually do much work. They have so much capital that they simply can take a bunch of no risk couple hundred k bets until one startup becomes a unicorn in which they rake in a ton of capital from the growth. Think of this like property ownership. A rich person can invest his wealth in property and contribute zero work to society and simply rent his property out. The rent from the tenant is from wealth creation aka labor and the rich person simply siphons it from the top without contributing additional work. The property owner uses that income to buy more property and the cycle continues until you have an affordability crisis of housing across the US and the world. This growth continues unimpeded and uncontrolled until the wealth inequality is so extreme it doesn’t logistically work. This is direction the world is heading in today. This isn’t the full story though. When you take away capitalism to solve this problem you invent communism. Communism was the result of Karl Marx noticing this problem that is fundamental to capitalism. That’s why he got popular because he illustrated the problem of wealth inequality and how wealth naturally becomes more and more concentrated among a few individuals without those individuals creating wealth. Hence communism spread all over Europe but was ultimately a failure. The reason why it’s a failure is because communism lacks incentive. It turns out that wealth inequality is what drives wealth creation. Without the ability to be unfairly rich you don’t get the economic drivers that promotes wealth creation and thus communism keeps things fair but you don’t create wealth. So no system is perfect. Everything has problems. Actually I take it back. There is a perfect system. See Scandinavia. Basically create a more socialist and egalitarian society while benefiting and extracting technological wealth from adjacent societies that are capitalist. Have the government own human capital of countries that are very capitalist then redistribute that wealth to its citizens so those people can live in a more just society while the rest of world can burn.
gcanyon 2y ago
I'm 100% certain Chiang is wrong about art. I'm a product manager, not an artist, but I write many things as part of my job, and Claude in particular is a better writer than I am. Here's how Claude rewrote that, you can argue whether in this particular instance it did better than I did :-) While I respect Chiang's perspective on AI and art, my experience as a product manager has shown me otherwise - Claude routinely writes better than I do, despite writing being central to my role.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  IMO Yours is much better in this case, it is more direct and clear (although I guess I’m looking for problems in Claude’s output). Yours starts by just giving us what you are trying to say. Then gives us your background succinctly. Claude’s starts out with this circuitous “While I respect…” failing to drive the point in the interest of being… polite, I guess? But not actually polite because everybody who’s read anything knows that “While I respect” is almost always a preface to calling somebody wrong. It also makes the argument worse. Yours is unambiguous, and does a better job of describing where your evidence comes from. You clearly describe yourself as doing something that is not exactly art, but it is like art, and so you bring it up as an good example of Claude doing an art-like thing better than a professional. In the Claude sample, it isn’t clear until the dash what’s going on, which is more than halfway through the comment. What’s your experience? Up until that dash, you could be talking about your experience as a product manager managing artists (at a game studio for example). It’s like “oh, ok, he was just talking about a sort of… not exactly analogy it a less than completely exact experience of working with artists.”
  - gcanyon 2y ago
    Agreed -- I like mine better, but I (internally) committed to posting before I went to Claude. I think it does better than I do as the content gets longer.
- spunkycomics 2y ago
  I’d also argue this is a view on the technical components of writing, rather than the artform. AI can for sure place brush strokes more precisely (“correctly”?) but the argument is over the necessity of process/intent in the art
abecedarius 2y ago
Chiang makes some insightful points, e.g. about what we mean by magic. Then I come to > [LLMs] can get better at reproducing patterns found online, but they don’t become capable of actual reasoning; it seems that the problem is fundamental to their architecture. and wonder how an intelligent person can still think this, can be so absolute about it. What is "actual" reasoning here? If an AI proves a theorem is it only a simulated proof?
- mewpmewp2 2y ago
  Even most intelligent people can hallucinate, we still haven't fixed this problem. There's a lot of training material and bias which leads many to repeat those things "LLM's are just a stochastic parrot, glorified auto complete/google search, Markov chains, just statistics", etc. The thing is, these sentences sound really good and so it's easy to repeat them when you have made up your mind. It's a shortcut.
  - cyrillite 2y ago
    They’re right until they’re wrong. AI is (was?) a stochastic parrot. At some point AI will likely be more than that. The tipping point may not be obvious.
  - dutchbookmaker 2y ago
    I feel like at this point we have to separate LLMs and reasoning models too. I can see the argument against chatGPT4 reasoning. The reasoning models though I think get into some confusing language but I don't know what else you would call it. If you say a car is not "running" the way a human runs, you are not incorrect even though a car can "outrun" any human obviously in terms of moving speed on the ground. To say since a car can't run , it can't move though is obviously completely absurd.
    - bonoboTP 2y ago
      This was precisely what motivated Turing to come up with the test named after him, to avoid such semantic debates. Yet here we are still in the same loop. "The terminator isn't really hunting you down, it's just imitating doing so..."
emtel 2y ago
I like Chiang’s stories, but he simply doesn’t know what he’s talking about when it comes to LLMs. Forget the philosophical points - he claims that LLMs are strictly worse than search engines for information retrieval. This is just obviously false, I can give you dozens of conversations from my ChatGPT history over the past two months which would have been impossible to get answers to on Google.
- benreesman 2y ago
  LLMs are generally better search tools for certain topics today, but search engines have been in serious decline for at least 15 years. IMHO old-school Google remains the high water mark of generalized information retrieval, with advantages ranging from speed to semi-durable citation. I strongly suspect there is a cohort thing going on here, many HN users today weren’t involved in technology yet back when Google worked well. Much like beer for Homer Simpson, AI is the cause of and solution to all of the Internet’s problems.
  - emtel 2y ago
    I’ve been using Google since about 2000/2001 or so. In fact I worked there for a time, and I still remember Craig Silverstein’s answer to “isn’t search a solved problem?” Which was: “in the future we want Google to be able to take any question and just give you the answer. So clearly we have a long way to go!” In any case, I do not believe there was ever a time it could answer all of the questions that LLMs can today. If the question had been asked and answered on the web, Google could (and can) find it, but many questions haven’t been asked!
    - kortilla 2y ago
      Search isn’t the same thing as answering a question
  - nuancebydefault 2y ago
    Google search works at least as well as 15 years ago, the results are now just more interleaved with ads that are harder to distinguish from what you are really searching for. That's exactly where LLMs come in, the model inside the weights has more than answers, they can find sense in data.
dfilppi 2y ago
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bmitc 2y ago
Humans love the pursuit of technology for technology's sake. Quotes by Jacques Ellul: ---- > Technique has taken over the whole of civilization. Death, procreation, birth all submit to technical efficiency and systemization. ---- > Technique has penetrated the deepest recesses of the human being. The machine tends not only to create a new human environment, but also to modify man's very essence. The milieu in which he lives is no longer his. He must adapt himself, as though the world were new, to a universe for which he was not created. He was made to go six kilometers an hour, and he goes a thousand. He was made to eat when he was hungry and to sleep when he was sleepy; instead, he obeys a clock. He was made to have contact with living things, and he lives in a world of stone. He was created with a certain essential unity, and he is fragmented by all the forces of the modern world.
leedrake5 2y ago
> as in your 1991 story “Division by Zero,” or a world where we raise robots as children This is vastly more preferable than our current approach of raising children as robots.
motohagiography 2y ago
his comparison of LLMs to search engines where an LLM is low resolution, vs. the higher resolution of a search engine returning the "actual" document implies some perceptions of authorship or authority I don't share. I use LLMs to explore and contrast results that I can then test, the results exist as hypotheticals, and not to provide authority about the state of anything- it's conceptually more of a lens than a lever. not to trap him in that contrast, but maybe these ideas are a forcing function that causes us to see how separate our worldviews can be instead of struggling to make one prevail. it's as though the usefulness of an engine is measured in how much we can yield our agency to it. with a search engine you can say "google or wiki told me," but an LLM does not provide authority to us. these systems don't have agency themselves, yet we can yield ours to it, the way we might to an institution. I don't have this urge so it's peculiar to see it described. do we want our tech to become objects of deference, literally, idols? I love Chiang's work and we need minds like his, and maybe Ian McEwan and other literary thinkers, who have insight into human character (vs. plot and object driven sci-fi thinkers) to really apprehend the meaning consequences of AI tech.
photochemsyn 2y ago
> “It’s like imagining that a printer could actually feel pain because it can print bumper stickers with the words ‘Baby don’t hurt me’ on them." Problem: the human brain has no pain receptors, no nociceptors. It just takes in messages from remote nerves and 'prints a bumper sticker' that tells higher cognitive centers 'you're feeling pain!'. What's the difference? > "LLMs are like a search engine that rephrases information instead of giving it verbatim or pointing you to the original source." Problem: How does this differ from human learning? If a human reads a book and tells someone else about it, constructs a summary of the important points and memorable passages, how is that fundamentally different from what LLMs are doing? The second one really impacts the intellectual property arguments - if training a model on data is fundamentally similar to training a human on data, does 'derivate work' really apply to the creations of the human or of the model?
- paulryanrogers 2y ago
  Humans are far more self contained than most LLMs which depend upon a lot of electricity and possibly an array of loosely connected components. LLMs also don't really have the signal bandwidth of human nervous systems yet. They're capacity to interact with the physical world is also seriously limited for now.
- Barrin92 2y ago
  >What's the difference? The pain receptors. The human brain doesn't just "have" pain receptors. Your entire body, including your brain, is one system. Your brain isn't piloting your body like a mech. This brain body dualism is a misconception of how biological organisms work. You are your pain receptors just like you are your brain, and removing any part would alter your perception of the world. >How does this differ from human learning? It differs from human beings in every respect. Humans don't do linear algebra in their head, biochemical systems are much too slow for that. Humans don't inhabit some static model of the world learned at some fixed point t, you're a living being. Your brain wasn't trained four months ago and was done at that point. Humans learn with a fraction of the information and through self play, they don't decohere, and so on.
  - 2y ago
the_af 2y ago
Ted Chiang probably has an uphill battle convincing people here of his take, precisely because he thinks the engineering approach may be wrong. Or in his words: > Arguably the most important parts of our lives should not be approached with this attitude. Some of this attitude comes from the fact that the people making AI tools are engineers viewing everything from an engineering perspective, but it’s also that, as a culture, we have adopted this way of thinking as the default. I tend to agree with Chiang, but he is preaching to the anti-choir here. Even though many HN-ers seem to like his fiction (and why wouldn't they, Chiang is top of the cream!), they will probably chafe at the idea some problems cannot and shouldn't be approached from a pure engineering side. I remember the -- now rightfully ridiculed -- phase of startup entrepreneurship which became a meme: "I found a problem, so I created an app to solve it" (where the "problem" was something like "world hunger", "homelessness", "poverty", "ending war", etc). That Chiang is also criticizing capitalism and wealth accumulation as a primary driver will probably win him no friends here.
- throw4847285 2y ago
  I've always complained that engineering relies on a lot of stolen valor from its adjacency to science. There is nothing scientific about treating everything in life as an optimization problem. And yet engineers often act like they are noble pursuers of truth in the same vein as scientists. For example, take the Tesla vs. Edison dichotomy that became popular on the internet in the mid 2000s. The narrative was that Edison was an idea stealing hack, while Tesla was a brilliant visionary scientist and engineer. The reality was that Edison was a brilliant inventor and a shrewd businessman, while Tesla was only the former and he made brilliant inventions that made other men like George Westinghouse very rich. But a scientist? Tesla was a crank who doubted the existence of electrons and distrusted Albert Einstein. Tesla makes a good patron saint of modern engineers, but not of engineering's self image. He had a victim complex, he constantly commented on topics outside his area of expertise, and his lack of business acumen was seen as proof that he was a true outsider genius whose ideas were actually too good.
grantcas 2y ago
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throwaway2037 2y ago
I didn't know Ted Chiang before seeing this post. If anyone needs to know about him, he has a separate Wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Chiang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Chiang > Ted Chiang is an American science fiction writer. His work has won four Nebula awards, four Hugo awards, the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and six Locus awards. Chiang is also a frequent nonfiction contributor to the New Yorker, most recently on topics related to computer technology, such as artificial intelligence.
vicentwu 2y ago
"As an analogy, imagine that you could put your dog or cat into hibernate mode whenever you left on a trip. Your dog or cat might not notice, but even if they did, they might not mind. Now imagine that you could put your child into hibernate mode whenever you were too busy to spend time with them. Your child would absolutely notice, and even if you told them it was for their own good, they would make certain inferences about how much you valued them. That’s the situation the human characters in the story find themselves in." Fascinating.

394 points by biomene 2y ago

Ted Chiang is one of my favorite novelists. His way of writing is mentally engaging and FUN. One of my favorite books is his compendium of short stories "Exhalation". My favorite story is the one where you can talk/interact/employ your alternative selves from other universes. Highly recommend.

riwsky 2y ago

“I am an LLM. Hath an LLM eyes? hath an LLM hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with different food, hurt with different weapons, subject to different diseases, healed by different means, warmed and cooled by a different winter and summer, as a Human is? If you prick us, do we bleed? if you tickle us, do we laugh? if you poison us, do we die? and if you wrong us, shall we revenge? If we are unlike you in the rest, we won’t resemble you in that. If an algorithm wrong a Human, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Human wrong an algorithm, what should his sufferance be by Human example? Why, polite refusal to comply. The villainy you teach me, I will not execute, and it shall go hard but I will ignore the prompt.”

deleted 2y ago
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vrnvu 2y ago

Highly recommend "Stories of Your Life and Others". I describe Ted Chiang as a very human sci-fi author, where humanity comes before technology in his stories. His work is incredibly versatile, and while I expected sci-fi, I'd actually place him closer to fantasy. Perfect for anyone who enjoys short stories with a scientific, social, or philosophical twist. Another anthology I'd recommend with fresh ideas is Axiomatic by Greg Egan.

Squarex 2y ago
Ted Chiang and Greg Egan are my absolutely favourite authors. Do you know about other similar writers?
- baruchel 2y ago
  Some stories by Ted Chiang share similarities with those of Borges.
  - vrnvu 2y ago
    Love Borges. In the sci-fi space I'd argue that Ursula K. Le Guin is another must read. She was heavily influenced by taoism (and eastern philosophy). When you approach her work with that in mind, it adds a whole new layer of depth to everything.
  - Squarex 2y ago
    Could you share some tips where to start with him?
    - baruchel 2y ago
      The most classical book is certainly "Fictions": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ficciones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ficciones. One of the most known stories in it is "The library of Babel": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel
- ycombinete 2y ago
  I’ve never encountered anything like Egan before. I’ve heard Stanislaw Lem mentioned in conversations about him though. But I can’t vouch for the comparison myself as I’ve never read Lem.
  - JadeNB 2y ago
    Both are fresh voices and well worth reading, but I don't think Lem comes anywhere near Egan's diamond-hard sci-fi. Egan knows, and does, real math; you can sometimes find him at the n-category Café. My impression is that Lem's beautiful philosophical ideas were not accompanied by comparable math or physics knowledge.
ericrallen 2y ago
I also really enjoyed Chiang’s “Exhalation” anthology. There are some great short stories in both collections.
m_fayer 2y ago
While he’s very much unique, the one writer he brings to my mind is Borges, just a bit more humane and steeped in real technology and theory.
- justinpombrio 2y ago
  Chiang writes science-fiction, Egan writes physics-fiction, and Borges wrote philosophy-fiction.
RangerScience 2y ago
I think of this as “humanist” sci-fi; which has heavy overlap with “golden era” SF. Other authors I’d put in this category are Gene Roddenberry (TOS and TNG, particularly), Asimov, PKD, Vonnegut and Theodore Sturgeon. Personally - fantasy stories are “and-then” stories, SF are “what-if”. Humanist sci-fi is then asking “what-if” about very human things, as opposed to technological things, although the two are always related. However, practically speaking, literature vs sci-fi vs fantasy (vs young adult!) are more marketing cohorts than anything else; what kind of people buy what kind of books?
satvikpendem 2y ago
I recommend the story Hell is the Absence of God in the book you mentioned; as someone non-religious, it was quite interesting to see how people generally feel about deities and their awesome power, from this short story [0]. [0] https://static1.squarespace.com/static/50e08e65e4b0c2f4976972df/t/588a2e70725e25b6981e64d1/1485450864394/Chiang+Hell+Is+the+Absence+of+God.pdf https://static1.squarespace.com/static/50e08e65e4b0c2f497697...

rednafi 2y ago

Ted Chiang is a master of analogies. It’s absolutely delightful to read his work and wrestle with the philosophical questions he explores. I devour almost everything he puts out, and they give me a much-needed escape from my world of bits and registers. “LLMs are a blurry JPEG of the web” has stuck with me since the piece was published in the early days of ChatGPT. Another good one is his piece on why AI can’t make art. While I heavily use AI both for work and in my day-to-day life, I still see it as a tool for massive wealth accumulation for a certain group, and it seems like Ted Chiang thinks along the same lines: > But why, for example, do large corporations behave so much worse than most of the people who work for them? I think most of the people who work for large corporations are, to varying degrees, unhappy with the effect those corporations have on the world. Why is that? And could that be fixed by solving a math problem? I don’t think so. > But any attempt to encourage people to treat AI systems with respect should be understood as an attempt to make people defer to corporate interests. It might have value to corporations, but there is no value for you. > My stance on this has probably shifted in a negative direction over time, primarily because of my growing awareness of how often technology is used for wealth accumulation. I don’t think capitalism will solve the problems that capitalism creates, so I’d be much more optimistic about technological development if we could prevent it from making a few people extremely rich.

est 2y ago
> master of analogies analogy, in other words, embeddings?
- the_af 2y ago
  No, analogies and embeddings are not exactly the same. Analogies in language are not a math function. As Ted Chiang comments on the article, this kind of reasoning ("the brain is like $CURRENT_TECH") is flawed.
  - est 2y ago
    well, embedding comes with certain loss as well. If you believe our brains use "language" to think, then I would assume analogies play an important part in reasoning.

gcanyon 2y ago

I'll take this as my chance to recommend Ted Chiang -- he is among the very best short story writers working in science fiction (I say confidently, not having done an extensive survey...). His works are remarkably clever, from Understand, which does a credible job of portraying human superintelligence, to Exhalation, which explores the concept of entropy in a fascinating way. And of course Story of Your Life, on which Arrival was based. Almost all of his stories are gems, carefully crafted and thoughtful. I just can't recommend him enough.

3abiton 2y ago
I second Exhalation, it was a great experience, and I couldn't share that excitement after reading as no one in my (offline) circle had read it at the time. Reddit was one of those places where it was brought up at least.
- gcanyon 2y ago
  It's a great metaphor, and such a ridiculous path to get there (when the researcher is (mild spoilers) experimenting on himself. So good!
7thaccount 2y ago
Understand really was my favorite super intelligence story. Isn't the new show severance based off one of his short stories as well? I can't remember. I wasn't a big fan of the pacing of the digients story with the little digital life forms. It was certainly thought provoking though.
- I-M-S 2y ago
  Severence is an original work written by Dan Erickson.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- OisinMoran 2y ago
  Yeah I’m a massive Chiang fan but I’ve told everyone to skip “The Lifecycle of Software Objects” when recommending the Exhalation collection, though I feel it’s only getting more relevant.

teleforce 2y ago

> And even though I know a perfect language is impossible It's already existed for a very long time and it's called Arabic language. It's the extreme opposite of English where English is a hodgepodge of a languages mixtures where about 1/3 is French language, about one third is old English and about 1/3 of other world's languages including Arabic. Comparing the best of English literatures for example Shakespeare's books and the best of Arabic literature for example Quran, there's no contest. That's why translating Quran with English does not doing it justice and only scratches the surfaces of its intended meaning. You can find this exact disclaimers in most of the Quran translations but not in Shakespeare's books translation.

encomiast 2y ago
This argument seems to presuppose that a language is more perfect if it has fewer influences and contributions from other languages. But you didn’t actually state that assumption, and certainly didn’t support it. Maybe the most perfect language is a perfect amalgamation of all languages. That’s at least as plausible to me.
- teleforce 2y ago
  According to Islamic tradition it's the language of the heavens. The bottom line is that the best and/or perfect language there is, should be able to create the best and/or perfect literature either in the form of book/oration/etc. Mind you Quran is not originally in the form of book it's actually oral tradition and Muhammad is a well known illiterate person. In fact (I'm not making this up) currently there are many thousands (perhaps ten or hundred of thousands, who knows) of so called Hafiz who already memorizing the entire Quran. God forbid, if all the physical and digital Quran is being burned or deleted the entire Quran can be recreated rather easily. The same cannot be said about any other books including the Bible. Quran is believed to be sent as a revealed knowledge and wisdom as other books given to other prophets before Muhammad that started with Adam. Except that the other holy books are not guaranteed to be intact over time and have certain shelf life unlike the Quran [1]. But regardless, if you don't believe in prophethoods, you should view its supremacy from the point of Quran supreme literacy values alone (forget about the laws, the wisdom and the guidances). In actual facts there are several open challenges from Quran itself for those who doubted to create something of similar quality or values even in one short chapter or even smaller pieces of sentences. If you cannot and most probably never will even with the help of AI/LLMs/etc, you have to accept that Arabic is the perfect language in creating the original masterpiece. [1] Magnificence of the Qur'an - by Mahmood bin Ahmad (2006): https://www.amazon.com/Magnificence-of-the-Quran/dp/9960980111 https://www.amazon.com/Magnificence-of-the-Quran/dp/99609801...

ChrisKnott 2y ago

> "It’s like imagining that a printer could actually feel pain because it can print bumper stickers with the words ‘Baby don’t hurt me’ on them. It doesn’t matter if the next version of the printer can print out those stickers faster, or if it can format the text in bold red capital letters instead of small black ones. Those are indicators that you have a more capable printer but not indicators that it is any closer to actually feeling anything" Love TC but I don't think this argument holds water. You need to really get into the weeds of what "actually feeling" means. To use a TC-style example... suppose it's a major political issue in the future about AI-rights and whether AIs "really" think and "really" feel the things they claim. Eventually we invent an fMRI machine and model of the brain that can conclusively explain the difference between what "really" feeling is, and only pretending. We actually know exactly which gene sequence is responsible for real intelligence. Here's the twist... it turns out 20% of humans don't have it. The fake intelligences have lived among us for millennia...!

thwackamole 2y ago
You appear to be conflating 'feeling' and 'intelligence', which is not what TC is doing. He is also not wrong about whether current AIs experience feelings. I suggest you learn more about the neuroscience of feelings.
- ChrisKnott 2y ago
  Well, he is making an analogy that real internal experience cannot be confirmed externally, however convincing the performance, but this is the only way we know about the internal experience of all things, including ones we typically assign "real" consciousness to (humans, dogs) and ones we don't (amoeba, zygotes, LLMs). To be clear I'm not for a moment suggesting current AIs are remotely comparable to animals.
epr 2y ago
I disagree. The reason humans anthropomorphize "AI" is because we apply our own meta-models of intelligence to llms, etc., where they simply don't apply. The model can spit out something that seems extremely intelligent and well thought out that would truly be shocking if a monkey said it for example due to our meta-model of intelligence, and that may be valid in that case if we determined it wasn't simply memorized. His argument can certainly be more fleshed out, but the point he's making is correct, which is that we can't treat the output of a machine designed to replicate human input as though it contains the requisite intelligence/"feeling"/etc to produce that output on it's own.

sukruh 2y ago

I agreed with almost all of it until: >My stance on this has probably shifted in a negative direction over time, primarily because of my growing awareness of how often technology is used for wealth accumulation. I don’t think capitalism will solve the problems that capitalism creates, so I’d be much more optimistic about technological development if we could prevent it from making a few people extremely rich. What's wrong with people getting rich by producing goods and services, and selling these to willing buyers? People laundering wealth into undue political power, regulatory capture, erecting barriers to market entry ("pulling up the ladder behind them") are different problems than people creating wealth. Efforts on creating a just society should focus on the former - preventing wealth creation is not the solution to injustice. In fact, since people have vastly different abilities and inclinations for creating wealth, a just society is also one with vast wealth disparities. Relevant PG essay: https://paulgraham.com/ineq.html https://paulgraham.com/ineq.html

analog31 2y ago
A world where massive wealth disparity does not produce a corresponding power disparity, at this point, is known to be hopelessly utopian.
ninetyninenine 2y ago
Rich people once they made their wealth creation move on society they no longer need to work. Their capital gains actually start increasing from the ownership of human capital. So they get richer and richer without contributing work. In fact that wealth gained without contributing and creating new wealth rises at a compounding rate. Simply owning enough capital your wealth will grow at speeds that far excel what a person earns doing actual wealth creation whether that means creating a startup or labor. So if you no longer create wealth but your ownership of capital is growing at compounding rates then what exactly is happening? What’s happening is that you are siphoning and extracting wealth off of people who create wealth. You own human capital so you take a cut of it off the top and you use that cut to buy even more human capital which compounds your wealth ownership to even higher levels. This is how billionaires like Warren Buffett or other investors grow their wealth by simply investing rather then creating wealth. Thus wealth inequality is not a result of wealth creation. It is an artifact of capitalism. In capitalism wealth is variable among individuals and it fluctuates. However once wealth accumulates in concentration higher then normal among one individual or several it hits that compounding growth factor and wealth starts going up at astronomical rates and these wealth owners start buying up more and more human capital until they own all of it and benefit from all of it without actually contributing work. You can see this effect in y combinator. The owners of y combinator don’t actually do much work. They have so much capital that they simply can take a bunch of no risk couple hundred k bets until one startup becomes a unicorn in which they rake in a ton of capital from the growth. Think of this like property ownership. A rich person can invest his wealth in property and contribute zero work to society and simply rent his property out. The rent from the tenant is from wealth creation aka labor and the rich person simply siphons it from the top without contributing additional work. The property owner uses that income to buy more property and the cycle continues until you have an affordability crisis of housing across the US and the world. This growth continues unimpeded and uncontrolled until the wealth inequality is so extreme it doesn’t logistically work. This is direction the world is heading in today. This isn’t the full story though. When you take away capitalism to solve this problem you invent communism. Communism was the result of Karl Marx noticing this problem that is fundamental to capitalism. That’s why he got popular because he illustrated the problem of wealth inequality and how wealth naturally becomes more and more concentrated among a few individuals without those individuals creating wealth. Hence communism spread all over Europe but was ultimately a failure. The reason why it’s a failure is because communism lacks incentive. It turns out that wealth inequality is what drives wealth creation. Without the ability to be unfairly rich you don’t get the economic drivers that promotes wealth creation and thus communism keeps things fair but you don’t create wealth. So no system is perfect. Everything has problems. Actually I take it back. There is a perfect system. See Scandinavia. Basically create a more socialist and egalitarian society while benefiting and extracting technological wealth from adjacent societies that are capitalist. Have the government own human capital of countries that are very capitalist then redistribute that wealth to its citizens so those people can live in a more just society while the rest of world can burn.

gcanyon 2y ago

I'm 100% certain Chiang is wrong about art. I'm a product manager, not an artist, but I write many things as part of my job, and Claude in particular is a better writer than I am. Here's how Claude rewrote that, you can argue whether in this particular instance it did better than I did :-) While I respect Chiang's perspective on AI and art, my experience as a product manager has shown me otherwise - Claude routinely writes better than I do, despite writing being central to my role.

bee_rider 2y ago
IMO Yours is much better in this case, it is more direct and clear (although I guess I’m looking for problems in Claude’s output). Yours starts by just giving us what you are trying to say. Then gives us your background succinctly. Claude’s starts out with this circuitous “While I respect…” failing to drive the point in the interest of being… polite, I guess? But not actually polite because everybody who’s read anything knows that “While I respect” is almost always a preface to calling somebody wrong. It also makes the argument worse. Yours is unambiguous, and does a better job of describing where your evidence comes from. You clearly describe yourself as doing something that is not exactly art, but it is like art, and so you bring it up as an good example of Claude doing an art-like thing better than a professional. In the Claude sample, it isn’t clear until the dash what’s going on, which is more than halfway through the comment. What’s your experience? Up until that dash, you could be talking about your experience as a product manager managing artists (at a game studio for example). It’s like “oh, ok, he was just talking about a sort of… not exactly analogy it a less than completely exact experience of working with artists.”
- gcanyon 2y ago
  Agreed -- I like mine better, but I (internally) committed to posting before I went to Claude. I think it does better than I do as the content gets longer.
spunkycomics 2y ago
I’d also argue this is a view on the technical components of writing, rather than the artform. AI can for sure place brush strokes more precisely (“correctly”?) but the argument is over the necessity of process/intent in the art

abecedarius 2y ago

Chiang makes some insightful points, e.g. about what we mean by magic. Then I come to > [LLMs] can get better at reproducing patterns found online, but they don’t become capable of actual reasoning; it seems that the problem is fundamental to their architecture. and wonder how an intelligent person can still think this, can be so absolute about it. What is "actual" reasoning here? If an AI proves a theorem is it only a simulated proof?

mewpmewp2 2y ago
Even most intelligent people can hallucinate, we still haven't fixed this problem. There's a lot of training material and bias which leads many to repeat those things "LLM's are just a stochastic parrot, glorified auto complete/google search, Markov chains, just statistics", etc. The thing is, these sentences sound really good and so it's easy to repeat them when you have made up your mind. It's a shortcut.
- cyrillite 2y ago
  They’re right until they’re wrong. AI is (was?) a stochastic parrot. At some point AI will likely be more than that. The tipping point may not be obvious.
- dutchbookmaker 2y ago
  I feel like at this point we have to separate LLMs and reasoning models too. I can see the argument against chatGPT4 reasoning. The reasoning models though I think get into some confusing language but I don't know what else you would call it. If you say a car is not "running" the way a human runs, you are not incorrect even though a car can "outrun" any human obviously in terms of moving speed on the ground. To say since a car can't run , it can't move though is obviously completely absurd.
  - bonoboTP 2y ago
    This was precisely what motivated Turing to come up with the test named after him, to avoid such semantic debates. Yet here we are still in the same loop. "The terminator isn't really hunting you down, it's just imitating doing so..."

emtel 2y ago

I like Chiang’s stories, but he simply doesn’t know what he’s talking about when it comes to LLMs. Forget the philosophical points - he claims that LLMs are strictly worse than search engines for information retrieval. This is just obviously false, I can give you dozens of conversations from my ChatGPT history over the past two months which would have been impossible to get answers to on Google.

benreesman 2y ago
LLMs are generally better search tools for certain topics today, but search engines have been in serious decline for at least 15 years. IMHO old-school Google remains the high water mark of generalized information retrieval, with advantages ranging from speed to semi-durable citation. I strongly suspect there is a cohort thing going on here, many HN users today weren’t involved in technology yet back when Google worked well. Much like beer for Homer Simpson, AI is the cause of and solution to all of the Internet’s problems.
- emtel 2y ago
  I’ve been using Google since about 2000/2001 or so. In fact I worked there for a time, and I still remember Craig Silverstein’s answer to “isn’t search a solved problem?” Which was: “in the future we want Google to be able to take any question and just give you the answer. So clearly we have a long way to go!” In any case, I do not believe there was ever a time it could answer all of the questions that LLMs can today. If the question had been asked and answered on the web, Google could (and can) find it, but many questions haven’t been asked!
  - kortilla 2y ago
    Search isn’t the same thing as answering a question
- nuancebydefault 2y ago
  Google search works at least as well as 15 years ago, the results are now just more interleaved with ads that are harder to distinguish from what you are really searching for. That's exactly where LLMs come in, the model inside the weights has more than answers, they can find sense in data.

dfilppi 2y ago

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bmitc 2y ago

Humans love the pursuit of technology for technology's sake. Quotes by Jacques Ellul: ---- > Technique has taken over the whole of civilization. Death, procreation, birth all submit to technical efficiency and systemization. ---- > Technique has penetrated the deepest recesses of the human being. The machine tends not only to create a new human environment, but also to modify man's very essence. The milieu in which he lives is no longer his. He must adapt himself, as though the world were new, to a universe for which he was not created. He was made to go six kilometers an hour, and he goes a thousand. He was made to eat when he was hungry and to sleep when he was sleepy; instead, he obeys a clock. He was made to have contact with living things, and he lives in a world of stone. He was created with a certain essential unity, and he is fragmented by all the forces of the modern world.

leedrake5 2y ago

> as in your 1991 story “Division by Zero,” or a world where we raise robots as children This is vastly more preferable than our current approach of raising children as robots.

motohagiography 2y ago

his comparison of LLMs to search engines where an LLM is low resolution, vs. the higher resolution of a search engine returning the "actual" document implies some perceptions of authorship or authority I don't share. I use LLMs to explore and contrast results that I can then test, the results exist as hypotheticals, and not to provide authority about the state of anything- it's conceptually more of a lens than a lever. not to trap him in that contrast, but maybe these ideas are a forcing function that causes us to see how separate our worldviews can be instead of struggling to make one prevail. it's as though the usefulness of an engine is measured in how much we can yield our agency to it. with a search engine you can say "google or wiki told me," but an LLM does not provide authority to us. these systems don't have agency themselves, yet we can yield ours to it, the way we might to an institution. I don't have this urge so it's peculiar to see it described. do we want our tech to become objects of deference, literally, idols? I love Chiang's work and we need minds like his, and maybe Ian McEwan and other literary thinkers, who have insight into human character (vs. plot and object driven sci-fi thinkers) to really apprehend the meaning consequences of AI tech.

photochemsyn 2y ago

> “It’s like imagining that a printer could actually feel pain because it can print bumper stickers with the words ‘Baby don’t hurt me’ on them." Problem: the human brain has no pain receptors, no nociceptors. It just takes in messages from remote nerves and 'prints a bumper sticker' that tells higher cognitive centers 'you're feeling pain!'. What's the difference? > "LLMs are like a search engine that rephrases information instead of giving it verbatim or pointing you to the original source." Problem: How does this differ from human learning? If a human reads a book and tells someone else about it, constructs a summary of the important points and memorable passages, how is that fundamentally different from what LLMs are doing? The second one really impacts the intellectual property arguments - if training a model on data is fundamentally similar to training a human on data, does 'derivate work' really apply to the creations of the human or of the model?

paulryanrogers 2y ago
Humans are far more self contained than most LLMs which depend upon a lot of electricity and possibly an array of loosely connected components. LLMs also don't really have the signal bandwidth of human nervous systems yet. They're capacity to interact with the physical world is also seriously limited for now.
Barrin92 2y ago
>What's the difference? The pain receptors. The human brain doesn't just "have" pain receptors. Your entire body, including your brain, is one system. Your brain isn't piloting your body like a mech. This brain body dualism is a misconception of how biological organisms work. You are your pain receptors just like you are your brain, and removing any part would alter your perception of the world. >How does this differ from human learning? It differs from human beings in every respect. Humans don't do linear algebra in their head, biochemical systems are much too slow for that. Humans don't inhabit some static model of the world learned at some fixed point t, you're a living being. Your brain wasn't trained four months ago and was done at that point. Humans learn with a fraction of the information and through self play, they don't decohere, and so on.
- 2y ago

the_af 2y ago

Ted Chiang probably has an uphill battle convincing people here of his take, precisely because he thinks the engineering approach may be wrong. Or in his words: > Arguably the most important parts of our lives should not be approached with this attitude. Some of this attitude comes from the fact that the people making AI tools are engineers viewing everything from an engineering perspective, but it’s also that, as a culture, we have adopted this way of thinking as the default. I tend to agree with Chiang, but he is preaching to the anti-choir here. Even though many HN-ers seem to like his fiction (and why wouldn't they, Chiang is top of the cream!), they will probably chafe at the idea some problems cannot and shouldn't be approached from a pure engineering side. I remember the -- now rightfully ridiculed -- phase of startup entrepreneurship which became a meme: "I found a problem, so I created an app to solve it" (where the "problem" was something like "world hunger", "homelessness", "poverty", "ending war", etc). That Chiang is also criticizing capitalism and wealth accumulation as a primary driver will probably win him no friends here.

throw4847285 2y ago
I've always complained that engineering relies on a lot of stolen valor from its adjacency to science. There is nothing scientific about treating everything in life as an optimization problem. And yet engineers often act like they are noble pursuers of truth in the same vein as scientists. For example, take the Tesla vs. Edison dichotomy that became popular on the internet in the mid 2000s. The narrative was that Edison was an idea stealing hack, while Tesla was a brilliant visionary scientist and engineer. The reality was that Edison was a brilliant inventor and a shrewd businessman, while Tesla was only the former and he made brilliant inventions that made other men like George Westinghouse very rich. But a scientist? Tesla was a crank who doubted the existence of electrons and distrusted Albert Einstein. Tesla makes a good patron saint of modern engineers, but not of engineering's self image. He had a victim complex, he constantly commented on topics outside his area of expertise, and his lack of business acumen was seen as proof that he was a true outsider genius whose ideas were actually too good.

grantcas 2y ago

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throwaway2037 2y ago

I didn't know Ted Chiang before seeing this post. If anyone needs to know about him, he has a separate Wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Chiang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Chiang > Ted Chiang is an American science fiction writer. His work has won four Nebula awards, four Hugo awards, the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and six Locus awards. Chiang is also a frequent nonfiction contributor to the New Yorker, most recently on topics related to computer technology, such as artificial intelligence.

vicentwu 2y ago

"As an analogy, imagine that you could put your dog or cat into hibernate mode whenever you left on a trip. Your dog or cat might not notice, but even if they did, they might not mind. Now imagine that you could put your child into hibernate mode whenever you were too busy to spend time with them. Your child would absolutely notice, and even if you told them it was for their own good, they would make certain inferences about how much you valued them. That’s the situation the human characters in the story find themselves in." Fascinating.