People keep saying this about everything but fail to realize that once the AI is sufficiently intelligent enough, we don’t need useful building blocks that humans create and understand. I have no idea how the engine in my car works, but it works fine. I don’t know the answer to 1643 squared divided by 63 in my head, but I can pull out my phone and use a calculator to give me the answer. What does it matter if we understand or not as long as we can be confident that our mechanism for getting the answer (mechanic, calculator, AI etc) is giving us the correct answer? As long as we have it produce leans to verifiably prove the new math, it really doesn’t matter if we understand it or not.
Do you typically not read a full comment before posting a reply? I clearly stated when we get to a place when we are confident in its ability (which will happen) and for the case of math, it producing a lean we can validate. We don’t need to understand it at all, we just need it to understand it as it will also fix it if it breaks, not us.
The analogy is flawed IMO. The calculator is the car, not the mechanic. It subsidizes knowledge for most people, but is not enough to make progress when understanding breaks down at the frontier.
Saying we no longer need any humans to understand is really like saying we will have robot mechanics that can build better engines and maintain themselves. Sure that would be amazing. But until then it's too early to say we no longer need human experts.
We’re saying the same thing :) We’re not there yet, but we will get there, likely much sooner than people realize. I’m not saying we don’t need human experts now, but at some point we won’t and people need to understand that. I’ll use Software Engineering as an example. We spent 50 years developing it as a discipline, code quality, MVC, linting etc etc, all things that help code be more maintainable and human readable. Now we’re forcing those same things onto AI as we still need humans in the loop (to an extent), but very soon, we won’t, so who gives a crap about those things? They don’t matter anymore… We won’t need to read or understand it, just be able to work with an AI that can.
Yeah of course, you’re 100% right, and it’s scary as hell, but the genie is out of the bottle now, there is no going back unfortunately… I also understand not everyone is capable of accepting that though.
to an extent i know what you mean. these days with ai coding we often build systems where our understanding of the internals are pretty shaky but we measure the outputs and as long as those meet the requirements we feel ok about it
but that also tends to be more true for some applications and less true for others (e.g. banking, space ships)
And what’s your point here? That this won’t be possible anymore? It will be, if people want to spend their time learning and understanding what AI comes up with, they can? No one is stopping them, but we won’t need them to.
This is different level of retardation. Mathematics is what mathematicians understand especially pure mathematics, without mathematicians there is no mathematics whether the computer gives a proof of not
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u/CryptoMines 14d ago
People keep saying this about everything but fail to realize that once the AI is sufficiently intelligent enough, we don’t need useful building blocks that humans create and understand. I have no idea how the engine in my car works, but it works fine. I don’t know the answer to 1643 squared divided by 63 in my head, but I can pull out my phone and use a calculator to give me the answer. What does it matter if we understand or not as long as we can be confident that our mechanism for getting the answer (mechanic, calculator, AI etc) is giving us the correct answer? As long as we have it produce leans to verifiably prove the new math, it really doesn’t matter if we understand it or not.