[HN Gopher] Cory Doctorow wants you to know what computers can a...
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Cory Doctorow wants you to know what computers can and can't do
Author : cocacola1
Score : 134 points
Date : 2022-12-04 17:21 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newyorker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newyorker.com)
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "Crypto is weird, because, much more so than other technologies,
| if you don't like crypto, crypto people really want to convince
| you that you're wrong."
|
| For some, this is a difficult-to-ignore red flag.
| nicbou wrote:
| They tend to have skin in the game. It's not just an opinion,
| it's an investment.
| mwattsun wrote:
| A fanatic is a person who consciously over-compensates a secret
| doubt.
|
| - Aldous Huxley
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Retro-computing is the most promising trend I've seen in the
| computing tech world. Open source hardware designs based on the
| RISC-V instruction set, returning to writing low-level firmware
| for RISC-V boards, using a low-level language with an open-source
| compiler, and making that approach the norm for all simple
| devices, seems to be a huge growth area. Built-in manual
| overrides, direct access to device internals, the return of
| knowledge that's on the verge of being lost to so many American
| consumers, it all looks good to me.
|
| Incidentally, this article uses the phrase 'cyberpunk' a lot but
| that genre is a lot more like 'cybernoir'. Look at for example
| Jean Pierre Melville films:
|
| https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/06/the-noirs-of-melville
| nuc1e0n wrote:
| Doctorow groks the issues of the technological world we live in
| today much better than most other commentators.
| amelius wrote:
| throwup wrote:
| The title is talking about end-users' control over their own
| hardware. Nothing to do with GPT-3.
| cokeandpepsi wrote:
| GPT-3 is everything, everything else is buggywhip
| detaro wrote:
| Could you elaborate how GPT-3 is relevant to the things
| discussed in the article?
| tdehnel wrote:
| Not only is this not relevant to the article, it's also wrong.
| Computers cannot create new explanatory knowledge like humans
| can. One day they may. But right now we have 0 clue how this
| happens in humans so we are not able to program it in
| computers.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > But right now we have 0 clue how this happens in humans so
| we are not able to program it in computers.
|
| Without taking a position on whether or not computers can
| create new exploratory knowledge (how could one begin to say
| authoritatively that they can't?), this "so" doesn't follow.
| The fact that we don't know how to do something doesn't mean
| we can't program it in computers.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| God of the Gaps, in other words.
|
| "At least computers can't do _that_. Only humans can do
| _that_. "
|
| (GPT-3 demonstrably does that, or behaves in a manner
| indistinguishable from doing that)
|
| "Well, at least computers can't do _this other thing_ ... "
|
| _But right now we have 0 clue how this happens in humans so
| we are not able to program it in computers._
|
| The notion that humans must understand the programs that
| their machines are running is by no means a necessary one.
| Can AlphaGo's human programmers predict, debug, or even
| explain every move it made against Lee Sedol, for instance?
| civopsec wrote:
| > God of the Gaps, in other words.
|
| > ... The notion that humans must understand the programs
| that their machines are running is by no means a necessary
| one.
|
| True. But these two supposed explanations get equally
| handwavy and arational.
|
| - I don't understand it so AI cannot possibly do it
|
| - I don't understand AI so I don't see why AI cannot do it
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Point being, it does not follow that just because we
| don't know how our own brains work, we can't create
| systems that emulate them perfectly. It also does not
| follow that we will understand these systems.
|
| Unless you believe in a soul, all that is necessary is to
| set up the correct initial conditions and let emergent
| behavior do the rest.
| civopsec wrote:
| I'm gonna call this emergent behavior of the gaps.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _God of the Gaps, in other words._
|
| No, not really. Make a sufficiently-powerful predictive
| text engine, and you get something like GPT-3. Make a
| sufficiently-powerful expert system, and you get a chess
| engine that can beat every grandmaster. These things were
| predicted in sci-fi novels _with descriptions of their
| algorithms_ decades before we had computers powerful enough
| to execute them.
|
| For things like "intelligence" and "consciousness", the
| best we've got is on the order of Isaac Asimov's
| _positronic brain_ : a total handwave, maybe with some
| technobabble or some oblique references to now-outdated
| models of psychology.
|
| The stuff humans can do that computers can't, are the
| things we don't _have_ algorithms for, and - funnily enough
| - things that "just throw a bigger neural net at it" don't
| seem to be actually solving (however much they're getting
| better at fooling people into believing they're solving).
|
| "We might be able to solve this one day" doesn't mean we've
| _already_ solved it.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _The stuff humans can do that computers can 't, are the
| things we don't have algorithms for_
|
| What are some examples? GPT-3 is already composing
| halfway-credible poetry and songs. (Edit: and it means
| nothing to say that "poetry and songs exist in its
| training data." The songs and poems it just gave me
| didn't.)
|
| I just asked it to write some code to walk a k-d tree,
| and it did that, too, complete with a unit test.
|
| Don't focus on the current state of the art; pay
| attention to its time derivative. That's all that
| matters. When the tech gets 10x better, it will be almost
| indistinguishable from human thought. Another 10x will
| tie up the remaining loose ends.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _GPT-3 is already composing halfway-credible poetry and
| songs._
|
| Poetry and songs abound in its training data.
|
| > _I just asked it to write some code to walk a k-d tree,
| and it did that, too, complete with a unit test._
|
| Such things abound in its training data.
|
| GPT-3 can't produce anything _novel_. It 's a search
| engine over natural generalisations of its training data,
| but it can't think for itself. It couldn't solve any of
| the unsolved problems of our day. Give it a maths problem
| with a known solution, and it might give you a half-way
| decent proof. Give it a problem _without_ a known
| solution - even an _easier_ one - and it 'll flounder.
| _dain_ wrote:
| >Poetry and songs abound in its training data.
|
| your training data is all the poetry and songs you've
| seen in your life. so go on, write me a poem right now. a
| good one.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| 99.99% of what humans do, if not more, is not original
| work by your definition. Replacing those 99.99% is on its
| own already revolutionary.
| danaris wrote:
| It absolutely does _not_ mean nothing to say that poetry
| and songs exist in its training data. The criticism is
| not "it's just spitting out existing poems and songs";
| it's "all it knows how to do is mimic (to greater or
| lesser degrees of accuracy) things in its training data."
|
| GPT-3 takes a massive corpus of text in, and then spits
| out something that it creates by munging that together in
| probabilistic ways, assisted (if I understand correctly)
| by various humans providing feedback on that.
|
| It has no comprehension of what it is doing. It has no
| "mental model" of the world. It has no "consciousness" of
| any kind, at any level.
|
| Because of this, it cannot genuinely imagine, synthesize,
| or _be creative_. Sure; it can put together sequences of
| words that had never been put together in exactly that
| configuration before, but that 's not _really_ the same
| thing as "creating something new."
|
| It can be entertaining, sure. It can even inspire
| insights _in us_ --but it can never be genuinely
| insightful _itself_ , because that requires
| understanding.
| mavhc wrote:
| But are humans any different? We gather inputs, mix them
| together, produce outputs.
|
| The joke on humans is such a simple program as GPT3 can
| emulate humans so well.
|
| Is GPT3 already smarter than all non human animals?
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Cory gets it, that computing is a battleground for the future.
| Code is war by other means. We will all be forced to pick a side.
| It would be wise to familiarise ourselves with the lay of the
| land.
| criddell wrote:
| What are the sides?
| mlyle wrote:
| Too many issues and too many sides. Too much grey within each
| debate, too.
|
| Computing appliances vs. general purpose machines. End-user
| control vs. vendor. Privacy vs. transparency. Freedom of
| expression vs. curated/"safer" experiences. Algorithms vs.
| humans in the loop. Governmental vs. corporatist vs. end-user
| freedoms. Cloud/timeshare/virtualization vs. on-premises/own
| your own machine/etc. Perpetual copyright and central
| ownership of culture vs. information wants to be free.
| Security vs. flexibility.
|
| Not to mention after you get past the whole ideological
| debates, you have active state vs. state cyberwarfare and
| information warfare and other proxy battles... and
| cybercrime.
|
| Computing and networking as mass-market phenomena is still
| new. As much as we pat ourselves on the back in tech for
| rapid progress, the social mechanisms and business models for
| all of this are still unstable.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| One side is people like me, who largely try to use software
| to run our lives and at odds with all the following sides.
|
| There are at least three surveillance apparatuses that seeks
| to record everything we do.
|
| * the state-surveillance apparatus to extend its own power
| (see Snowden)
|
| * the ad-industry-surveillance apparatus to increase their
| own profits.
|
| * the social-media-surveillance apparatus that wants to
| increase our engagement and in-collusion with the ad-industry
| increase their profits.
|
| The social-media companies + email companies that refuse to
| standardize their protocols.
|
| Then there is the copyright industry that has created DRM
| with no regards to stopping legitimate usage of media bought
| by us.
|
| There is the cloud-service providers that use open-source
| software to rake in billions of profits but won't donate 5
| dollars to the creators of the open-source software.
|
| The OS creators that make it harder and harder for power-
| users to use their computer as they want to.
|
| The state-departments that force that use of apps on non-free
| OS/computers to access essential services.
| contravariant wrote:
| I'm not sure those last two are different. You can however
| split the ad industry surveillance into (at least) two
| kinds.
|
| The first is surveillance aimed at increasing the power of
| each individual advertisement by personalizing them to the
| victim, by their nature these typically seek all kinds of
| _deeply_ personal information about someone 's psyche but
| not necessarily their daily life.
|
| The second is surveillance aimed at 'proving' the
| effectiveness of ads, these typically ignore people's
| interests but dig deeply into their daily activities, what
| they buy, what they see, what they hear, just to be able to
| claim it was their ad that made someone buy something.
| nuc1e0n wrote:
| I wouldn't even call it an opposition of ideas. There's
| just people who understand, like Doctorow, and those that
| are flailing around.
| mjh2539 wrote:
| The manufacturing of microprocessors and other ICs requires
| such an enormous amount of capital that all sides are
| practically indistinguishable.
|
| But more realistically, if you have access to the hardware,
| in principle, you can do whatever you want.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| - Team computers-control-the-humans (CCH): run by a small
| group of humans on a power trip and staffed by a much larger
| group of humans who don't mind the control as long as they
| get to be Better than Somebody(tm) in the overall hierarchy.
|
| - Team humans-control-the-computers (HCC): those of us for
| whom not being in control of the computers around us is
| enough of a problem to warrant doing something about it.
|
| CCH can't win because as they get closer they end up treating
| the muggles poorly, which give HCC a recruiting uptick. But
| HCC can't win either because as they get closer it stops
| feeling important to continue the fight.
|
| It'll be one of those forever wars.
| prpl wrote:
| HCCH
| elgar1212 wrote:
| > Well, Big Tech is not the only concentrated industry. A bunch
| of concentrated industries use Big Tech antitrust as a pretext
| for going after Big Tech--not to end monopoly but to redistribute
| the industry's share of the monopoly themselves. So, cable
| operators, phone companies, entertainment companies. I think it's
| fair to say that the big entertainment companies don't want to
| kill Google; they just want to take it over. Some of the energy
| that comes up to break up or tame Big Tech is coming from other
| sectors that are every bit as much in need of taming and breakup
| as Big Tech is.
|
| This is the most notable bit of information in the article
|
| The whole big tech thing has three camps: big tech itself, other
| corporations like telecoms which want to buy out tech companies
| like verizon bought out yahoo, and politicians in DC who want to
| blackmail tech companies and control the flow of information[0]
|
| government regulation is a double edged sword, and wherever
| there's a bunch of money there's a bunch of people who want to
| take it
|
| [0] https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-
| disinformat...
| macintux wrote:
| Active discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33854184
| californiadreem wrote:
| I have not read the article yet, but this is what I predict the
| contents will be, namely "Cory Doctorow Wants You to Know He Has
| a New Book Coming Out."
|
| I predict it will be an interview where Doctorow's trenchant
| commentary on how the emerging cyberdystopia can be meaningfully
| thwarted is by buying yet another novel by him about how a new
| technology is only being wielded incorrectly and if only the
| plucky hackers use it in transgressive ways, it will undermine
| the Institutional foundations of the technological order and not
| reinforce the status quo.
| zh3 wrote:
| Pre-judging an article without even reading it doesn't feel
| like the HN way (it would be interesting to know what
| percentage of HN readers would comment on an article they
| haven't read).
|
| Personally, I do think he has a point. Agreed, he may make it
| repeatedly - in somewhat different ways - but none the less, I
| have sympathy for his point of view. I am sick to the back
| teeth of having control of my own computer being slowly taken
| away from me, one finger at a time.
| californiadreem wrote:
| I _totally_ sympathize with the viewpoint. My contention is
| that _monetizing_ that viewpoint acts as a pressure release
| that personally enriches Cory Doctorow and his publishers at
| the expense of actual effective action to avert the disaster.
|
| This is the same argument that I levy at professional
| "effective altruists"--if you're profiting by and not
| subsidizing altuism (i.e. comparable net worth to those
| you're helping), you're by definition _not_ an altruist, you
| 're a symbiont at best and a parasite at worst.
|
| RMS is an impotent (and some would say toxic) emissary for
| open software and hardware, but at least his principles
| directly align with his lifestyle. No one is being ferried
| into nascent manipulative technologies because of their
| supposedly "revolutionary" potential on his account.
| lgreiv wrote:
| Having read a couple of prompts and replies in the past days, I
| am like 75% sure this response was written by ChatGPT based on
| its emphasis to stress uncertainty.
|
| Then again, HN is the place of public discourse where I would
| expect expressing such caveats the most from human actors, too.
|
| That being said, the assessment sounds solid.
| californiadreem wrote:
| I don't know whether I should offended or flattered. If I
| were to identify as anything, it would be a Pyrrhonist, so
| what do I know?
| bo1024 wrote:
| It's been an hour, did you read it yet?
|
| I would rate your prediction "mostly false". Interesting
| comments on Big Tech and politics, blockchain, development of
| cyberpunk, future of AI, etc.
| eli wrote:
| Is it not possible that writing books about a subject and
| giving interviews about that same subject come from a sincerely
| held concern?
| californiadreem wrote:
| Doctorow (and Neil Stephenson and William Gibson to a lesser
| extent) have been doing this shtick for almost 20 years.
| They're either naive to their real purpose--selling impotent
| dissent--or hacks _knowingly_ selling impotent dissent.
| Neither reflects well on their sincerity.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| It's possible that they believe it's _not_ impotent.
| californiadreem wrote:
| "It is difficult to get a man to understand something,
| when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
| germinalphrase wrote:
| It's not hypocritical to say "we should be worried about
| X" while understanding the audience is unlikely to do
| anything about X.
| harry8 wrote:
| Nothing large ever started small and grew. No idea ever
| took time to catch on. Anything that doesn't work
| immediately is worthless. Any dissent is therefore futile
| and anyone who indulges is clearly morally bankrupt or
| belongs in Jail as a traitor for publishing it. Consistency
| is actually a vice not a virtue. Praise Google and
| sacrifice your privacy to its benevolence.
|
| (I don't much care for the fiction of Doctorow, Stephenson
| & Gibson released this century fwiw, Neuromancer is still
| good fun. Raffle the rest.) My point is its ok to be
| critical and remain so. Its ok to disagree with that
| criticism but if you really think the criticism is lame and
| by design to make cash, maybe suggest something more
| "potent" to back that up? Or a course of action you think
| such luminaries should follow? And I'm actually all ears on
| that.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| using your argument to sell something always weakens your
| argument
| fsflover wrote:
| How about using books to expand your (strong) argument?
| californiadreem wrote:
| Cory Doctorow, more than anyone living or dead (excepting
| Aaron Swartz, may his soul find repose), has the tooling
| and philosophical understanding to publish his books
| digitally for nominal hosting costs under permissive
| licensing. That he doesn't (and doesn't do that
| _exclusively_ ) suggests that he thinks it's ethically
| appropriate to enrich himself and enable the contuination
| of traditional for-profit publication methods.
| californiadreem wrote:
| > "In your next novel, "Red Team Blues," you focus on Martin
| Hench, a sixty-seven-year-old forensic accountant, who is
| tasked with recovering a set of stolen signing keys that, with
| some technical finagling, can permit one to rewrite a
| blockchain's distributed ledger, swiping assets from one side
| to the other, as it were. Do you think blockchain tech is less
| secure than enthusiasts portray it to be?"
|
| Color me shocked.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
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