If your daughter had cancer and you could press a button to make it go away, would you press it?
If so, what aspect of that makes it different? It is a change in the same beneficial direction. It is an intervention against what has happened naturally.
Similarly if she lacked any empathy and you could press a button to provide it? This would be the same direction of the same property, just an intervention from a different naturally occuring starting point.
I make no claim of the merits of OpenAI's immediate behaviour. I am commenting on a world in which things like this can be done, and like Grant Sanderson, I see a world of opportunity for understanding and learning for the joy of appreciating the problem and the solution. The only thing that seems to have been lost is that a human may no longer gain the prestige of being the first to discovers something. That should pale into insignificance to the benefits of understanding a thing. I'm not even sure if you should consider prestige as a healthy motivation to discover things.
Right now AI can provide a proof that is either valuable or not. If it is just the last page of a novel without any of the chapters then it hasn't given us mutch at all. The problem isn't in what it has provided, it tha't we've been using the wrong measure of merit.
If it does provide a full result with a rich explanation that people can understand then it has undoubtedly provided something that benefits the world. No human is awarded prestige for the discovery but that has always been an unfair measure.
If you work all your life on a math problem only to have an AI produce the result before you, how is this meaningfully different for your experience to working all your life on a math problem only to have another person produce the result before you.
If there is something that is unknown and could be proved true by path A and proved false by path B by definition nobody knows which path to follow. What happens if two mathematicians attempt this problem one going down each path. If an AI produces the result before they finish have they lost to the same degree? Only one of them had any chance of gaining the prestige. Did the other lose nothing? Was their life wasted? I don't think so either way and the only way to consider that work not wasted is to consider the effort to understand to be the thing that is valuable, not the result at the end.
If a solution is found by a human when there are people tying multiple paths, the one who guessed the correct path gains the prestige. That doesn't seem like a fair way to reward effort.
If we want understanding then AI can help.
Chess has had this moment. Computers can play chess better than people. It has also been a great benefit to the understanding of chess precisely because they value the how to get there over the result.
Prior to modern chess engines you could hypothesize about what the best move might be but you could never know if you were right. The fact that chess engines beat people so consistently is because often the guess is not right.
Chess engines gave us the ability to look at a game and see if if a player could have made a better move. They could then look to see why it was a better move. People then learned how to play better. They still play against other humans because they are testing each others understanding of the game, for that the computer is set aside.
Computers playing chess better than humans improved chess for humans.
Is there a compelling reason why that cannot be true for other things that they are better than.
If so, what aspect of that makes it different? It is a change in the same beneficial direction. It is an intervention against what has happened naturally.
Similarly if she lacked any empathy and you could press a button to provide it? This would be the same direction of the same property, just an intervention from a different naturally occuring starting point.
I make no claim of the merits of OpenAI's immediate behaviour. I am commenting on a world in which things like this can be done, and like Grant Sanderson, I see a world of opportunity for understanding and learning for the joy of appreciating the problem and the solution. The only thing that seems to have been lost is that a human may no longer gain the prestige of being the first to discovers something. That should pale into insignificance to the benefits of understanding a thing. I'm not even sure if you should consider prestige as a healthy motivation to discover things.
Right now AI can provide a proof that is either valuable or not. If it is just the last page of a novel without any of the chapters then it hasn't given us mutch at all. The problem isn't in what it has provided, it tha't we've been using the wrong measure of merit.
If it does provide a full result with a rich explanation that people can understand then it has undoubtedly provided something that benefits the world. No human is awarded prestige for the discovery but that has always been an unfair measure.
If you work all your life on a math problem only to have an AI produce the result before you, how is this meaningfully different for your experience to working all your life on a math problem only to have another person produce the result before you.
If there is something that is unknown and could be proved true by path A and proved false by path B by definition nobody knows which path to follow. What happens if two mathematicians attempt this problem one going down each path. If an AI produces the result before they finish have they lost to the same degree? Only one of them had any chance of gaining the prestige. Did the other lose nothing? Was their life wasted? I don't think so either way and the only way to consider that work not wasted is to consider the effort to understand to be the thing that is valuable, not the result at the end.
If a solution is found by a human when there are people tying multiple paths, the one who guessed the correct path gains the prestige. That doesn't seem like a fair way to reward effort.
If we want understanding then AI can help.
Chess has had this moment. Computers can play chess better than people. It has also been a great benefit to the understanding of chess precisely because they value the how to get there over the result.
Prior to modern chess engines you could hypothesize about what the best move might be but you could never know if you were right. The fact that chess engines beat people so consistently is because often the guess is not right.
Chess engines gave us the ability to look at a game and see if if a player could have made a better move. They could then look to see why it was a better move. People then learned how to play better. They still play against other humans because they are testing each others understanding of the game, for that the computer is set aside.
Computers playing chess better than humans improved chess for humans.
Is there a compelling reason why that cannot be true for other things that they are better than.