annapowellsmith

money, power, and populism in the AI buildout

How do we fundamentally discover new things? In a letter to Maurice Solovine, Albert Einstein conceptualized discovery as a cyclical process involving an intuitive 'jump' from sensory experience to axioms, followed by logical deduction. While Generative AI has mastered Induction (statistical pattern matching) and is rapidly conquering Deduction (formal proof), we argue it lacks the mechanism for Abduction—the generation of novel explanatory hypotheses. Using Einstein’s formulation of General Relativity as a computational case study, we demonstrate that the prevailing theory of "creativity as data compression" (induction) fails to account for discoveries where observational data is scarce. This position paper argues that while a modern Large Language Model could plausibly execute the deductive phase of proving theorems from established premises, it is structurally incapable of the abductive 'Jump' required to formulate those premises. We identify the translation of simulation into formal axioms as the critical bottleneck in artificial scientific invention, and propose that physically consistent, multimodal world models offer the necessary sensory grounding to bridge this divide.

Comment from a tractor-owning friend:

That's a very good piece capturing a lot of the issues (esp GPS retrofitting which is easy and make a huge difference).

The one thing it doesn't quite draw out is that the market has segmented. If you are a small to mid farmer you have fairly low demands for horsepower and can tolerate small breakdowns you can fix in the field. So buying an older machine makes sense.

If you are a big farmer or a contractor (person with a big tractor/combine/machine who hires out) you need high horsepower and 18 hour a day operation without breakdowns. as in fleet purchasing for trucks they have rolling finance for high capital value kit to replace it every couple of years having run up high hours.

The modern electronic high power kit is quite amazing, it's not gratuitous use of electronics. Electronics also important for meeting modern emissions regs.

Tractors, as the piece points out have to be ultra rugged for field work and that means that the older stuff does last well and 100hp or over will get you a long way.

Article is paywalled, so here are the key bits:

Tens of thousands of political ads have gone missing from Facebook’s public archive less than 48 hours before the British general election, raising fresh questions over measures introduced to address transparency concerns in online political advertising...

...On December 5, Facebook’s ad library, which includes adverts shown on its photo messaging subsidiary Instagram, showed a total of just under 180,000 classified as political in Britain since October 2018. But on Tuesday, that number had suddenly dropped by a third, to fewer than 120,000 ads.

Facebook declined to say what had caused the issue, or whether the ad data were irretrievably lost or could be recovered. But a company spokesperson said: “We’re aware that people are having trouble accessing the ads in the ads library, and we’re working to fix the issue as soon as possible.”...

...The data lost by Facebook did not appear to be limited to any particular party or subset — ads were missing from all the main parties’ pages.