[FRIAM] deducing underlying realities from emergent realities

[Marcus Daniels]

This type of article I find tiring. 

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/11/ai-genesis-excerpt-kissinger-schmidt-mundie/680619/?gift=IwTom6kf_sPDx8WzuZ66abdQNn-XBOIBZBuHrK3fnB8&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share <https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/11/ai-genesis-excerpt-kissinger-schmidt-mundie/680619/?gift=IwTom6kf_sPDx8WzuZ66abdQNn-XBOIBZBuHrK3fnB8&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share>

They write:

“For this and many other reasons, we must not entrust digital agents with control over direct physical experiments. So long as AIs remain flawed—and they are still very flawed—this is a necessary precaution.”

What are they talking about? This kind of thing is well underway:


https://www.nature.com/articles/s41592-021-01348-4 <https://www.nature.com/articles/s41592-021-01348-4>

LLMs will just make it more sophisticated.



From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> on behalf of Jochen Fromm <jofr at cas-group.net>
Date: Sunday, November 17, 2024 at 10:51 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] deducing underlying realities from emergent realities 

My 2 cents: particle collliders are used to unmask underlying realities behind emergent realities. Physicists use them to shatter matter into pieces and try to find the most elementary particles everything is made of. 

Mathematicians try to find elementary prime numbers. Psychologists examine the most basic elements of society - persons - and the most elementary mechanisms that control their behavior - emotions. Sociologists examine the elementary rules that govern society. 

In the opposite direction we can either just observe the world at different scales or run simulations of agent-based models to explore emergent realities. After doing this often enough it should be possible to predict the possible types of emergent levels from a given set rules of the underlying level. 



-J. 





-------- Original message -------- 

From: Roger Critchlow <rec at elf.org> 

Date: 11/17/24 5:46 PM (GMT+01:00) 

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <Friam at redfish.com> 

Subject: [FRIAM] deducing underlying realities from emergent realities 



Sabine is wondering about reported failures of the new generations of LLM's to scale the way the their developers expected. 


https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2024/11/ai-scaling-hits-wall-rumours-say-how.html <https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2024/11/ai-scaling-hits-wall-rumours-say-how.html> 



On one slide she essentially draws the typical picture of an emergent level of organization arising from an underlying reality and asserts, as every physicist knows, that you cannot deduce the underlying reality from the emergent level. Ergo, if you try to deduce physical reality from language, pictures, and videos you will inevitably hit a wall, because it can not be done. 



So she's actually grinding two axes at once: one is AI enthusiasts who expect LLM's to discover physics, and the other is AI enthusiasts who foresee no end to the improvement of LLM's as they throw more data and compute effort at them. 



But, of course, the usual failure of deduction runs in the opposite direction, you can't predict the emergent level from the rules of the underlying level. Do LLM's believe in particle collliders? Or do they think we hallucinated them? 



-- rec -- 



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