[FRIAM] Epistemic Holography

[Marcus Daniels]

Let's call it Card Catalog++ for the moment and not AI.   If one gives a parochial person a fancy card catalog that can find an answer to a problem, do they suddenly become curious people and find interesting problems to solve?  Does it even occur to them to pay for it unless they need it for their jobs?   

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Wednesday, May 21, 2025 6:05 AM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Epistemic Holography

I've already given my answer to the question: never. Human effort is different from computational effort. Human intelligence is intertwined with machine intelligence and vice versa. It's a category error to ask when machines will "surpass" (or whatever word you choose) humans in XYZ activity. The right question to ask is how will any given machine change humans? And the corollary how will humans change the machines?

Hammers are better at blunt impact than the human using the hammer. But that wasn't always true. Hammering with a limestone rock was arguably no better than hammering with one's fist.

But, the hammer is a human tool. Currently, the variety of AI tools are still human tools. The discussion we're actually having is if (or when) humans will become the AIs' tools. Ecologically, even that question is silly. Are the microbes in my gut *my* tools? Are we the tools of Sars-COV-2? These are mostly stupid questions.

Asking when AI will surpass humans at activity XYZ is a similar question. It preemptively registers the categories. If you find an AI tool that does something better than *you* do that thing, then *change* what you do ... fold yourself into the control manifold of the tool. That's what we did ... It's what our children have done ... It's what their children's children will do. ("Our" being general, here. I have no children, thank Yog.)


On 5/20/25 10:38 PM, Pieter Steenekamp wrote:
> This naturally leads to the million-dollar question: if — and if so, when — AI will surpass the very best humans across all scientific domains. Sam Altman seems to suggest that we may soon be able to rent access to a PhD-level AI for as little as $10,000 to $20,000. Although that will obviously be a game-changer, I would still make the bar higher than that. I'm struggling a bit to define this properly, so although it's not a definition, for now I'll stick to I'll know it when I see it.

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