CONDITION: Nearby “Bomb Cyclone”. I would say not “three magics”, ending with large-scale sparse regression & classification, but five—and maybe six: eye-hand-brain, language, writing, gift-exchange..
Re Blanchard: In FRED, I graph nonfarm payroll # with core PCE and the only time I see core inflation fall out of trend with employment count is in 2008, when there was a particularly hard recession. In fact the relationship is strongly inverse in 1970's and early 80's. What am I missing?
Because this doesn't look like the relationship to bet the economy on.
> Now how likely is it that we are now at the cusp of a sixth magic: predictive accuracy, generalization, and control without any simple intermediating laws, abstractions, or encapsulations, based simply on the fact that we have a huge amount of data, and can thus classify situations very finely by looking at what the situations’ nearby neighbors are?
I think this is factually untrue and actually looking less likely by the month. Leaving aside things like tricking humans about images and language, having a huge amount of data and classifying situations according to nearby neighbors has shown to be very very *bad* at generalization and control, hype aside [see e.g. https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/alphafold-excitement ]. If nothing else, the plausibility achievements of chatGPT should highlight its absolute lack of concern about its truth value.
The near-future of AI in science IMHO looks more like this: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.13254 Using ML to augment existing knowledge in areas so complex that all the data we have ever had is probably not enough to even get a good handle on things without a lot of previous theory.
For a Sixth Magic [I like the labels], I'd propose what's currently called causal discovery and automatic experiment design. Basically, for the first time ever we have a _calculus of understandings of the world_ --- we can infer, study, and figure out the next optimal experiment for scientific models far beyond the complexity of what we can currently handle. At the moment no entity in the planet can really put together and take advantage of our current set of models, theories, and data about, say, biochemistry, but we are in the process of building them. But I bet they will look more like "Excel for arbitrary complex theories" than the Azathoths that grab headlines today.
I was also thinking of Excel in terms of the sixth magic - but coming from a step further back, what if the sixth magic is simply algorithms that run independently of the mind of an individual human?
You set up rules and instructions and start things going, and input data or refine the results, and the thing powers ahead and sucks in lots of individuals as ancillary support nodes and shapes the world around it.
I'm including here the huge slow-moving AIs that run through human wetware - sects, corporations - as the early indicators of what these kinds of expressions of human intelligence are capable of achieving. But the difference now of course is that we can shift much of the operation directly into computers, get much quicker results, and more effectively steer the outcomes towards desirable goals.
Even quite simple rules like 'spread the faith' or 'maximise shareholder wealth' give rise to astonishingly complex behaviours when expressed over sufficient time and mediated through the computational power of hundreds or thousands of human brains. In many ways an algorithmic system acts like a discrete entity with features that make it difficult for us not to anthropomorphise it - and this isn't entirely an illusion, hence eg the need to recognise corporate personhood for legal purposes.
Perhaps it's because I'm not a scientist that I don't find "a calculus of understandings of the world" very plausible as a game-changer - it feels to me more like a refinement (if potentially a powerful one) of the Fifth Magic of scientific method.
The ability to conjure up enormous quasi-entities that produce complex behaviour following rules that shift and change in response to external stimuli, all in a black box, and rearrange our understanding of the world - that feels like a separate class of knowledge-expansion.
(And to be really clear I'm not ascribing actual independence or originality to the algorithmic beasts, I'm pretty sceptical that this approach gets us beyond filtering the available data, in response to direct commands, in ways that are opaque to their creators and can reveal/take advantage of patterns or possibilities that are not otherwise easily grokkable.)
I saw your microblog. I came across it by accident as I was trying to access the comments section from a different email address. (I seem to have subscribed from several, but only one as paid, and I have no idea how that happened, but one day soon I will have to actually switch my paid subscription to a different email address because my law firm is getting very hinky about us using our email for anything other than communications with or on behalf of clients as management fears we will inadvertently trigger the interest of some hacker....). Anyway, I came across it, and it struck me as tucked away in some obscure location neither responding to or initiating a message to some other of your fanboys. Because I could not understand what you were saying, what with all the jargon that I had not encountered elsewhere, I just guessed it was some private musing not yet ready for prime time.
I re-read it, and I still don't understand it. Not a criticism--just what happens when you take only one year or bone-head economics 40 years ago....
Re Blanchard: In FRED, I graph nonfarm payroll # with core PCE and the only time I see core inflation fall out of trend with employment count is in 2008, when there was a particularly hard recession. In fact the relationship is strongly inverse in 1970's and early 80's. What am I missing?
Because this doesn't look like the relationship to bet the economy on.
> Now how likely is it that we are now at the cusp of a sixth magic: predictive accuracy, generalization, and control without any simple intermediating laws, abstractions, or encapsulations, based simply on the fact that we have a huge amount of data, and can thus classify situations very finely by looking at what the situations’ nearby neighbors are?
I think this is factually untrue and actually looking less likely by the month. Leaving aside things like tricking humans about images and language, having a huge amount of data and classifying situations according to nearby neighbors has shown to be very very *bad* at generalization and control, hype aside [see e.g. https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/alphafold-excitement ]. If nothing else, the plausibility achievements of chatGPT should highlight its absolute lack of concern about its truth value.
The near-future of AI in science IMHO looks more like this: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.13254 Using ML to augment existing knowledge in areas so complex that all the data we have ever had is probably not enough to even get a good handle on things without a lot of previous theory.
For a Sixth Magic [I like the labels], I'd propose what's currently called causal discovery and automatic experiment design. Basically, for the first time ever we have a _calculus of understandings of the world_ --- we can infer, study, and figure out the next optimal experiment for scientific models far beyond the complexity of what we can currently handle. At the moment no entity in the planet can really put together and take advantage of our current set of models, theories, and data about, say, biochemistry, but we are in the process of building them. But I bet they will look more like "Excel for arbitrary complex theories" than the Azathoths that grab headlines today.
I was also thinking of Excel in terms of the sixth magic - but coming from a step further back, what if the sixth magic is simply algorithms that run independently of the mind of an individual human?
You set up rules and instructions and start things going, and input data or refine the results, and the thing powers ahead and sucks in lots of individuals as ancillary support nodes and shapes the world around it.
I'm including here the huge slow-moving AIs that run through human wetware - sects, corporations - as the early indicators of what these kinds of expressions of human intelligence are capable of achieving. But the difference now of course is that we can shift much of the operation directly into computers, get much quicker results, and more effectively steer the outcomes towards desirable goals.
Even quite simple rules like 'spread the faith' or 'maximise shareholder wealth' give rise to astonishingly complex behaviours when expressed over sufficient time and mediated through the computational power of hundreds or thousands of human brains. In many ways an algorithmic system acts like a discrete entity with features that make it difficult for us not to anthropomorphise it - and this isn't entirely an illusion, hence eg the need to recognise corporate personhood for legal purposes.
Perhaps it's because I'm not a scientist that I don't find "a calculus of understandings of the world" very plausible as a game-changer - it feels to me more like a refinement (if potentially a powerful one) of the Fifth Magic of scientific method.
The ability to conjure up enormous quasi-entities that produce complex behaviour following rules that shift and change in response to external stimuli, all in a black box, and rearrange our understanding of the world - that feels like a separate class of knowledge-expansion.
(And to be really clear I'm not ascribing actual independence or originality to the algorithmic beasts, I'm pretty sceptical that this approach gets us beyond filtering the available data, in response to direct commands, in ways that are opaque to their creators and can reveal/take advantage of patterns or possibilities that are not otherwise easily grokkable.)
Yes: I don’t think I have a handle on this yet...
I saw your microblog. I came across it by accident as I was trying to access the comments section from a different email address. (I seem to have subscribed from several, but only one as paid, and I have no idea how that happened, but one day soon I will have to actually switch my paid subscription to a different email address because my law firm is getting very hinky about us using our email for anything other than communications with or on behalf of clients as management fears we will inadvertently trigger the interest of some hacker....). Anyway, I came across it, and it struck me as tucked away in some obscure location neither responding to or initiating a message to some other of your fanboys. Because I could not understand what you were saying, what with all the jargon that I had not encountered elsewhere, I just guessed it was some private musing not yet ready for prime time.
I re-read it, and I still don't understand it. Not a criticism--just what happens when you take only one year or bone-head economics 40 years ago....
Thx much!