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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   28616 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 28, 2025

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If an insurmountable gap there is, I claim is is not in the ability to do useful work, but in the ability to tell whether that work is useful or not.

Can you help me understand this claim more concretely? E.g. if an LLM had just successfully designed a bridge for me, but then I modified the design to make it not useful in some way, for some kinds of changes it wouldn't be able to tell if my change was good or not? But a human would?

Let's say you overlooked telling it about some fairly critical detail (your bridge is affected by gravity in some unusual way, or something, I'm not a civil engineer). It's not going to be able to figure that out on its own. And the world is full of such critical details that aren't captured in public datasets (or worse, are captured totally wrong). It will then confidently work off the wrong track, sometimes in subtle enough ways that it requires an expert to notice.

You can observe this right now if you work in a specialized or cutting edge field where solutions to problems are unintuitive. LLMs become worse than useless the more what you're trying to do works like that. And that's fine, it's just not the right tool.

But if there's something that looks like a fundamental limit of the approach vis à vis intelligence, that's what it looks like to me.

There's also more general issues with agentic systems specifically and how quickly they seem to fall victim to noise and hallucinations without human supervision, but I'm more on the fence as to whether this can be ameliorated.

Let's say you overlooked telling it about some fairly critical detail... It's not going to be able to figure that out on its own.

Right, but neither would a human, unless they also had more direct access to the problem somehow. But that's what agentic scaffolding is for.

There's also more general issues with agentic systems specifically and how quickly they seem to fall victim to noise and hallucinations without human supervision

Even with tens of thousands of experts spending billions of dollars and R & D for a decade to solve these problems?

but I'm more on the fence as to whether this can be ameliorated.

Seems like you're retreating to "I'm not sure"?

Even with tens of thousands of experts spending billions of dollars and R & D for a decade to solve these problems?

I'm not saying we'll never learn to fly or travel faster than light, but it's going to require innovation that is not incremental, and that can't be predicted.

Seems like you're retreating to "I'm not sure"?

Certainty is unwise, one way or another.

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