| > Respectfully I have titles in the discipline. I know and I am supposed to know what you wrote there well. What I was telling you is that the use of 'predict' for the nature of Science is well established; of course it is a rhetoric simplification - but language in use is. Please see (I had to return to it a few weeks ago for another discussion) the article about Imre Lakatos in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lakatos/ . > look at the average human We do not look at the average human to determine a specific ability: we look at specimen that show and express that particular ability. There is a difference between John who has a keen ethical sense, Ron who does not exercise it, and Don who is a clinical psychopath with missing cerebral modules making it completely Values-blind. > As for your detective game, how many humans, picked at random, could solve it? And I would certainly not ask them advice. On the contrary, LLMs are there to give outputs... So, > But at what they were trained to do -- in much the same way a cat was "trained" by long eons to hunt mice -- they're extremely capable There may be a very great misunderstanding about what they are trained to do («predicting verisimility», telling a convincing story) and what we should expect them to do (producing outputs like those who «predict[] facts», i.e. reason subtly over a world model). In fact, > structurally flawed Until we know they are "_sober_", I'd exercise all care. "Sobriety" must be implemented. > Use DeepSeek R1 and try and tell me that it doesn't check I have used it. (I have used it before many of you: I am one who gave the alarm to this community(, ignored,) well before the stock market crash.) Those of the "detective" game used it, and it failed especially. This tells you that with LLMs we are still in the realms of the "oracular" that you supposed "dead and gone with Delphi". Edit: and especially, > Scratch the surface, though, and the same type of thing is happening You may have "intuitions" and say that according to "your guts and best subconscious guesses", "that A is B". But if you then "believe" that intuition and consider it "final" instead of checking it, vetting it through conscious processes, to determine if it was correct and make it solid - then you are doing it wrong. |
You raise interesting points.
I'd propose a wager, but I'm not sure what the terms ought to be.
In general, I think that procedural thinking is a problem that is basically already cracked, and that all (or nearly all) hard problems that the 99.5th percentile human can solve, in any given domain, will be soluble by artificial intelligences in the near enough future. Five years, I think, would be a wild over-estimate. Maybe two?
I also think that, as a general rule, "prediction = intelligence" and that the breadth, accuracy, and extensibility of one's predictive capabilities is essentially correlated with just how intelligent one is. It doesn't matter how it happens; it can be a black box. Humans, to be sure, are black boxes. I think that scientists have been trying to simulate the nematode c.elegans brain for about two decades, and as far as I know they still haven't succeeded, despite it only having 900 neurons.