I think our entire ontology for how we talk about and conceptualise A[G]I is confused. And I wouldn't be surprised if in ten years we will look back at the discourse today and laugh at how primitive some ideas are. A few hot and uncertain takes:
— Séb Krier (@sebkrier) September 18, 2025
The way people talk about future… pic.twitter.com/1o5oilqzQh
From deeper into this long tweet:
The way people talk about future AIs/AGIs feels like a category error. Sometimes they reify future systems as self-sovereign entities with their own goals and incentives, a different species that we need to learn to co-exist with. I think that's not impossible, and I used to be a lot more sympathetic to this view, but I'm a lot less certain now and it's certainly not self-evident. Agents can still be tools, and tool agents that operate along timelines don't need to necessarily be 'separate species'-like. [...]
To me at least, AGI will likely be a distributed ecosystem of different models, built by different companies and state actors, with different capabilities, architectures, and incentive structures.
New ontology. 50yrs to make the worse version.
ReplyDeleteInteresting history from "July 1945, Vannevar Bush was riding high"... "But Doug Engelbart didn’t have much else to do." ...Ted Nelson "He met Doug Engelbart in the mid 60s,"
Yes, seems "pre-internet" yet so much more.
"As Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, he’d won World War II. His proximity fuse intercepted hundreds of V-1s and destroyed thousands of tanks, carving a path for Allied forces through the French countryside. Back in 1942, he’d advocated to President Roosevelt the merits of Oppenheimer’s atomic bomb. Roosevelt and his congressional allies snuck hundreds of millions in covert funding to the OSRD’s planned projects in Oak Ridge and Los Alamos. Writing directly and secretively to Bush, a one-line memo in June expressed Roosevelt’s total confidence in his Director: “Do you have the money?”
Indeed he did. The warheads it bought would fall on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in mere weeks. The Germans had already given up; Victory in the Pacific was nigh. So Bush was thinking ahead.
In The Atlantic, Bush returned to a pre-war obsession with communication and knowledge-exchange. His essay, “As We May Think,” imagined a new metascientifical endeavor (emphasis mine):
"Science has provided the swiftest communication between individuals; it has provided a record of ideas and has enabled man to manipulate and to make extracts from that record so that knowledge evolves and endures throughout the life of a race rather than that of an individual.
"There is a growing mountain of research. But there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers—conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. Yet specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial.
…
"The difficulty seems to be, not so much that we publish unduly in view of the extent and variety of present day interests, but rather that publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record. The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships.
"Bush thought we were ripe for a paradigm shift. Some new method of spreading research, connecting it across fields and domains, and making new discoveries in the in-betweens. The most exciting Next Big Thing of the era was microfilm, and so when Bush let his imagination run a little wild,1 he envisioned a machine enabling us to do grand new things with long books shrunk into tidy rolls:
...
"I’ll remind you—the year was 1945.
"2. First Experiments in Hyper-cyber-space
...
From...
'"Your Review: Project Xanadu - The Internet That Might Have BeenFinalist #12 in the Review Contest
Sep 19, 2025
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-project-xanadu-the-internet
Bill, do you use a personal knowledge tool ala Obsidian?
SD.
"a new set of concepts (ontology) for talking about" ...
ReplyDelete"Many automated decision systems (ADS) are designed to solve prediction problems" ...
"In this work, we consider the ways in which we must shift from a prediction-focused paradigm to an interventionist paradigm when considering the impact of ADS within social systems. "
"Bridging prediction and intervention in social systems"
Posted on September 23, 2025 1:52 PM by Jessica Hullman
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/09/23/bridging-prediction-and-intervention-in-social-systems/
SD.