TsviBT's Shortform

TsviBT

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If someone asks me "what's the least impressive thing you think AI won't be able to do by 20XX", I give answers like "make lots of original interesting math concepts". (See https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sTDfraZab47KiRMmT/views-on-when-agi-comes-and-on-strategy-to-reduce#comments) People sometimes say "well that's a pretty impressive thing, you're talking about the height of intellectual labor".

A main reason I give examples like this is that math is an area where it's feasible for there to be a legible absence of legibilization. (By legible, I mean interpersonal explicitness https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KuKaQEu7JjBNzcoj5/explicitness .) Mathematicians are supposed to make interesting novel definitions that legibilize inexplicit ideas / ways of thinking. If they don't, you can tell that their publications are not so interesting. It is legible that they failed to legibilize.

In fact I suspect there will be many much "easier" feats that AI won't be able to do for a while (some decades). Easier, in the sense that many more humans are able to do those feats. Much harder, in the sense that it requires creativity, and therefore requires having the algorithm-pieces for creativity. That's easy for humans because it's our birthright, but "hard" for AI because it doesn't have that yet. Lots of little novel "knacks", of the sort people can pick up; surprising connections or analogies; solving lots of little problems, or coming up with a way of seeing some sort of situation in a way that makes it make sense.

But knacks, insights, predictions, inventions--these are not categories. I'm not saying "AI can't make predictions" or "AI can't learn knacks", because that would be nonsensical, because those aren't categories. I'm saying that some things humans do, require broad-spectrum creativity; but it's hard to describe those things as a task, and so I don't give it as an answer to the question about what AI can't do. (If a task is stereotyped, not that hard, has clear feedback, and has lots of demonstrations--all things correlated with legibility--then probably AI will be able to do it soon!)

1onslaught1y

Hey, thanks for engaging. I read what I thought were the relevant excerpts in what you linked there. I hadn't really crossed paths with you before, but you seem to have a rich ontology and lexicon when it comes to theory of mind. I am not sure if that pinpoints the disagreement or not. We might just be talking past each other. I'll tell you what I think creativity is and then I'll restate my objection to your prediction. I do think "creativity" is a useful word, just maybe not a load bearing one in my ontology. Like, if I really like a story and it has a lot of unexpected elements that I think it uses really well, that is what I might call creative. Or anything like that if it feels novel, exciting, clever sort of thing... Maybe if someone were giving something high praise and wanted to say it is very deep and clever they could say it is "very creative". Especially if it was artistic or novel. Also sometimes when it is just a lot of whacky things are together even if it's not that clever. Like, when a kid combines a lot of elements into their pretend world or story. Ya, I know it has something to do with a minds ability to keep learning and improving. Your "trajectory of creativity" concept is about a minds ability to continue to improve beyond the minds around it. I don't resonate with those usages as much, but I can also kind of understand where it's coming from and how you're using the word. I think my original objection / pushback was partly that it feels hard to operationalize this because what you find interesting is kind of just your thing and it doesn't seem like a meaningful proxy for intelligence or something. I guess I would add that surely some people are already impressed and interested with some math ideas that chatbots can come up with. Also, perhaps if you could visualize extremely high dimensional spaces you would think that AlphaEvolves proofs were beautiful, elegant, and crisp. I'm not saying there's no information/signal in what you're

I agree that it's hard to operationalize; that's part of what my OP was saying. And then I think it's relatively easier to operationalize in mathematics, where it is in large part explicitly about creativity in my sense (but maybe not especially much in your sense). So that's where I'm getting my prediction; if you don't see what I mean by creativity, or wouldn't make the same prediction, then fair enough, we'll have to agree to disagree.

4TsviBT1y

No, humans do this all the time, constantly, originarily (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5tqFT3bcTekvico4d/do-confident-short-timelines-make-sense#Creativity___Originariness) when they are kids. They keep using roughly the same set of faculties on harder and harder problems, including sometimes making globally novel insights. Gippities learn in a different way which does not go on to do that. You can be helped in noticing that it's a different way via sample complexity.

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