this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2024
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[–] [email protected] 15 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (8 children)

We have figured out how to run everything, absolutely everything, in the 1950s.

The original computer "AI" craze was started by "cybernetic systems" and for good reason. You probably only know of the bastardizations of "cyber-" that don't have anything in common with the original concept.

The original concept goes like this:

  1. set a goal
  2. perform an action
  3. measure how much impact that had, did it get you closer to your goal or not?
  4. If you are at your goal, you're done,
  5. otherwise adjust your actions, got to 2. (This is "feedback" and the reason that word is now so common. People at the time knew)

The faster you go through the loop, the faster you will figure out what works.

You can measure anything you want, as vague is you want. Happiness, money, productivity. It's the way democracy is designed to work, in which case the feedback is vague and the cycle time is measured in years. It runs your thermostats, in your home, big national power grid power plants. It's how autopilots autopilot.

The idea that "nobody could have predicted..." or "nobody responsible" is a myth. We have the science. We know how it works.

Every failure we still experience is a failure we allow to happen. Because of profit, politics, or whatever.

Didn't catch something "going on for years", maybe someone should check more often. "Crazy single individual causing a tragedy"? No, that's a person at risk, probably with social or mental problems you didn't take care of before, didn't flag, and didn't stop in time.

"Nobody wants to work on our open source project" Really, how is your onboarding? Do people take a look at the docs/culture and run away screaming? Yeah?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Your premise relies on two false pretenses:

  1. That we have time to calculate how everything works. We don’t.

  2. The system doing the calculations is affected by doing the calculations. This creates infinite recursion, which by definition means we can’t actually compute everything

If our universe exists within another universe, the outer universe could calculate and predict everything in our universe, but we cannot do it from within the confines of our own universe.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Having this problem can also be managed by going through the loop. If you original goal was "calculate stuff to prevent bad things", and you can't do it because you're choosing too much accuracy, you can experiment with the accuracy until you find a good middle ground.

We can use super detailed FEM, CFD what not sophisticated science, but sometimes the stuff from the 1800s is just fine.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

The loop would need a step that involves recalculating the goal, in that case, not merely actions

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