I saw a lot of this for the first time during the LK-99 saga when the only active discussion on replication efforts was on r/singularity. For the past solid year or two before LK-99, all they’d been talking about were LLMs and other AI models. Most of them were utterly convinced (and betting actual money on prediction sites!) that we’d have a general AI in like two years and “the singularity” by the end of the decade.
At a certain point it hit me that the place was a fucking cult. That’s when I stopped following the LK-99 story. This bunch of credulous rubes have taken a bunch of misinterpreted pop-science factoids and incoherently compiled them into a religion. I realized I can pretty safely disregard any hyped up piece of tech those people think will change the world.
“in all fairness, everything is an algorithm”
While we’re here, can I get an explanation on that one too? I think I’m having trouble separating the concept of algorithms from the concept of causality in that an algorithm is a set of steps to take one piece of data and turn it into another, and the world is more or less deterministic at the scale of humans. Just with the caveat that neither a complex enough algorithm nor any chaotic system can be predicted analytically.
I think I might understand it better with some examples of things that might look like algorithms but aren’t.
An algorithm is:
A finite set of unambiguous instructions that, given some set of initial conditions, can be performed in a prescribed sequence to achieve a certain goal and that has a recognizable set of end conditions.
For the sake of argument, let’s be real generous with the terms “unambiguous”, “sequence”, “goal”, and “recognizable” and say everything is an algorithm if you squint hard enough. It’s still not the end-all-be-all of takes that it’s treated as.
When you create an abstraction, you remove context from a group of things in order to focus on their shared behavior(s). By removing that context, you’re also removing the ability to describe and focus on non-shared behavior(s).So picking and choosing which behavior to focus on is not an arbitrary or objective decision.
If you want to look at everything as an algorithm, you’re losing a ton of context and detail about how the world works. This is a useful tool for us to handle complexity and help our minds tackle giant problems. But people don’t treat it as a tool to focus attention. They treat it as a secret key to unlocking the world’s essence, which is just not valid for most things.
