I disagree with the article. I think it is always possible to come up with reasonably small theories that capture most of the given phenomena. So in a sense, you don't need complex theories in the form of large NNs (models? functions? programs?), other than for more precise prediction.
For example - global warming. It's nice to have AOGCMs that have everything and the carbon sink in them. But if you want to understand, a two layer model of atmosphere with CO2 and water vapor feedback will do a decent job, and gives similar first-order predictions.
I also don't think poverty is a complex problem, but that's a minor point.
> I also don't think poverty is a complex problem, but that's a minor point.
I'm not sure it's a minor point. I don't think poverty is a "complex" problem either, as that term is used in the article, but that doesn't mean I think it fits into one of the other two categories in the article. I think it is in a fourth category that the article doesn't even consider.
For lack of a better term, I'll call that category "political". The key thing with this category of problems is that they are about fundamental conflicts of interest and values, and that's a different kind of problem from the kind the article talks about. We don't have poverty in the world because we lack accurate enough knowledge of how to create the wealth that brings people out of poverty. We have poverty in the world because there are people in positions of power all over the world who literally don't care about ending poverty, and who subvert attempts to do so--who make a living by stealing wealth instead of creating it, and don't care that that means making lots of other people poor.
Every sedentary society has historically scared its members of the dangers of the nomadic lifestyle, heathens, ...
The implied conclusion being that since our ancestors switched from nomadic to sedentary it must have been preferable, a kind of informal democratic collectively and individually approved choice.
Surely sedentary must have been better, how else could such a transition have been sustained?
Rather easy how else: its perfectly possible for average or mean life quality under sedentary lifestyle to be a net setback compared to nomadic lifestyle, since slavery can't be effectively implemented in a nomadic lifestyle, whereas the sedentary lifestyle creates both the demand for labor (routine monotonous work in the fields) and the means to enable slavery (escaping nomadic tribes under Brownian motion is much easier than escaping from a randomly assigned position deep in a larger sedentary empire, even if you escape the sedentary village, the stable neighbouring village will happily return you to "your owner" so that he would hopefully return the favor if ever he catches one of "their slaves").
It's easy to claim a net improvement in life quality ... by discounting the loss of life quality of the slaves!
Nomadic lifestyle was simply outcompeted by sedentary-enabled slavery!
> I think it is always possible to come up with reasonably small theories that capture most of the given phenomena.
I can write a program (call it a simulation of some artificial phenomenon) whose internal logic is arbitrarily complex. The result is irreducible: the entire byzantine program with all of its convoluted logic is the smallest possible theory to describe the phenomenon, and yet the theory is not reasonably small for any reasonable definition.
That's true but I can still approximate what the system does with a simpler model. For example, I can split states of the system into n distinct groups, and measure transition probabilities between them.
Thermodynamics is a classic example of a phenomenological model like that.
> requires an amount of time approaching the time spent if they had just done it themselves
It's actually often harder to fix something sloppy than to write it from scratch. To fix it, you need to hold in your head both the original, the new solution, and calculate the difference, which can be very confusing. The original solution can also anchor your thinking to some approach to the problem, which you wouldn't have if you solve it from scratch.
Sloppy code that has been around for a while works. It likely has support for edge cases you forgot about. Often the sloppyness is because of those edge cases.
those are different things. Often you don't plan for all the necessary things and so it doesn't fit in - even though a better design evists that would have it fit in neater - but only years latter do you see it and getting there is now a massive effort you can't afford. The result looks sloppy because on hindsight right is obvious
It might unravel intellectual property, just not in a fair way. When capitalism started, public land was enclosed to create private property. Despite this being in many cases a quite unfair process, we still respect this arrangement.
With AI, a similar process is happening - publicly available information becomes enclosed by the model owners. We will probably get a "vestigial" intellectual property in the form of model ownership, and everyone will pay a rent to use it. In fact, companies might start to gatekeep all the information to only their own LLM flavor, which you will be required to use to get to the information. For example, product documentation and datasheets will be only available by talking to their AI.
> How does China incentivize its executives to spend money on redundancy?
IMHO, China has two parallel hierarchies of status - one in the ruling party, other in private sector. So the ruling party can maintain the capitalist competition, and dictate overall industrial policy, which fuels the innovation.
In the West, the rich people owning capital captured the political class, so there is only one status hierarchy now - of capitalists. This hierarchy ossifies and becomes increasingly resistant to competition - why invest into something new when it will most likely cause your individual wealth to decrease?
I think this manifests as the wealthy class increasingly speculating on the rising price of assets and extracting rents from them, rather investing in productive infrastructure. So the neoliberalism (capitalism) is in a sort of tragedy of commons, where wealthy individuals benefit more from this financialization rather than actual production.
The West avoided this in the past by having strong unions and middle class controlling the policy through democracy, which balanced the accumulation of wealth. If China can in the future avoid this (or other) trap, where the status elite ossifies and prevents investment in the interest of whole society, remains to be seen.
Not with modern cellular and Wi-Fi tech we can't. Base stations literally “steer the beam” to follow you. Precise location spying is essential to the way they achieve such high throughput.
Of course we can, these are all non physical properties of the universe. We can design things to not enable tracking or advertising, we just don't because the public isn't allowed to provide public solutions so we're forced to use malware by corporations that profit off of the malware.
Do people seriously forget that humans design with an explicit purpose? That purpose can change you know...
edit: needs to be stated that the last data privacy law the US passed was regarding video rentals in the 80s.
we can't have privacy for mail contents. the post network literally "routes the package" via the address on the box. digging through your mail is essential to the way they achieve such delivery rates
“Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program, in which Postal Service computers photograph the exterior of every piece of paper mail that is processed in the United States”
That's different. That's only tracking to a granularity of a postally recognized address. News flash, that address isn't you. It's somewhere you probably are at some point, but it isn't you. Cellular network tracking and surveillance on the other hand... You can't really get around that problem without everything being designed with store & forward in mind.
This confuses a technology used for the purpose of optimizing the performance of a technology with tracking for the purposes of selling you crap or keeping tabs on your location for unwarranted reasons. Huge difference. The former does not entail the latter.
Actually it is physically impossible to have any wireless comms at all without giving away a unique identity that can be tracked. Not unless you're going to replace your phone's radio every time you send some data. Every single transmitter has a unique fingerprint that can be identified relatively easily. It's called Specific Emitter Identification. If at any point a fingerprint is associated with your identity, it's trivial for a state actor to know exactly who and where you are every time your phone transmits something. They don't have to know what you're sending. The electromagnetic spectrum is not a private medium.
How things are aren’t the only way things could be.
A receiver could use a new random ID to call “collect” to a secure third party network which agrees to pay for the base stations bandwidth for every connection. The station then responds to the base station yep ID X’s bandwidth will be paid by vert tel.
Obviously, this doesn’t eliminate the possibility of tracking as you’d want the cell to have multiple connections created and abandoned randomly, but it does remove that ID you’re concerned with.
GP is referring to manufacturing variance in the radio equipment, not the deliberately-inserted tracking identifiers. See, for example, doi:10.1016/j.dsp.2025.105201 and doi:10.3390/rs17152659 for relatively cheap approaches.
The solution to this is just to make it illegal to store and process the results of such analysis applied to radio signals, without consent of the data subject (GDPR jurisdictions have that already), and to enforce that law.
Intentional noise can obstruct that signal. Which should be obvious from a pure information theory perspective, if you can extract more information from a transmission to identify the radio a transmitter could modulate that to carry information.
Even going to the extreme of a friendly jammer producing a countersignal is only enough to fool the bottom end of hobbyists. The only thing you can do to stop SEI to a certainty is to trash a radio after you've used it once. It's an unsolvable problem outside of that, and known as such for decades.
I’ve read papers saying otherwise. In real world conditions when you’re trying to track moving transmitters, we are talking about an extremely difficult to detect signal and you’re trying to accurately identify an extremely large number of devices.
You're confusing a technical limitation with a policy decision. Just because the cell tower (as currently designed) needs to know your fairly-precise location at all times, it doesn't mean that location needs to be stored indefinitely or used against you.
We could live in a world where we have strictly-enforced privacy laws. We don't, and that sucks, and if anything, we're moving further away from that state of affairs very day. But we could.
I'm not confusing anything. I'm saying that even if you completely eliminated the latter, your privacy will still be compromised by the former. When “The Government” is the entity wanting to know where you are, it doesn't matter which private company they compel to participate. They will just go for the path of least resistance, and as long as your location data is recorded by something, somewhere, they will get it.
> They will just go for the path of least resistance, and as long as your location data is recorded by something, somewhere, they will get it.
There is the real problem. It’s not a tech issue. It’s a people problem. Most governments don’t actually _respect_ and _serve_ their people. They see them as cattle to be monitored and manipulated.
You're missing the point. Just because it's possible for that tracking to happen, it doesn't mean it has to happen. We could have strong privacy laws. Mobile carriers (and anyone else) could be required to not store this data at all, or at the very least delete it after a short time. We could have mandated surprise audits to ensure this actually happens. We could have significant, company-ending fines for non-compliance.
We don't, and that sucks. But it's not a binary choice between "you can carry your phone everywhere" or "you can avoid having your movements stored in a database indefinitely". There are other options that we as a society could choose, if we could get our acts together.
Sure, the opsec ideal is that you don't have to trust other parties in the first place. But honestly, for the vast majority of people, that sort of thing doesn't matter, and having strong, readily-enforced privacy laws would be more than sufficient to keep people safe and secure.
One problem is that such information can be useful for non surveillance purposes, for example: how they knew certain roads were congested before GPS was the mobile networks. I personally do not see anything nefarious about this, nor would I necessarily wish to see this kind of information as uncollectable. Such things are different from tracking specific individuals, yes, but it's not that different. It then becomes a matter of what, how much, and for what purposes the information can be collected, which can be somewhat moot since the government in all likelihood will give themselves an opt out anyway.
None of this is to say that we shouldn't try, or that it's futile, but rather that it's a daunting task: the only way to really defeat this is to not only regulate private entities but also the government itself. And the only way to do that is to make such surveillance political suicide. And the only way to do that is to get the people to care about privacy. Here in the UK, the public has more or less come to accept CCTV cameras being everywhere, with the government now introducing AI face-scanning cameras, which has not been met with much public resistance. And so I do have to echo what @everdrive said: "We've done this to ourselves". Whether it's about convenience or apathy or whatever, we've had the means to object to this and we haven't.
That's a problem with any self-improving tools, not just LLMs. Successful self-improvement leads to efficiency, which is just another name for laziness.
I think intelligence in general means solving (and manipulating) constraint problems. So when you ask AI to, say, write a "snake game", it figures out what this means in terms of constraints to all the possible source codes that can be written (so it will have things like the program is a game, so it has a score, there is a simple game world and there is user input connected to the display of the game world and all sorts of constraints like this), and then it further refines these constraints until it picks a point (from the space of all possible programs) that satisfies those constraints, more or less.
One beautiful thing about current AI is that this process can handle fuzzy constraints. So you don't have to describe the requirements (constraints) exactly, but it can work with fuzzy sets and constraints (I am using "fuzzy" in the quite broad sense), such as "user can move snake head in 4 directions".
Now, because of this fuzzy reasoning, it can sometimes fail. So the wrong point (source code) can get picked from the fuzzy set that represents "snake game". For example, it can be something buggy or something less like a canonical snake game.
In that case of the failure, you can either sample another datapoint ("write another snake game"), or you can add additional constraints.
Now, the article argues in favor of formal verification, which essentially means, somehow convert all these fuzzy constraints into hard constraints, so then when we get our data point (source code of the snake game), we can verify that it indeeds belongs to the (now exact) set of all snake games.
So, while it can help with the sampling problem, the alignment problem still remains - how can we tell that the AI's (fuzzy) definition of a functional "snake game" is in line with our fuzzy definition? So that is something we don't know how to handle other than iteratively throwing AIs at many problems and slowly getting these definitions aligned with humans.
And I think the latter problem (alignment with humans on definitions) is the real elephant in the room, and so the article is IMHO focusing on the wrong problem by thinking the fuzzy nature of the constraints is the main issue.
Although I think it would definitely be useful if we had a better theoretical grasp on how AI handles fuzzy reasoning. As AI stands now, practicality has beaten theory. (You can formalize fuzzy logic in Lean, so in theory nothing prevents us from specifying fuzzy constraints in a formal way and then solving the resulting constraint problem formally, it just might be quite difficult, like solving an equation symbolically vs numerically.)
But isn't it just a failure to communicate it? What if almost all other people are similarly disillusioned?
Also, according to psychologists, one negative experience outweighs roughly five positive experiences of the same magnitude. So, as we get older, we might have tendency to accumulate negative experiences, and as a result become more cynical and less idealistic. And so it kind of perpetuates.
These people, who make purchasing decisons, also make them on behalf of someone's preferences, mixed with their own, to the extent they have a say. Like the market, government represents certain weighted subset of people. With the market, the people in the government are under influence just as much as anybody else. You can't really say that preferences flow a certain way, from government to business.
"Market" is a proxy for other things, and different people mean different things when they say it. So when we talk about the "market" wanting or doing something, we aren't always talking about the same thing. This is important to realize, so that we don't conflate separate concepts and talk past each other.
I wasn't really sure how to respond, it seemed obvious to me, so I put your question with the two comments into Claude. I genuinely think it gave a great response. I encourage you (or anybody) to try yourself next time, but here it is:
The second person was essentially unpacking the phrase "the market" to reveal who it actually represents. Here are the top 3 interpretations of their point:
1. The market isn't a neutral arbiter — it's a voting system where money is the vote. When we say "the market decides," we're really saying that people with more money have more say. A billionaire's preference for a luxury yacht counts for vastly more than a poor person's need for affordable housing. So "market outcomes" aren't some objective measure of what society wants — they reflect what wealthy people want.
2. The first person's critique is correct, but misdirected. By saying "the market" is indifferent to people's well-being, the first commenter was almost treating the market like an external, autonomous force. The second person is saying: it's not some mysterious system — it's just rich people's preferences given structural power. The problem isn't the abstraction called "the market"; the problem is inequality in who gets to participate meaningfully in it.
3. The language of "the market" obscures a political reality. Calling something a "market outcome" makes it sound natural, inevitable, and impersonal. But framing it as "rich people's preferences dominate resource allocation" makes it sound like what it actually is — a political and social choice about whose interests get prioritized. The second person is essentially calling out the ideological function of the word "market" as a way to launder what is really a power structure.
The three interpretations overlap, but they emphasize different things: the mechanics of how markets work, the validity of the first person's critique, and the rhetorical/political role of market language respectively.
Yes, it was clear that you wanted to refocus this as a moral problem of people. But that's irrelevant. The point of the guy above is that there is a system (the market) that creates certain incentives, and as a result, we have what we have. That's why I ask: what's your point? We still have all these problems.
So are you asking how to change it? I think that's pretty obvious once people understand it's a collective social choice - organize to change it. The point is "the market" is not some mysterious unreachable force.
For example, this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47181837 is wrong; even if you had large amount of people acting like that person does, you would still likely have a system that doesn't work in the interest of society.
I'm no asking how to change it. And I don't think anyone has suggested that the market is some mysterious unreachable force. To be honest, at this point it's clear that you're being condescending and assuming people believe something foolish instead of trying to understand what they're actually saying.
Also, unlike US and Russia, China has green transition as an official policy. There are additional savings from total electrification. (I think they also care more about longterm and being closer to the equator and the sea, they better understand the consequences of global warming.)
For example - global warming. It's nice to have AOGCMs that have everything and the carbon sink in them. But if you want to understand, a two layer model of atmosphere with CO2 and water vapor feedback will do a decent job, and gives similar first-order predictions.
I also don't think poverty is a complex problem, but that's a minor point.
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