Automation Without Understanding (arxiv.org)
60 points by root-parent 4 hours ago
titzer 2 hours ago
AIs should be forced to show their work. Every tool they use, every program they generate and run in the background, and every logical inference. They should be forced to produce Lean or Rocq proofs or execution traces for all the computation they use. For facts, they should be able to produce sources. For any abstract reasoning, they should be able to break it down into explainable steps.
Then, on top of that, they should be able to explain any of that, at any level of detail, whether talking to an expert or a layperson.
chickensong 3 minutes ago
That's an implementation preference, and you can have all of that today if you write your own harness. Vibe coding a cat meme generator doesn't need a Lean proof.
jstanley 2 hours ago
hackernewds 11 minutes ago
why?
mondrian an hour ago
It sounds ‘the singularity is near’ not so much because AI is reaching escape velocity forward, but because we’re systematically pushing humans back beyond the threshold where computers are legible?
notpachet an hour ago
I think about this a lot. From the POV of a medieval peasant, we likely reached the singularity a long time ago.
ludwik 38 minutes ago
You both seem to be using a different definition of "singularity" from the one I'm familiar with. I've always understood it to mean a rapid feedback loop in which AI creates successive, increasingly capable generations of AI outside human control, rather than simply a level of technological advancement that would be incomprehensible to someone
sachaa 2 hours ago
What worries me isn’t AI replacing experts, it’s that we may stop producing people who know enough to notice when AI is confidently wrong.
DaiPlusPlus 2 hours ago
> it’s that we may stop producing people who know enough to notice when AI is confidently wrong.
The running-joke is that a LinkedIn-lunatic AI booster, with a Nano Banana-generated profile-pic, will immediately slide into the chat to tell you that that this is already a solved problem: just spin up another agent to do the work to verify the first agent. Token-cost-be-damned. And we laugh and downvote them to oblivion and carry on with our day.
But today I had some exposure to a SotA agentic team coding loop thingie which had been running almost hands-off for a few weeks on a (pretty serious) Win32+Direct3D-to-Emscripten+WebGL porting project - and I'm genuinely spooked at how well it all works; I mention this example because all the agents' processes involved a decently rigorous verification step: any time any agent confidently asserts something then it has to provide associated evidence, such as a unit test report, or build artefact, or external citation, and the system will spawn a new agent (perhaps using a different backing LLM) to verify the claim. I know a unit-test pass/fail isn't quite the same thing as, say, a medical AI agent confidently wrong about me having/not-having terminal spleen cancer, but the capability for a team-of-agents to be self-checking is definitely there.
----
Also, the past 3 years of AI/LLM/etc developments have taught me to never cling to any shortcoming or weakness they have because plenty of them do seem to have been solved or mitigated, either directly or indirectly.
taurath an hour ago
How is the token-cost-be-damned part in the latter example?
I do find that both porting and translation projects have a much higher signal given the ease of mapping to tokens, when there is a proven working source to refer to - the source itself provides the validation. In a new project, you don’t have that validation.
DaiPlusPlus an hour ago
gedy 2 hours ago
It's agents all the way down~!
sandruso 34 minutes ago
MSkill1 3 hours ago
I'm not exactly sure how you would go about grading mathematical proficiency. I went through calculus two and discrete mathematics, but I'm sure that there are things I have forgotten now even though I would be considered familiar with most leading edge AI technology. If I'm being honest, I'm not sure I could pass the final exams I took to get my CS degree right now.
overgard 17 minutes ago
I think the differentiation going forward is going to be if you're a person that understands things or if you're a person that delegates your understanding. I don't think there's going to be a lot of economic or social value to prompting an AI to do things you don't understand. First, anyone can do it, so why should someone give you money or credibility for that? Second, as fewer and fewer people bother to learn hard things, the scarcity of that knowledge will increase its value.
I guess even if I end up being wrong about that, I'd rather enrich my life and grow as a person by continuing to learn and do hard things rather than become an annoying cheerleader dependent on unreliable tools.
piloto_ciego 4 minutes ago
lol, there aren’t going to be people giving money to other people in the long run.
“Money is the sign of a poor civilization” or something similar that a Culture GCU would say.
wwweston 2 hours ago
See also Bill Thurston’s classic Math Overflow answer to a student wondering where they fit compared to a Gauss or Euler:
https://mathoverflow.net/questions/43690/whats-a-mathematici...
“The product of mathematics is clarity and understanding. Not theorems, by themselves. [Their importance is not just in their specific statements], but their role in challenging our understanding, presenting challenges that led to mathematical developments that increased our understanding.
The world does not suffer from an oversupply of clarity and understanding (to put it mildly)… In short, mathematics only exists in a living community of mathematicians that spreads understanding and breaths life into ideas both old and new. The real satisfaction from mathematics is in learning from others and sharing with others. All of us have clear understanding of a few things and murky concepts of many more. There is no way to run out of ideas in need of clarification. The question of who is the first person to ever set foot on some square meter of land is really secondary. Revolutionary change does matter, but revolutions are few, and they are not self-sustaining --- they depend very heavily on the community of mathematicians.”
lioeters 2 hours ago
Curious to see if that can map to what's happening in the software industry/community.
> The product of software engineering (or computer science) is clarity and understanding. Not programs, by themselves. Their importance is not just in their specific statements (lines of code in a specific language), but their role in challenging our understanding, presenting challenges that led to computational (?) developments that increased our understanding.
> ..In short, software only exists in a living community of developers that spreads understanding and breaths life into ideas both old and new. The real satisfaction from computers is in learning from others and sharing with others.
That seems to work. What about other areas of human activity that are currently being consumed by automation and "AI"? Like writing, the arts, or the sciences.
measurablefunc an hour ago
Peter Naur wrote an essay about exactly that https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/016560...
lioeters an hour ago
Animats 30 minutes ago
> "the essay makes the case for treating mathematical capacity as a strategic asset on a par with semiconductor capability."
In other words, the mathematicians want more funding.
bitwize 13 minutes ago
And the Chinese are still going to kick our ass.
Ancaps are in for a major cope and seethe when they are forced to admit that the communists won the cold war.
h2aichat 2 hours ago
I see many people reacting with fear towards IA and many of them do not feel the same level of danger in other places which are clear to me (and I think that what they fear most is the unknown, as it has to be bad, for sure). I like the quote of the other message from Whitehead !!
Let's enjoy the ride. It might be last one!
koof 2 hours ago
Learning and understanding is enjoying the ride.
measurablefunc 3 hours ago
"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them." - A. N. Whitehead
titzer 2 hours ago
Yes, now we can do thinking without thinking. Good job.
measurablefunc 2 hours ago
Computers can not think & that is why they are useful. Thinking computers would become very problematic very quickly.
em-bee 2 hours ago
dehsge 2 hours ago
“It is the first step in sociological wisdom, to recognize that the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur:—like unto an arrow in the hand of a child. The art of free society consists first in the maintenance of the symbolic code; and secondly in fearlessness of revision, to secure that the code serves those purposes which satisfy an enlightened reason. Those societies which cannot combine reverence to their symbols with freedom of revision, must ultimately decay either from anarchy, or from the slow atrophy of a life stifled by useless shadows.” A. N. Whitehead
mondrian 2 hours ago
Key word: perform, i.e. execute. Scale indeed comes by performing more things per unit time, things we understand, on execution engines we understand.
browski 2 hours ago
Yeah how many of us know how to build an ICE engine or shoes of any meaningful quality
We set upon end of human craftsmanship decades ago
Math is probably the easiest to reclaim given its right in front our faces going about daily life. The syntax of math is not that important; real world quantification the syntax is meant to represent will still exist. Our biochemistry implicitly operates on senses of enough food and water, etc.
Such measures are so embedded in the daily routines we live an intuition will always exist
No one is born knowing how to make a computer as we know them today. A cup half filled is obvious