We do have flying cars, and we do have printers that print other printers, but both were some combination of really expensive/poor quality. Technically speaking, if you take it that most cities have 3D printers, most cities then do have micro factories, however that says nothing about general feasability...
Technology requires infrastructure and resources, and our infrastructure is strained and our resources are even more so... Until the costs become pocket change for the average person, technology will just remain generally unavailable.
The answer to your question is that chemistry is a science and we know what we are doing.
Also, that arsenic is naturally occurring and our body can handle it.
If you have ever drank apple juice or eaten rice, you have consumed arsenic. If you grow rice in the dirt with zero pesticides, it will have arsenic in it. The FDA sets the limits at the parts per billion level.
The biological half life of inorganic arsenic in a human is about 4 days, which is why people generally don't die from eating a few apple seeds over their lifetime.
If you learn chemistry, you can learn how <Chemical whatever> can be part of your extraction process yet not be part of the final product. It's a standard part of chemistry. It's fallible though, which is why the processes used for chemicals that go into food often use different processes than versions of that chemical not meant for consumption, and they have stricter regulations on purity and contaminants.
Guess what this administration would love to do with nuclear facilities...
Any time you have to include "competent" in a description of a job or related technology, that's a clue that it needs requisite oversight and (possibly exponetial) proportionate cost.
> There's so much tacit knowledge and implicit computation coming from experience, emotions, sensory inputs and from our own internal noise.
The premise of the article is stupid, though...yes, they aren't us.
A human might grow corn, or decide it should be grown. But the AI doesn't need corn, it won't grown corn, and it doesn't need any of the other things.
This is why, they are not useful to us.
Put it in science fiction terms. You can create a monster, and it can have super powers, _but that does not make it useful to us_. The extremely hungry monster will eat everything it sees, but it won't make anyone's life better.
I agree we don't have much to (physically) fear from it...yet. But the people who can't take "no" for an answer and don't get that it is fundamentally non-human, I can believe they are quite dangerous.
My point is not that LLMs are inherently trustworthy. It is that a prompt can make the intentions of the programmer clear in a way that is difficult to do with code because code is hard to read, especially in large volumes.
The solution, then, is to add comments to every difficult line of code and have an LLM check that comments match the code. Then you get precision and reliability of machine language + readability of human language
I’m not sure I agree with you that code is hard to read. I usually tend to go straight to the source code as it communicates precisely how something will behave. Well written code, like well written prose can also communicate intent effectively.
TBH. I never read prose that couldn't be in some way misinterpreted or misunderstood. Because much of it is context sensitive.
That is why we have programming languages, they, coupled with a specific interpreter/compiler, are pretty clear on what they do. If someone misunderstands some specific code segment, they can just test their assumptions easily.
You cannot do that with just written prose, you would need to ask the writer of that prose to clarify.
And with programming languages, the context is contained, and clearly stated, otherwise it couldn't be executed. Even undefined behavior is part of that, if you use the same interpreter/compiler.
Also humans often just read something wrong, or skip important parts. That is why we have computers.
Now, I wouldn't trust a LLM to execute prose any better then I trust a random human of reading some how-to guide and doing that.
The whole idea that we now add more documentation to our source code projects, so that dumb AI can make sense of it, is interesting... Maybe generally useful for humans as well... But I would instead target humans, not LLMs. If the LLMs finds it useful as well, great. But I wouldn't try to 'optimize' my instructions so that every LLM doesn't just fall flat on its face. That seems like a futile effort.
The article smacks of someone who doesn't understand version control at all...
Their main idea is to version control the reasoning, which, OK, cool. They want to graph the reasoning and requirements, sounds nice, but there are graph languages that fit conviently into git to achieve this already...
I also fundamentally disagree with the notion that the code is "just an artifact". The idea to specify a model is cute, but, these are indeterminate systems that don't produce reliable output. A compiler may have bugs yes, but generally speaking the same code will always produce the same machine instructions, something that the proposed scheme does not...
A higher order reasoning language is not unreasonable, however the imagined system does not yet exist...
Hybrids are even better, super tiny batteries with an ICE on standby.
If you scale size as well (like a motorcycle but e.g. as a tricycle for safety), you can realize some major efficiency improvements (doubling or tripling energy efficiency).
Which is why, bicycles should be the focus of transportation improvement.
Except the people hallucinating that we need to eat more meats. A couple of people requiring more caloric/protein intake doesn't make it reasonable for everyone to take in more
The advice to cut processed foods is solid and is something we have been saying for decades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_second_law
We do have flying cars, and we do have printers that print other printers, but both were some combination of really expensive/poor quality. Technically speaking, if you take it that most cities have 3D printers, most cities then do have micro factories, however that says nothing about general feasability...
Technology requires infrastructure and resources, and our infrastructure is strained and our resources are even more so... Until the costs become pocket change for the average person, technology will just remain generally unavailable.
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