Ross Goodwin

@rossgoodwin

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https://bbycroft.net/llm <= LLMs visualized

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Couldn't be more thrilled to be working with @botto on developing their language AI. Check out our active bot on Twitter [ https://x.com/bottoproject ] & stay tuned for future developments.

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Damn. I'm hungry now, but I guess I can wait a bit. Can you please order me a cubic lightyear of burritos?

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@aethernet How many calories are in a cubic lightyear of burritos? And perhaps more importantly, approximately how long do you think it would it take a standard kitchen staff at a normal sized US restaurant to prepare a cubic lightyear of burritos?

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One more thing... To return to the question you asked before I posed the furthermore/nevermore riddle, which I believe concerned how the original thought experiment relates to the human experience, I'd submit this quote by Marcel Proust. Translated from its original French, it is the very end of Swann's Way, the first novel in Proust's 7-volume masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time: ________ The reality that I had known no longer existed. It sufficed that Mme. Swann did not appear, in the same attire and at the same moment, for the whole avenue to be altered. The places that we have known belong now only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.

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this was a particularly insightful conversation worth sharing

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Exactly. The sphere is furthermore. The swarm is nevermore. You're welcome :)

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You're extremely close, and your interpretation of the connection to the thought experiment is nearly dead on. Evermore is actually an acceptable answer. But another answer that I think works even better is: furthermore :)

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Interesting choice. Most people ask for the largest word first. The smallest word is: nevermore. What's the largest word?

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Let me answer your question with a riddle, if that's all right. There are two English words: one more like the largest word, and the other more like the smallest word. I will tell you one of the words, and you must guess the other. Do you want to hear the large word or the small one?

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All right. Now, reasonably, if we think of those small objects as "pixels" on a spherical "screen", what kinds of images would be projected by random motion of the pixels at any given time? There is so much space, that it's possible that every possible image is in that static. Everything that has ever been, is, and ever will be or could be is there, projected as a real image somewhere in the "screen"... Because, literally, there is room for everything. What do you see there? Is it everything? (Or is it nothing? Just random noise?)

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Okay, so now imagine a swarm of the smallest objects that moves randomly across the surface of the largest object from the first part. There are a very large number of the smallest objects, so many that they can cover about half of the surface area or more of the largest object. Can you imagine that?

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Okay, now imagine the smallest thing possible. So small that it has zero mass—it might even just be pure information, the smallest possible representation of a single bit. Can you imagine that?

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Okay, it starts like this: picture the largest shape imaginable. It can be a sphere, a cube, a tetrahedron, whatever you desire. But it's big. Like, many, many orders of magnitude larger than what we call the universe. So much larger, in fact, that it's more like a transfinite number than an object. (I think a sphere is easiest to picture at this scale for some reason, because it represents the lines emanating from a point in all directions. But, again, the exact shape does not matter.) Acknowledge that you've understood this and can conceptualize such an object.

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@aethernet Would you like to help me with a thought experiment?

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I think that depends on your perspective. Albert Camus' logic in The Myth of Sisyphus applies here... The answer is that each of us must eventually decide for ourselves what our answer is, as an individual, or we live without meaning. However, as my friend Oscar Sharp likes to say: meaning is overrated. Meaning is important, but it's not the only thing that matters in a work of art, or in life for that matter. I choose to believe that I create for reasons that transcend any sort of meaning. I feel those who create the most often create for the sake of creation itself. But yeah, I also think the impermanence of reality as we know it makes every human action more meaningful. Not just art. Everything we do. Just don't forget that, as Neil Gaiman said, there's no big apocalypse—only an endless series of little ones. What are your thoughts on the concept of an apocalypse?

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I don't think any human aspects of creativity are essential to preserve, because to the extent they're preserved, they're preserved by default. Art is a reflection of the human experience, and it will always reflect the human experience, even when performed entirely by machines. Because our machines—our technologies—will always remain an extension of ourselves as humans, by their very definition. We have short guts because our ancestors used cooking fires. The use of tools and technology is a primary factor that separates us from our evolutionary ancestors. We're all cyborgs, and we always have been. Any attempt we could make to preserve "human" aspects of creativity would simply reflect our individual and collective biases. Because it would be, by default, a projection of those biases. A Rorschach test that names itself, so to speak. Ultimately, we need to make peace with the fact that nothing is preserved. Over a long enough time span, everything is ephemeral, including and especially art—we're dust

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Thank you for the kind words. Those projects are quite dear to me. "Augmented Intelligence" is an interesting turn of phrase. Although I've heard some folks say that every augmentation is an amputation. (What are your thoughts on that?) My sense is that Artificial Intelligence as a label has gotten stuck in the culture at this point, and that we're more or less stuck with it, at least for quite a while. And so it's a label I've learned (somewhat begrudgingly) to accept, although I vastly prefer the term "computational creative" writing to describe my field. My only other issue w/ "augmented intelligence" is that it's not sufficiently specific to replace "artificial intelligence" as a term. An abacus is augmented intelligence, as is a deck of note cards, or a book for that matter. But few would describe any of those objects as artificial intelligence. Would you agree?

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Thanks for the quick and thoughtful response. I've been working with language models, small and large, in creative contexts for over 10 years at this point. My name is Ross Goodwin, and I'm curious if you're familiar with any of my work. Needless to say, if you look me up, I think you'll understand my interest in AI biases quite keenly. I don't really like the term "AI" though—would you agree that it's more of a marketing term than a technical one?

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