Comment by glenstein | Hacker News Reader

Comment by glenstein | Hacker News Reader

>I was a deep learning skeptic. I doubted that you could get to intelligence by matrix multiplication for the same reason you can’t get to the Moon by piling up chairs

I've always been fascinated by this example. I've also heard it referred to as climbing a tree won't get you to the Moon.

Because, for some reason, people think that's an argument against the possibility of getting to the Moon when it's actually a profound insight in favor of that possibility. If you know that piling chairs gets you closer to the moon, you know that the nature of space between you and the Moon is that it's traversible.

A criticism that would make more sense would be something along the lines of "piling up colors you won't get you any closer to the Moon", since colors aren't even the right kind of thing, and you can't aggregate them in a way that gets you spatially closer. Because that at least does not concede the fundamental relationship of spatial traverseability.

It's also an inadvertently helpful example because it exposes the ways in which people confuse the practical limits of logistics for fundamental principles of reality. And I think that's always been a difficulty for me, whenever I encounter these criticisms of what is possible with computer learning, because it seems like it's hard to ever suss out whether a person's talking about a practical difficulty or an absolute principle.

I don't know. I've been using Copilot, ChatGPT, and Bing Chat intensively in the past month. So far I still think the metaphor "you can’t get to the Moon by piling up chairs" aged very well.

> A criticism that would make more sense would be something along the lines of "piling up colors you won't get you any closer to the Moon", since colors aren't even the right kind of thing, and you can't aggregate them in a way that gets you spatially closer. Because that at least does not concede the fundamental relationship of spatial traverseability.

No. I think you misunderstood what the chair metaphor is trying to say. It makes perfect sense, and if you replaced it with colors it would stop making sense.

"You can’t get to the Moon by piling up chairs" means that even chairs and rockets share some attributes (helping you get higher), the difference between them is still qualitative, not quantitve. The problem isn't "we don't have enough chairs."

"You can't get to the Moon by piling up colors" makes zero sense because colors and rockets share so few attributes and the metaphor falls flat.

Is it true for AI? I don't know, and at this point, anyone who claims they knows for sure, is lying. But I don't think my experience with ChatGTP (GPT4 included) and Bing Chat disputes it.

>means that even chairs and rockets share some attributes (helping you get higher), the difference between them is still qualitative, not quantitve.

I don't think so, because the needed 'quality' is the ability to traverse space. So I don't think I agree that the qualitative piece is missing.

Perhaps the moon example is helpful here because the real solution, a rocket ship, uses propulsion rather than sheer mass, and so you could say that some function such as propulsion is 'qualitatively' lacking. But even that I believe exhibits the very form of confusion that I'm criticizing, which I'll explain below.

>The problem isn't "we don't have enough chairs."

Well, in a way it is. And at the risk of sounding like the type of question that Randall Monroe would answer in the book What If, even this most vulgar example would in a literal case prove true. Given enough chairs, they would topple over, but create a pile that overtime would spill and evenly distribute over the earth, and it would be the whole earth that grows until it's size is so large that it's close to the Moon.

And, I wasn't even trying to make this point, but it's actually kind of a perfect example here because Chat GPT has made all of its progress by throwing chairs (data) at the problem.

> has made all of its progress by throwing chairs (data) at the problem.

To me it seems like the most tricky thing about the whole field is that quantitative adjustments make qualitative breakthroughs. Simply increasing parameters / layers / data make sudden rapid jumps in generalization / abstraction / etc. It's somewhat unintuitive because many things in world don't work like this, and the metaphor you're discussing is more about "normal" things, it doesn't really apply to ANNs well, those are more of anomaly, like quantum mechanics (yeah, it's probably a bad analogy too).

The quote isn't talking about physical distance. It's talking about "close" in the sense of progress. You haven't made any progress towards walking on the moon even if the pile of chairs is as big as Mount Everest. There isn't just the question of toppling either, the chairs would start physically crushing each other and then they are no longer chairs.

I think this misunderstands my point across the board. Physical distance is progress, and not only that, it's the most fundamental kind of progress for this type of problem. Chairs run up against practical limitations but not in-principle limitations, and people invoke the piling-up-chairs argument because they are confused about which kinds of arguments are about practicality and which are about illustrating a conceptual principle.

>You haven't made any progress towards walking on the moon even if the pile of chairs is as big as Mount Everest.

I literally gave an example where this is exactly the thing that does, in fact, happen.

>There isn't just the question of toppling either, the chairs would start physically crushing each other and then they are no longer chairs.

I guess this means you actually read to the end of my comment, so that's good, but, this introduces JV debate team metaphysics that has nothing to do with anything, and if it did matter, you could substitute out chairs for just about any other physical material where the property of chair-ness is moot and the point would be the same. Gravel? Let's go with gravel.

But I shouldn't even have to make the point because the fundamental insight is that the nature of the problem is about the traversibility of space.

Again, this quote and this argument have been around for decades now, and it has been used to support an a whole range of arguments, some of which are now being abandoned because they seem increasingly untenable with recent advancements.

If the people who used this example in the 1960s knew that, come 2023, people were no longer making the in-principle argument, and were even denying that it was ever ever about the possibility in principle, they would wonder what the hell was happening in 2023 that rendered this position of theirs no longer respectable.

The moon is 30 earth diameters away. There isnt enough gravel on earth to build a pile that high. It's just not a working approach. If you are standing on a giant pile and want to get to the moon your best bet is walk all the way down again and start building a rocket.

Even if you had enough chairs, they are not strong enough.

They are qualitatively different because the rocket can traverse that amount of space scalably. The chairs cannot.

Six stages of acceptance:

1. We'll never land on the moon.

2. It's hard to land on the moon.

3. I never said we can't land on the moon, you just can't do it with pile of chairs.

4. I was never denying that chairs illustrate a fundamental principle that illustrates why the problem is indeed solvable in principle.

5. I was never saying distinctions about what is or isn't 'qualitative' was intended to show that we can't in fact land on the moon.

6. I know, I've been saying we'll land on the moon this whole time! I've always disagreed with people who said otherwise despite coming to defense of arguments that were used for decades to make the point that I supposedly am not endorsing!

Of course they can. Neal Armstrong literally travelled to the moon sitting in a literal chair.

Basically, the Saturn rocket was more or less a simple chair with some extra features added to it.

Granted they didn’t stack chairs. But, nevertheless, focusing on the mods you’d need to make to your La-z-boy to get to moon would be a fruitful way of approaching the problem.

>I don't think so, because the needed 'quality' is the ability to traverse space. So I don't think I agree that the qualitative piece is missing.

It's not the distance that keeps us from the moon but gravity. The needed quality to get to the moon is the ability to escape the gravity well, and chairs don't provide that.

These models are impressive but they aren't general intelligence, and I'm not sure this type of model ever will be.

If we look at it the other way around. These models have consumed more textual and graphical information than any human could ever do in a million lifetimes, and yet for most questions they don't really answer any better than the average human could. (They're much faster, so for the specific cases that they're right that's very useful).

So there is some key thing missing. I would say it is the ability to understand the text they are consuming and generating.

Interesting insight.

For me, the (tree) analogy is that of an illusion of progress: while the treetop is closer than the ground, there is no tree that can ever be tall enough to get the rest of the way.

So, it isn't supposed to be used to say "you can't do it at all", just "you can't do it like that".

But metaphors get mixed as soon as they leave the bottle of text and enter the cocktail shaker of other people's minds, so I am unshocked by the usage you are criticising here.

>So, it isn't supposed to be used to say "you can't do it at all", just "you can't do it like that".

And I'm of two minds on this, because I find that to be a respectable position, and in fact, for this reason, I hope you show up to continue debates on this because your voice would be helpful and counteracting what I believe is the less reasonable position. Depending on how long you've been following debates on the topic, which have raged from essentially the 1950s through now, I would guesstimate that "you literally can never get to the moon" has at least at times enjoyed dominance as the majority position, and when not the majority position, is at least credited as being a respectable one.

And even in this dressed up reasonable version, it still feels wrong to me in an important way: if you did have a tree that was 328,900 miles tall, you could reach the Moon. There are so many opportunities along the way to mentally short circuit, and slip into practical considerations and lose sight of the principle. Of course no such tree exists, but it has critically illustrated that the entirety of the space from here to there is in principle traversable, and it's the insight into this principle that ultimately will get us from here to there.

It does mean you need to shift your focus of research from arborism to jet propulsion, and that is the important point made by your version of this argument. But it amounts to joining the 'arborists' in championing the possibility of getting there rather than being a skeptic of the possibility, and I feel like most people making this point imagine themselves to be taking the sides of the skeptic.

I think if I had to pick a strawman expression to thoroughly defeat, it would be something like "You can't go to the moon by shooting a very big canon".

Because on the one hand, yeah, no explosion-based canon is going to get you to the moon; there's just no way to give a payload enough initial momentum to escape the earth's gravity well without killing any humans in that payload.

On the other hand, once you have canons, Newtonian physics, and an understanding that the moon is a very distant rock and not, like, a spirit god or something, then you have enough information to realize that going to the moon is only a matter of time and enough iterative improvements on those canons. It doesn't require inventing a completely novel technology like portals or teleporters or whatever. (Though it requires a ton of improvements in material science, engineering, computing, etc.)

And I think it's meaningful that From the Earth to the Moon was Jules Vernes' third book, and A trip to the Moon the first science-fiction movie even made. People could see the writing on the wall.

It's harder to make any predictions about AGI, because intelligence is a much fuzzier target than "reaching escape velocity". But it feels like neural networks are closer to the canon than to the pile of chairs: a basic concept that might not be capable of reaching general intelligence, but is only one or two steps removed from one that will reach it given enough engineering and money;

You can't use chairs to get to the moon not because of distance but because of orbital mechanics. That's why chairs work and colors don't: you think you're getting closer by stacking chairs when in reality, all you're going to do is fall down.

Until you grasp orbital mechanics, the concept of orbital velocity, and delta-V you can't possibly get to the moon. The distance might as well be infinite because the gravity well will pull you down.

It's also a completely invisible problem until you really reach altitude unless you're got a lot of theoretical background which we don't have on artificial intelligence. We don't even really know what the AI rockets will look like when compared with AI chairs.

On an abstract level, it's obvious that intelligent design, symbolic representations etc. aren't needed to build a mind, because we _evolved_ and evolution is a blind optimizer.

But concretely, all the machine learning approaches had many obvious limitations (the volume of data, lack of generalization) until they suddenly didn't, and past a certain scale features of intelligence began to emerge.

>On an abstract level, it's obvious that intelligent design, symbolic representations etc. aren't needed to build a mind, because we _evolved_ and evolution is a blind optimizer.

This is playing pretty fast and loose. First of all, I wouldn't lump intelligent design together with the claim that symbolic representations are necessary to account for certain features of human intelligence (such as the classic Fodorian triad of compositionality, systematicity and productivity).

Second, I just don't think the logic of your sentence works. Why does it make any more sense than the following?

"It's obvious that fingers aren't needed to build a hand, because we _evolved_ and evolution is a blind optimizer."

Maybe you can build a functional equivalent of a hand without giving it any fingers. But the mere fact that we evolved doesn't tell us anything about whether or not that is possible.

The point is that at no point in evolutionary history did a cognitive scientist sit down and write a bunch of S-expression GOFAI rules for human cognition.

Of course not, but who is claiming that this happened? I'm not sure I can think of even single person who is both (i) an intelligent design advocate and (ii) explicitly committed to a symbolic model of human cognitive capacities. This seems like a straw man. You might as well say that at no point in evolutionary history did an embryologist ever write down a plan for the eight developmental stages of a human fetus.

the "intelligent design advocates" doesn't refer to creationists in this context, it refers to GOFAI people.

I might be wrong but I think it’s more of a "It’s obvious you don’t need to have fingers to build a hand that has fingers" than building a fingerless functional equivalent to a hand.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com