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Yeah, how many people do you think understand the Linux kernel in full? What percentage of the people using it to great commercial effect can understand it?

How's your understanding of Schroedingers "An Undulatory Theory of the Mechanics of Atoms and Molecules"? You seem to be using the results of it as applied to semiconductor engineering just fine. And, I promise you, most semiconductor engineers haven't read it in full, they just accepted the results as passed on by several layers of teacher.

I have a paper on routing algorithms, which I have attempted to read to my cat. I don't think my cat retained much, but they seem to be enjoying the cat food that got delivered using the results.

I'd suggest that we're going to be a lot closer to the cat than the author of the paper when AI takes off.

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> how many people do you think understand the Linux kernel in full?

"Not many people understand some things fully" is so massively different from "the human mind is incapable of understanding some things that AI will understand for us"

Yeah. We're only starting the journey of building tools better at thinking than the human mind, so expecting me to have examples of things it produces is a little hard, don't you think?

The best I can do is things that are incomprehensible to nearly everyone, but still provide value. There's a small leap of imagination to consider an author that understands it and can show others how to leverage results without understanding be mechanical rather than biological.

You've moved the goalposts. The original claim was about producing mathematics that are in principle impossible for any human to understand.

All the stuff you've listed is understood by some person, and that understanding is the source of its value.

Now that we've cleared that up, can you furnish an example that satisfies the original claim of incomprehensibility and value?

You asked for examples, for a technology that we're still building. Maybe you can see the issue with that?

Anyways, people benefitted greatly from Newton's laws of gravity, even though we still don't have a quantum-compatible set of laws for it. The laws of gravity are still incomprehensible for people, but the approximation that we've observed is still immensely valuable.

No, I gave you a lot more leeway than that. Take any utterly incomprehensible piece of writing from the entire history of civilization and demonstrate its value.

You keep falling back on "incomprehensible for some people" but that wasn't the claim. It was about a text which is incomprehensible in principle; that is, utterly impossible for any human to ever understand.

Can you give me an example single piece of writing that the author didn't claim they understood? I don't think that any utterly incomprehensible writing exists.

If you want examples where nobody but the author understands it, examples are a dime a dozen.

So you concede the point then. The age of humans comprehending things is not coming to an end. And therein lies the rub. When it comes to intellectual labour:

Understanding == Value

If a mathematician produces something incomprehensible then it has no value. It's meaningless. Indistinguishable from random noise.

An AI which produces incomprehensible text is producing no value. We didn't need to spend trillions of dollars on LLMs to figure that out. Markov chains can do that job perfectly well.

You may have missed the present tense. I didn't say it's over, but that it will be. Please pay attention and don't make straw men.

Again, do you believe that there are documents, of any value, that humans don't understand?

Maybe an LLM could help you notice what I was saying, since it's clearly beyond at least one human's comprehension!

Again, do you believe that there are documents, of any value, that humans don't understand?

There is no value in an undeciphered document until understanding is achieved, just as a lode of gold ore in some asteroid orbiting a distant star has no value until we can fly there and extract it.

If an LLM can help us understanding something then it was not incomprehensible, by definition.

But this is just arguing over word tenses. You think "cannot", they think "could". Somewhere between there is the actual crux of disagreement.

His examples work fine but you aren't accepting them because they don't confine to your paradox.

Every writing must be comprehensible to at least the author, regardless of whether it has commercial value or not. If I hit the keyboard a few times, I've created writing, but it doesn't mean anything. It is just gibberish and without meaning, so there is nothing to try to comprehend. So if there is something to be comprehended, then at minimum the author should know it.

Therefore what you keep claiming is the only refute of your argument of "an [...] incomprehensible [...] writing" is actually a paradox, and cannot be disproved itself. However "humans comprehending things" is not a paradox, which means that your specific request to beat your paradox is not actually related at all.

His examples disproving the non-paradox version of your challenge (writing incomprehensible to folks other than the original authors) are sufficient to disprove your statement, as he gave examples of both people not comprehending human made and 'God' made writing (the universe/gravity)

That's because his examples are obvious and not at all interesting, since we've already seen them.

His original claim amounts to creating an AI that takes its place above humans as some kind of electronic God, delivering edicts to humanity that we cannot comprehend, but which somehow have value to us. It's unskeptical, pseudo-religious nonsense.

I don't see that at all. Nowhere did this person evoke placing AI above people or even remotely evoke religious imagery. You imagined that yourself, and that creeps me out.

It’s right here:

The age of humans comprehending things is coming to an end [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49312914

That does not place AI above humans and neither does it evoke anything religious.

Look at it this way. AI has destroyed humanity at chess for decades now. That doesn't mean we have placed AI above humans in the general sense.

You have basically totally fabricated what you thought the other person was saying.

There are plenty of artifacts that, if not impossible for humans to understand, then at least no human has ever completely understood. To start with, the universe as a whole. Despite that, we are able to choose legible pieces of it to model and perform useful actions from.

This will shift your argument--that doesn't count! etc., to the point where it's by construction unsatisfiable and vacuous. And it doesn't matter: an LLM might e.g. break some cryptographic algorithm in a way utterly unintelligible to humans, but the fact that it works would be sufficient on its own to make all of us choose to abandon that algorithm and choose different ones.

One person need not completely understand something for it to have value; it's sufficient for there to exist a shared understanding.

an LLM might e.g. break some cryptographic algorithm in a way utterly unintelligible to humans, but the fact that it works would be sufficient on its own to make all of us choose to abandon that algorithm and choose different ones.

No, that is the entire point. If it is an algorithm which accomplishes something useful, then it is intelligible as such. That which is incomprehensible cannot be understood even in part, so it provides no value as a bit of knowledge (unless you're looking for a strong random number source, I suppose).

So, what you're asking for is an example of someone extracting value out of something that is fundamentally irreducible random noise?

Nothing is in principle impossible to understand. It just takes too long, is inconvenient and/or economically unviable.

I don’t find it hard at all to imagine that an AI comes up with a fundamental proof applicable to physics which results in some widget we can now produce that would otherwise not have been produced yet nobody takes the time to fully comprehend why it works. Somebody could, in principle, devote their lives to it and possibly get it, but for what purpose?

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