This raises an important question: What is the goal of human knowledge? As I see it — and as Breiman sees it — the fundamental objective is not understanding but control. By recording which crops grow in which season, we can feed our families. By understanding that germs cause disease, we can know to wash our hands or get a vaccine, and lower our risk of death. In these situations, knowledge and understanding might be intrinsically satisfying to our curiosity, but that satisfaction ultimately pales in importance to our ability to reshape our world to our benefit.
Noah Smith
The Third Magic
Control is survival evolved.
(B)eing able to predict the economic growth of a few city blocks 10 years into the future with even 30% or 40% accuracy is leaps and bounds ahead of anything I’ve ever seen. It suggests that rather than being utter incomprehensible chaos, some economic systems have patterns and regularities that are too complex to be summarized with simple mathematical theories, but which nevertheless can be captured and generalized by AI.
Noah Smith
The Third Magic
Let’s say it’s 100% accurate. What happens we do predict ten years into the future, and then, ten years into the future, it’s observed and it’s not 100%? Do we say that the model was right but the inputs changed? Or do we have a way more intriguing phenomenon going on that mimics existential questions in the quantum realm?