it's the humility, stupid

Author: MarkBruns

_posts/2023-10-09-theory-of-quantum-information.md

@@ -6,14 +6,15 @@ date:   2023-10-09 4:30:00
 categories: emergence
 ---
 
+***Information is physical.*** Information is in the structure of the atom and the chemical bonds that atoms form. It's inside elementary particles of Nature, inside the nuclear fusion of the stars, inside superconductors and dark matter or the structure of DNA that governs the development of Life.  *Information is a* ***physical*** property, but *knowledge is human*. Human knowledge *emerges* from human interaction with information and makes humankind powerful because **knowledge is SHAREABLE.** In fact, it is the *shareability* of human knowledge that gives humankind the capacity for freedom and transcending its circumstances. Shareability is the most essential quality of knowledge ... if we cannot SHARE our knowledge, what good can it possibly be for humans?
 
-From the experimental implementation to complexity classes, from the philosophical justifications for the [Church-Turing thesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Turing_thesis) to the nitty-gritty of [Dirac's bra-ket notation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bra%E2%80%93ket_notation) and linear algebraic manipulation on [complex vector spaces](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_coordinate_space)... we can look at a text like Mike and Ike, we start to understand that knowledge is way beyond a clever idea and depends on far more than one *einstein* ... it's not one guy discovering fire, or the wheel or even something like penicillin or the transistor -- we just are not that smart as individuals, even though we are still stupid enough to file patents that attribute ideas to one individual ... we are getting smarter about knowledge, but we are not that smart yet.
+Knowledge itself is an extremely complex *thing* resting atop an even more complex foundation ... knowledge is, like beauty, completely in the eye of the beholder or in the hand of the user -- knowledge is way, way, way above and in addition to the extremely simplistic notions underpinning the simplifying assumptions we need to make large language models and vectorized words or symbols even remotely computable ... this human character of knowledge will be there if computation power grows one million-fold or one billion-fold ... human knowledge will expand faster than computation, in part because computation will be constrained by what some human can imagine, although that human will be an *einstein* or a human with intelligence and resources that represents a seemingly superhuman one-in-a-100-million capababilty. Human knowledge is and must be innately SHAREABLE by conscious humans.  
 
-Knowledge itself is an extremely complex *thing* resting atop an even more complex foundation ... knowledge is way, way, way above and in addition to the extremely simplistic notions underpinning the simplifying assumptions we need to make large language models and vectorized words or symbols even remotely computable ... it will not matter if computation power grows one million-fold or one billion-fold ... human knowledge will expand faster. 
+The more complex that knowledge seems to get, the more simple and fundamental the shareable nature of knowledge becomes. We can delve into the experimental implementation to complexity classes, from the philosophical justifications for the [Church-Turing thesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Turing_thesis) to the nitty-gritty of [Dirac's bra-ket notation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bra%E2%80%93ket_notation) and linear algebraic manipulation on [complex vector spaces](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_coordinate_space) ... but we left with an understanding that knowledge is way beyond a clever idea and depends on a clever insight of far more than one *einstein* ... it's not one guy discovering fire, or the wheel or even something like penicillin or the transistor or a quantum computer -- we just are not that smart as individuals, even though we are still stupid enough to file patents that attribute ideas to one individual ... we are getting smarter about knowledge, but we still are not that smart yet when we don't stress sharability.
 
-There are indeed individual human einsteins -- people that bright are not *that* rare ... yes, it's unlikely that we meet an einstein ... since maybe only one einstein in 10,000 finds her/his niche in the world ... but still since it's likely that einstein's IQ put him the the 0.03 percentile, if there are 8 billion humans, that means that there about 2.5 million einsteins alive today ... and maybe 250 of those people are doing OR about to do einstein-level work  ... and COLLECTIVELY humans are getting even smarter than the smartest humans ... but we are not yet smart enough to understand why humility matters.
+There are indeed individual human einsteins -- people that bright or as bright as Albert Einstein are rare, but not *that* rare ... yes, it's unlikely that we meet an einstein, even though we might fantasize that the guy in the mirror is an einstein ... maybe only one einstein in 10,000 finds her/his niche in the world ... but still since it's likely that einstein's IQ put him the the 0.03 percentile, if there are 8 billion humans, that means that there about 2.5 million einsteins alive today ... but maybe 250 or 25 of those people are doing OR able to do einstein-level work  ... and COLLECTIVELY humans are getting even smarter than the smartest humans ... but if we don't understand shareability,we are not yet smart enough to understand the limits of intelligence of one human or one machine ... or why humility matters. Perhaps a century ago it still made sense to award Nobel prizes to solo einteins working in obscurity ... but not really any more. *It's the humility, stupid.*
 
-Perhaps a century ago it still made sense to award Nobel prizes to solo einteins working in obscurity ... but not any more. Nowadays, knowledge ***emerges*** from very large populations of *einsteins* arguing with and learning from one another -- but it's not until after the concepts have been is developed by humans ... human knowledge [including the semiotics of how we represent knowledge] does not exist on its own ... 3 and 5 do not know that their sum is 8 or their product is 15; they certainly have no understanding of little rules we use like the commutative property in mathematics ... numerical analysis is terribly important to humans but ONLY to humans [and their numericl machines]... human knowledge is a matter of contexts, but it is a very imperfect, very partial **artifact** of the sum total of all human understanding ... of course, we often say that artificial intelligence is "hallucinating an answer" ... like a free verse rapster riffing on rhymes -- the AI's product is not knowledge and AI functionality or meaningful work product simply cannot extend past the realm of human knowledge, ie after all, exactly WHO is AI trying to be intelligent for?
+Nowadays, knowledge ***emerges*** from very large populations of *einsteins* arguing with and learning from one another -- but it's not until after the concepts have been is developed by humans ... human knowledge [including the semiotics of how we represent knowledge] does not exist on its own ... 3 and 5 do not know that their sum is 8 or their product is 15; they certainly have no understanding of little rules we use like the commutative property in mathematics ... numerical analysis is terribly important to humans but ONLY to humans [and their numericl machines]... human knowledge is a matter of contexts, but it is a very imperfect, very partial **artifact** of the sum total of all human understanding ... of course, we often say that artificial intelligence is "hallucinating an answer" ... like a free verse rapster riffing on rhymes -- the AI's product is not knowledge and AI functionality or meaningful work product simply cannot extend past the realm of human knowledge, ie after all, exactly WHO is AI trying to be intelligent for?
 
 It's similar for us ... we need to know our WHY ... need to think about WHO we're doing this for? Frankly, it's mostly for us ... or the guy like us who will pick up where we left off in minutes, days or years from now. We are not that smart, we were certainly not born smart ... but collectively, we GET smarter by working on the process of getting smarter.