How Many Magics to Human Prosperity & Progress?
Call off the cults and the funerals. “AI”’s real advance is high‑dimensional prediction that generalizes without interpretable laws. That’s operational power, not Turing-Class cognition. Noah Smith says: Think of three magics: literate historical memory made knowledge accumulative; hypothesis-and-experiment science made it generalizable; AI makes it operational at scale via learning‑and‑search replacing inadequate low-dimensional cookie‑cutter models with extremely high-dimension extremely big-data extremely flexible-function prediction. But is that “Third Magic” really of the same scale as the first two? I would view things somewhat differently: I would add eyes-thumbs-brains-tools, language, and societal coördination via scaled-up gift exchange to writing and science as decisive magics. And I would say that at the moment “AI” is as likely to be a wishful mnemonic as a genuine Sixth Magic. Chatbots are useful, but they’re pass‑the‑story engines: blurry‑JPEG‑of‑the‑web plus rotoscoping, not minds. The hype machines—Downer, Boomer, Doomer—confuse cultural technology with cognition and policy with prophecy. The Downer critique underrates genuine capabilities; the Boomer gospel overstates sparks‑of‑AGI. The Doomer rapture is theology in tech drag. The economic story is a bubble build‑out: GPUs gush profit; most applications burn cash. Economically, chips win, most deployments don’t; fear of disruption fuels spending by platform monopolists remembering the fates of IBM and WIntel. Use AI where feedback is tight and stakes local; demand theory or rigorous trials where failure is catastrophic; measure, pre‑register, and watch the stages of the roll-out carefully to gauge what all this will really mean for us…
Noah Smith reposts <https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-third-magic-23f>
, with further thoughts, his “Third Magic” essay <https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-third-magic> from year-end 2022, which at the time I said was smarter than anything I had read on the internet in 2022.
Here’s why I said that, and what I said back then:
This by Noah Smith May Well Be Better than Anything I Read in All 2022:
But I would say not “three magics” but five—and maybe six:
Noah Smith: The Third Magic <https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-third-magic>: ‘A meditation on history, science, and AI: More profound and fundamental meta-innovations… these are ways of learning about the world: The first magic… history… knowledge… recorded in language…. Animals make tools, but they don’t collectively remember…. History… is what allows tinkering to stick…. Our second magic trick… was science… figuring out… principles about how the world works…. Controlled experiments…. It’s pretty incredible that the world actually works that way. If… in the year 1500… [you] told… [someome] one kooky hobbyist rolling little balls down ramps could be right about how the physical world works, when the cumulated experience of millions of human beings around him was wrong… they would have thought you were crazy. They did think that was crazy. And yet, it… worked…. But… complex phenomena have so far defied the approach…. Language, cognition, society, economics, complex ecologies these things so far don’t have any equivalent of Newton’s Laws, and it’s not clear they ever will….
The Third Magic…. “Statistical Modeling: The Two Cultures”… [a] split between… parsimonious models… [and] predictive accuracy…. Control…. Generalize… without finding any simple “law” to intermediate…. Halevy… Norvig, and… Pereira… “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data”…. “Represent all the data with a nonparametric model… with very large data sources, the data holds a lot of detail…. Trust… language…. See how far you can go by tying together the words that are already there…. Now go out and gather some data, and see what it can do”…. Underlying regularities that are difficult to summarize but which are still possible to generalize…. Black-box prediction…. We’re always in danger of overfitting and edge cases…. The “third magic” may be more like actual magic than the previous two…. But even wild, occasionally-uncontrollable power is real power….
[In] a number of subfields of economics… [circumstances] resist the natural experiment approach…. Might we apply AI tools?… Khachiyan et al. argues… “yes”…. Being able to predict the economic growth of a few city blocks 10 years into the future with even 30% or 40% accuracy…. And this is just a first-pass attempt…
What do I think? I think five or maybe six magics:
The first magic is at the individual level: eyes, hands, and brains that allow us, but just to use and make but to plan for tool-use, and so the East African Plains Ape gains fangs, claws, fur, levers, and much else.
The second magic is at the small group-collective level: ears and mouths that allow us to talk using language, and so the band of fifty of so East African Plains Apes becomes an anthology intelligence: what one knows, soon all know.
Then comes the third magic, which is Noah’s first: the artificial memory and communication device that is writing, and all of a sudden it is not just the band of fifty that is an anthology intelligence, but potentially all humanity in the present and the past.
The fourth magic is a magic of coordination: How do you get us all in harness, pulling in the same direction, but each doing our (relatively specialized) part? The fourth magic is gift-exchange, that in its hypertrophied form turns into the market economy. Doing favors for one another, in a social context in which there must br approximate balance, is what allows us to, collectively, not just know things but do things.
After that comes, as Noah correctly notes, the fifth magic of science: the experimental method, and the exaltation of ideas not because they solidify the band or help some élite run a force-and-fraud exploitation-and-domination game, but because the ideas are true and are a univeral remote control—they enable us to understand and hence control the universe.
Those five magics have brought us where we are today.
Now how likely is it that we are now at the cusp of a sixth magic? It would be: Predictive accuracy, generalization, and control without any simple intermediating laws, abstractions, or encapsulations that vastly exceeds any individual human grasp, or even the grasp of all humans working together.
Perhaps. But I need to explain what is going on. Predictive accuracy, generalization, and control based simply on the fact that we have a huge amount of data, plus enough computer power to allow us to conduct extremely high-dimensional analysis using extremely flexible functional forms. Thus we can classify situations very finely by looking at what the situations’ nearby neighbors—for the right meaning of “nearby” which we can now figure out—are?
On the one hand, I feel that this must be true—I find it very hard to imagine what our brains, or, say, a dogs’ brains, are doing in wetware other than this. On the other hand, our computers are still a lot less sophisticated than our brains. It is unclear if Moore’s Law will get us to computers of sufficient complexity. It is unclear if we can do as good a job of programming our computers as evolution has done at programming us. And, of course, we already have the real ASI—the Anthology Super-Intelligence that is all of us humans thinking together. Adding-in the new capabilities of silicon to our current ASI makes it vastly more capable. But is it enough to qualify as a genuine Sixth Magic? Perhaps. But, at least as I see it, magics one through five—eyes, hands, brains, and tools; ears, mouths, and language; writing; coördination at scale via gift-exchange amped up by money; and science—were all genuinely world-changing in a way that this latest is not yet proven to be.
However, it is now nearly three years later along this ride. What have we learned, and how do things now look different?