While I agree that the potential for AI (we probably need a better term than LLMs or transformers as multimodal models with evolving architectures grow beyond those terms) in exploring less testable topics as more testable is quite high, I’m not sure the air gapping on information can be as clean as you might hope.
Does the AI generating the stories of Napoleon’s victory know about the historical reality of Waterloo? Is it using something like SynthID where the other AI might inadvertently pick up on a pattern across the stories of victories distinct from the stories preceding it?
You end up with a turtles all the way down scenario in trying to control for information leakage with the hopes of achieving a threshold that no longer has impact on the result, but given we’re probably already seriously underestimating the degree to which correlations are mapped even in today’s models I don’t have high hopes for tomorrow’s.
I think the way in which there’s most impact on fields like history is the property by which truth clusters across associated samples whereas fictions have counterfactual clusters. An AI mind that is not inhibited by specialization blindness or the rule of seven plus or minus two and better trained at correcting for analytical biases may be able to see patterns in the data, particularly cross-domain, that have eluded human academics to date (this has been my personal research interest in the area, and it does seem like there’s significant room for improvement).
And yes, we certainly could be. If you’re a fan of cosmology at all, I’ve been following Neil Turok’s CPT symmetric universe theory closely, which started with the Baryonic asymmetry problem and has tackled a number of the open cosmology questions since. That, paired with a QM interpretation like Everett’s ends up starting to look like the symmetric universe is our reference and the MWI branches are variations of its modeling around quantization uncertainties.
(I’ve found myself thinking often lately about how given our universe at cosmic scales and pre-interaction at micro scales emulates a mathematically real universe, just what kind of simulation and at what scale might be able to be run on a real computing neural network.)
While I agree that the potential for AI (we probably need a better term than LLMs or transformers as multimodal models with evolving architectures grow beyond those terms) in exploring less testable topics as more testable is quite high, I’m not sure the air gapping on information can be as clean as you might hope.
Does the AI generating the stories of Napoleon’s victory know about the historical reality of Waterloo? Is it using something like SynthID where the other AI might inadvertently pick up on a pattern across the stories of victories distinct from the stories preceding it?
You end up with a turtles all the way down scenario in trying to control for information leakage with the hopes of achieving a threshold that no longer has impact on the result, but given we’re probably already seriously underestimating the degree to which correlations are mapped even in today’s models I don’t have high hopes for tomorrow’s.
I think the way in which there’s most impact on fields like history is the property by which truth clusters across associated samples whereas fictions have counterfactual clusters. An AI mind that is not inhibited by specialization blindness or the rule of seven plus or minus two and better trained at correcting for analytical biases may be able to see patterns in the data, particularly cross-domain, that have eluded human academics to date (this has been my personal research interest in the area, and it does seem like there’s significant room for improvement).
And yes, we certainly could be. If you’re a fan of cosmology at all, I’ve been following Neil Turok’s CPT symmetric universe theory closely, which started with the Baryonic asymmetry problem and has tackled a number of the open cosmology questions since. That, paired with a QM interpretation like Everett’s ends up starting to look like the symmetric universe is our reference and the MWI branches are variations of its modeling around quantization uncertainties.
(I’ve found myself thinking often lately about how given our universe at cosmic scales and pre-interaction at micro scales emulates a mathematically real universe, just what kind of simulation and at what scale might be able to be run on a real computing neural network.)