[nilamo]

A structured language without ambiguity is not, in general, how people think or express themselves. In order for a model to be good at interfacing with humans, it needs to adapt to our quirks.

Convincing all of human history and psychology to reorganize itself in order to better service ai cannot possibly be a real solution.

Unfortunately, the solution is likely going to be further interconnectivity, so the model can just ask the car where it is, if it's on, how much fuel/battery remains, if it thinks it's dirty and needs to be washed, etc

[atroon]

>Convincing all of human history and psychology to reorganize itself in order to better service ai cannot possibly be a real solution.

I think there's a substantial subset of tech companies and honestly tech people who disagree. Not openly, but in the sense of 'the purpose of a system is what it does'.

[harrall]

I agree but it feels like a type-of-mind thing. Some people gravitate toward clean determinism but others toward chaotic and messy. The former requires meticulous linear thinking and the latter uses the brain’s Bayesian inference.

Writing code is very much “you get what you write” but AI is like “maintain a probabilistic mental model of the possible output”. My brain honestly prefers the latter (in general) but I feel a lot of engineers I’ve met seem to stray towards clean determinism.

[oxygen_crisis]

Yep, humans have had a remedy for the problem of ambiguity in language for tens of thousands of years, or there never could have been an agricultural revolution giving birth to civilization in the first place.

Effective collaboration relies on iterating over clarifications until ambiguity is acceptably resolved.

Rather than spending orders of magnitude more effort moving forward with bad assumptions from insufficient communication and starting over from scratch every time you encounter the results of each misunderstanding.

Most AI models still seem deep into the wrong end of that spectrum.

[Dylan16807]

> in order to better service ai

That wasn't the point at all. The idea is about rediscovering what always worked to make a computer useful, and not even using the fuzzy AI logic.

[idiotsecant]

I think it's very likely that machine intelligence will influence human language. It already is influencing the grammar and patterns we use.

[runarberg]

I think such influence will be extremely minimal, like confined to dozens of new nouns and verbs, but no real change in grammar, etc.

Interactions between humans and computers in natural language for your average person is much much less then the interactions between that same person and their dog. Humans also speak in natural language to their dogs, they simplify their speech, use extreme intonation and emphasis, in a way we never do with each other. Yet, despite having been with dogs for 10,000+ years, it has not significantly affected our language (other then giving us new words).

EDIT: just found out HN annoyingly transforms U+202F (NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE), the ISO 80000-1 preferred way to type thousand separator

[skjoldr]

> Convincing all of human history and psychology to reorganize itself in order to better service ai cannot possibly be a real solution.

I'm on the spectrum and I definitely prefer structured interaction with various computer systems to messy human interaction :) There are people not on the spectrum who are able to understand my way of thinking (and vice versa) and we get along perfectly well.

Every human has their own quirks and the capacity to learn how to interact with others. AI is just another entity that stresses this capacity.

[trollbridge]

Speak for yourself. I feel comfortable expressing myself in code or pseudo code and it’s my preferred way to prompt an LLM or write my .md files. And it works very effectively.

[stvltvs]

> Unfortunately, the solution is likely going to be further interconnectivity, so the model can just ask the car where it is, if it's on, how much fuel/battery remains, if it thinks it's dirty and needs to be washed, etc

So no abstract reasoning.