"The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate."
This shows the extreme importance of blue sky thinking and allowing people to follow their whims sometimes rather than not starting something unless it fits into existing research goals and funding. This breakthrough all lead from an observation that had no apparent use beyond fulfilling a whim and to have fun with it.
I try to live my life by the ludic principle of 'playing'. It's honestly been the lifeblood that's fueled me, kept me sane at work and allowed me to do OK in my career. All of my best ideas at work and in things like making music came from this spirit I'm convinced.
I learned my trade by playing. I suspect that many other people on HN also did. Now I do something very different, and that also came from playing, as did many of the skills that made it possible.
I still write code, but it's entirely for fun. It's a completely different experience from closing tickets in an office.
I do many other things that aren't very cost-effective, just because they're fun. They might not pay the rent, but they keep me sane enough to do the things that do. For Mr. Feynman it was playing the bongos.
Do things that don't matter. Aside from the doors it can unlock, it's just damn fun.
You can't really make a learning system that doesn't play.
Physical play is how we train, develop and calibrate our bodies; mental play does the same for our minds.
If we one day build AGI that doesn't skip and dance and draw and make up silly stories for the fun of it, that will surprise me a lot more than the other way around.
It wouldn't need to skip and dance, though. Mental play is just randomly trying to piece together different information and see the results (physical play is simpler, a subset of mental play, basically continuous calibration).
It's like having 12 puzzle sets and just taking pieces from each, trying to fit them with others and seeing the results. Sometimes something interesting shows up.
Our brains do it constantly, all the time, 24/7. Most often the results are garbage and discarded, but sometimes something interesting/useful comes out, so it's tagged as such and stored for further processing.
The data used for such play is everything we have stored in memory, recalled either randomly or, more often, based on current circumstances/needs/wants.
An AGI would only play with what it has. And what it has available would be up to the creators.
If it's built to imitate a human, it will have to be loaded with the same data as a human. And I mean all of it, everything from birth to current age or death (that varies a lot by individual, by the way).
Basically, you'd have to recreate a whole human life's experience for this hypothetical AGI. Otherwise it won't be even close to a human.
But such an advanced AI would most likely be built for specific purposes, which would save a lot of resources. It can play all it wants with that limited data, improve it and create new stuff. But it won't be able to do things like applying information from bird flight to car building, because it will simply not have that data.
> If we one day build AGI that doesn't skip and dance and draw and make up silly stories for the fun of it, that will surprise me a lot more than the other way around.
I agree, it would be sad if AI wasn't able to play with human culture. Culture is crystallized intelligence.
I've been thinking about this recently and realized that my brain is capable of drawing an incorrect conclusion about the "mattering-ness" of something based on limited data, typically a feeling arising from personal values.
The thing is, everything we do does matter, and it's one of the reasons why the Bible instructs us to "walk by faith, not by sight". On the cosmic scale of things, we don't have all the information to truly calculate whether something does (or does not) matter. In that regard, choosing to live as if what we do always matters seems like the preferred and life-giving approach.
I wonder how much is made by very simple emotions:
- playing
- competition
- noble obligations (helping someone else)
I keep looking at adult life in dismay because what people consider work would barely amount to 20 minutes of soccer when we were kids. We used to run wild for hours, hurt ourselves, attempt everything that could work and we kept asking for more. Can we plug that back into daily adult jobs ?
I really wish there was a PE class for adult, where you stretch, run around the track, then play some random sport for about an hour. One day it's cops and robbers, another it's grass hockey, and nobody knows in advance.
You could argue that having fun is the end goal of things. Why do we do things that we consider important? Why is it important? Somewhere down the line everything we do should enable someone having fun. If not, then why bother?
True. I think most people can benefit from a bit of this at least. Ie. Speaking of software engineering, at work our 10% time is for us to do as we please. A lot of good things come from that. Maybe 50% time would be too much for most though. Google's 20% is probably the maximum I'd opt for if I were a CEO.
For me setting 10% aside as "do as you please" feels like a restriction on creativity as well. It's hard to "plan" creativity. I think culture and trust is much more important than setting a number.
I agree about culture and trust, both crucial in this regard. I think something like 10% time can play a part too, it at least gives people the feeling they can do what they want for a fixed period of time.
These percentages are purely aspirational. Managing software developers' time down to the single digit percentages is impossible. In reality if you're doing something in your 20% (or whatever) that turns out to be valuable, and in particular you make your management see that it's valuable, your 20% will become 80%, and if not, then your 20% will be whatever you manage to make it.
Well, apart from being playful you also need to be a person who can figure out the equation for water funnel effortlessly as a high school kid. The rest of us can benefit from forcing oneself to intellectual effort
That just can't happen, though. Part of tenure is having experience and being able to draw from that. It isn't just job experience, either: Life experience counts and can give your different ways to think outside of the box.
The best example I can give is art related: Documentaries and other non-art learning puts a variety of concepts and ideas in your brain, making it easier to think of creative concepts for artwork.
The process takes time, though, more time than can be reasonably stuffed into getting a degree.
The uni system couldn't afford to give tenured professors freedom to follow their fancy without the "underclass" working hard to make it possible in the first place — graduate students and untenured staff do the high-volume work needed to make profits: churning out tens of thousands of undergrads per year, paid for by fed-backed loans, and definitely not all of them taught by Feynman-type professors.
I don't know if that's true, that's just my model of how American university works.
Sure. I just wonder if there is some sort of middle ground? Does it have to be zero sum here between tenured and non-tenured in this regard? I'm not sure what the answer is but other setups are possible unless you consider this one optimal (perhaps some do!).
> When I was in high school, I'd see water running out of a faucet growing narrower, and wonder if I could figure out what determines that curve. I found it was rather easy to do.
Wait, is this caused merely by the water being accelerated by gravity?
I bet most people would be able to figure out the equations for that if they got interested.
This shows the extreme importance of blue sky thinking and allowing people to follow their whims sometimes rather than not starting something unless it fits into existing research goals and funding. This breakthrough all lead from an observation that had no apparent use beyond fulfilling a whim and to have fun with it.
I try to live my life by the ludic principle of 'playing'. It's honestly been the lifeblood that's fueled me, kept me sane at work and allowed me to do OK in my career. All of my best ideas at work and in things like making music came from this spirit I'm convinced.