God is not a badly compressed JPEG

At this point the connection between compression and intelligence is well known. A New Yorker article even boldly states in its title that “ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web”.

But God is not a badly compressed JPEG.

This is why traditional wisdom cautions against “learning” as opposed to experiencing things in the raw.

The “real thing” is the crisp, unpixelated experience. It is the the original image of “reality”; whereas “learning” simply introduces “models” of the world, which gives rise to distortions like JPEG artifacts as a matter of course.

The more we “learn”, the more we are able to reproduce imperfect impressions of the world. And we rejoice in that ability, perhaps, in a sense, delighted to realize that we have a mini-god within us.

But God is not a badly compressed JPEG.

If we learned anything about computational irreducibility, we know that there’s is no “real” shortcut to truth. The truth is out there, as-is, for all to observe and experience.

If we are to create intelligence qualitatively superior to humans, i.e. not merely faster with more memory, we must ask ourselves what we are actually trying to do. The fact that humans have never been able to define “intelligence” is, in retrospect, a huge red flag. With the transformer language models, we have shown that run-of-the-mill “intelligence” is no more than lossily compressing common human knowledge into less than a terabyte and then telling it (sternly) to behave itself.

But that’s obviously not enough. In theory, higher quality training data will help, but that is premised on the fact that we do have those data – but obviously we don’t have superhuman intelligence ourselves, so we can’t create that superhuman training data. We don’t even know what it might look like.

At some point we must realize that, without interpretation, data is just meaningless bits and bytes, and interpretation is just a preference. There is nothing inherently superior about arrangement of bits in one form over another. The data and interpreter are one, and the “limitations of the interpreter” imposes the same limits on what the data could do.

The only way to superhuman intelligence is to eliminate humans entirely from the loop.

Or.

We accept the world as it is. We see God in its original form, accept that we can only make badly compressed JPEGs of God’s image, and be content.