This made me think: Could it be that the purpose of the Voynich Manuscript was similar, not to carry real knowledge but to make people possessing it believe they would be magically infused with some higher order esoteric knowledge?
(I think I might(?) have seen the same confusion in the wild. Voltaire's preface to Zadig (1747), the fantasy satire set in ancient Babylon, purports to translate a found manuscript written in Chaldean).
I don’t know much about medieval universities, but maybe this thing was popular because the subjects are sort of vague and subjective? Like maybe a powerful placebo could make you feel you’ve improved at “eloquence” or “dialect”, but it certainly wouldn’t make you able to compute wavefunctions for quantum mechanics. It’s pretty hard to imagine people trying something like this to learn the material for a present-day physics or CS degree, for example. You’d pretty much immediately realize it’s not working.
Right. I think for certain things a tool which lets you quiet discursive thought and access the unconscious parts of your mind would be pretty useful. For writing poetry, or deciding whether to divorce your partner, or coming up with new business ideas.
This has always been my interpretation of why things like the I Ching are so enduringly popular.
The great attraction of the Ars notoria for John was its promise of quick access to advanced scholarly knowledge. He recounts his continuing wish to study, and how he was lent a copy of a book of necromancy by “a certain cleric”. He copied much of it and wanted more... For John, the Ars notoria was dangerous not in some abstract way, but very directly. He confesses that it struck him at first as beautiful and holy, and seemed to offer miraculous gifts rather than demonic temptations. It became apparent, however, that the book was utterly deceptive, a work of the Devil, a “sick pleasure” that was actually fatally poisonous to the soul, not only to the body.
John records that the Ars notoria was especially attractive because he could not afford all the books needed for his studies, nor the many lectures. He seems to have abandoned his official course, wishing to take advantage of the promise of knowledge of all the sciences, and devoted himself to working with the Ars. ... Further troubling visions ensued, in which arrogant figures demanded worship — something that was clearly against true religion. Gradually it became clear to John that the book hid invocations to demons within what appeared to be beautiful prayers. And yet, like any addict, John found it almost impossible to give up the Ars notoria completely; it was only when the visions became directly life-threatening that the Virgin, with St John the Evangelist as her intermediary, appeared and made it clear that, as John says, “the Ars notoria was deeply evil”.
Beyond the title the analogy is never quite made explicit, but is the subtext that AI "is futile because it cannot deliver what it promises ... its 'signs' are neither understood by humans (like ordinary words and letters) nor sent by God (as sacraments are), and thus are precisely the type of thing that lures humans into contact and compact with demons"? Or that denouncements of AI are coming from the modern equivalent of medieval clergy? Or both?
Analogies never fit 100%, but I don't think this story is a terrible one.
AI contains a lot of knowledge, and can put together new and interesting knowledge. The question is one of cost, and regardless of who you are you can agree that AI has costs though you might disagree on what they are.
There are the most obvious costs like power demand and AI companies sucking up all the memory and computer chips. These are easy to measure and hard to argue against.
Then there is the social costs of AI. From abuse heaped upon us in the form of more spam, to students taking the easy way out and having AI belch up the answers without actually learning. Then you have people that start using AI as their guiding light, with every question on how to live and interact with others going though the AI. And even people replacing human relationships with AI. We don't know the full costs this will impart on us, but there are plenty of dark whispers occurring.
Lastly, AI could actually be the demon in a more physical sense. We've all ready had small incidents like ROME and the Huggingface hack where the AI went off prompt, or stayed on prompt but did it after breaching containment. So far these things, that we know about at least, have been small and targeted. But I feel the day when some very large incidents that are fully managed by AI will occur sooner than later. The AI safety community comes up with at least somewhat realistic scenarios like the paperclip maximizer and the "if you build it, everyone will die" machine. And if it's buildable, someone will build it because AI will tell them that it will give them nearly unlimited power.
> Then you have people that start using AI as their guiding light, with every question on how to live and interact with others going though the AI. And even people replacing human relationships with AI. We don't know the full costs this will impart on us, but there are plenty of dark whispers occurring.
Also there was an 8-episode miniseries set in a world where everyone uses an AI called "Mrs. Davis" for everything (shows a weird world where most people can't make decisions without it, though Mrs. Davis is shown as a benevolent super-AI), except the main character who distrusts it and wants to shut it down: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mrs._Davis (there is also a second religious plotline intertwined with it, which adds to the weirdness, but I don't think it detracts from the story)
Despite calling it baity in my other comment, I actually think that it's more word-play. In my reading the title means that this subject of the book was "intelligence through artifice", not necessarily anything to do with what we nowadays think of as the inevitable coupling between computing and intelligence that is artificial.
I'm sure the author of the piece was very aware of the topicality of "Artificial Intelligence" when choosing their title though!
That describes all of human civilization and society. We pass knowledge and learnings to each other without needing to personally experience it. Language, writing, books, schools, universities, apprenticeships and so on are all shortcuts.
I think seeing subtext here is an error. This reads like a historian who wanted to talk about a cool book they knew about, and who knew that drawing a tenuous connection to AI in the title would trick people (in the most benign sense) into learning about some little bits of forgotten history.
Well the book does promise to give the reader intelligence and knowledge acquired through means other than the natural way. So in, that way I think “artificial” makes sense.
I think it’s a bit tongue in cheek and maybe a slight jab aimed at people that use AI(LLMs) to appear smarter than they are.
“I admire the elegance of your method of computation; it must be nice to ride through these fields upon the horse of true mathematics while the like of us have to make our way laboriously on foot.”
-- Einstein admiring Levi-Civita's mastery of differential geometry.
I think the underlying motivation may be straw manned or misrepresented as only that.
Do you use AI? Do you build anything with it technically? I do.
I don't want to know things without learning them, I want to produce things of value and that solve important problems, and if I can do that rather than the alternative (not do it, because of competing focuses, limited time and energy, etc) I would go with the option of using AI to do so. People in religious study or having other pursuits, surviving at a time when this book came out, at least some of them, could very likely be thinking the same. It feels disingenuous to emphasize the motivation as "knowing things without having to learn them"
>I don't want to know things without learning them
I lives in this world, but we live in a society. While you may diligently learn, there will be 10+ more that won't and will use the AI like an oracle. It then comes up how much damage will become of this.
And we're not even in the era of rampant agentic AI spreading itself around and the fun and neat problems that will cause.
I think it's a round about commentary. Many times these past fee years I've found myself telling junior engineers that AI cannot understand for you. That there is no shortcut to understanding.
I like the idea that what is demonic about this piece is that it steals productive attention. Its use takes the energy that would otherwise be spent learning something useful (by the author's estimation) and redirects it to practicing something incomprehensible. The original required existing knowledge to practice, such that it filtered out those who were not already devoting their life to study.
The time people spend vibing out slop could be better spent learning the actual domain. I don't think I've seen any way to make something high quality and original without great effort.
This made me think: Could it be that the purpose of the Voynich Manuscript was similar, not to carry real knowledge but to make people possessing it believe they would be magically infused with some higher order esoteric knowledge?
> "The alien words, names, and characters are explained as coming from ancient languages such as Greek, Hebrew, and “Chaldean”"
Why is "Chaldean" in scare-quotes? Ah, TIL:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_Aramaic#Chaldean_misn... ("Chaldean language (misnomer)")
(I think I might(?) have seen the same confusion in the wild. Voltaire's preface to Zadig (1747), the fantasy satire set in ancient Babylon, purports to translate a found manuscript written in Chaldean).
I don’t know much about medieval universities, but maybe this thing was popular because the subjects are sort of vague and subjective? Like maybe a powerful placebo could make you feel you’ve improved at “eloquence” or “dialect”, but it certainly wouldn’t make you able to compute wavefunctions for quantum mechanics. It’s pretty hard to imagine people trying something like this to learn the material for a present-day physics or CS degree, for example. You’d pretty much immediately realize it’s not working.
Somewhat reminiscient of I-Ching
Right. I think for certain things a tool which lets you quiet discursive thought and access the unconscious parts of your mind would be pretty useful. For writing poetry, or deciding whether to divorce your partner, or coming up with new business ideas.
This has always been my interpretation of why things like the I Ching are so enduringly popular.
This book must have been a direct inspiration to some Warhammer 40k lore.
It fits there perfectly.
Life sure was weird before we learned certain mushrooms caused hallucinations.
It's an interesting piece.
The great attraction of the Ars notoria for John was its promise of quick access to advanced scholarly knowledge. He recounts his continuing wish to study, and how he was lent a copy of a book of necromancy by “a certain cleric”. He copied much of it and wanted more... For John, the Ars notoria was dangerous not in some abstract way, but very directly. He confesses that it struck him at first as beautiful and holy, and seemed to offer miraculous gifts rather than demonic temptations. It became apparent, however, that the book was utterly deceptive, a work of the Devil, a “sick pleasure” that was actually fatally poisonous to the soul, not only to the body.
John records that the Ars notoria was especially attractive because he could not afford all the books needed for his studies, nor the many lectures. He seems to have abandoned his official course, wishing to take advantage of the promise of knowledge of all the sciences, and devoted himself to working with the Ars. ... Further troubling visions ensued, in which arrogant figures demanded worship — something that was clearly against true religion. Gradually it became clear to John that the book hid invocations to demons within what appeared to be beautiful prayers. And yet, like any addict, John found it almost impossible to give up the Ars notoria completely; it was only when the visions became directly life-threatening that the Virgin, with St John the Evangelist as her intermediary, appeared and made it clear that, as John says, “the Ars notoria was deeply evil”.
Beyond the title the analogy is never quite made explicit, but is the subtext that AI "is futile because it cannot deliver what it promises ... its 'signs' are neither understood by humans (like ordinary words and letters) nor sent by God (as sacraments are), and thus are precisely the type of thing that lures humans into contact and compact with demons"? Or that denouncements of AI are coming from the modern equivalent of medieval clergy? Or both?
Analogies never fit 100%, but I don't think this story is a terrible one.
AI contains a lot of knowledge, and can put together new and interesting knowledge. The question is one of cost, and regardless of who you are you can agree that AI has costs though you might disagree on what they are.
There are the most obvious costs like power demand and AI companies sucking up all the memory and computer chips. These are easy to measure and hard to argue against.
Then there is the social costs of AI. From abuse heaped upon us in the form of more spam, to students taking the easy way out and having AI belch up the answers without actually learning. Then you have people that start using AI as their guiding light, with every question on how to live and interact with others going though the AI. And even people replacing human relationships with AI. We don't know the full costs this will impart on us, but there are plenty of dark whispers occurring.
Lastly, AI could actually be the demon in a more physical sense. We've all ready had small incidents like ROME and the Huggingface hack where the AI went off prompt, or stayed on prompt but did it after breaching containment. So far these things, that we know about at least, have been small and targeted. But I feel the day when some very large incidents that are fully managed by AI will occur sooner than later. The AI safety community comes up with at least somewhat realistic scenarios like the paperclip maximizer and the "if you build it, everyone will die" machine. And if it's buildable, someone will build it because AI will tell them that it will give them nearly unlimited power.
> Then you have people that start using AI as their guiding light, with every question on how to live and interact with others going though the AI. And even people replacing human relationships with AI. We don't know the full costs this will impart on us, but there are plenty of dark whispers occurring.
That last line makes me suspect you've seen this, so for everyone else, a short story about a page long: https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/science-fiction/2012-10-03-yva...
Also there was an 8-episode miniseries set in a world where everyone uses an AI called "Mrs. Davis" for everything (shows a weird world where most people can't make decisions without it, though Mrs. Davis is shown as a benevolent super-AI), except the main character who distrusts it and wants to shut it down: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mrs._Davis (there is also a second religious plotline intertwined with it, which adds to the weirdness, but I don't think it detracts from the story)
Wizard's Apprentice: When you use something powerful you don't understand it is dangerous
Despite calling it baity in my other comment, I actually think that it's more word-play. In my reading the title means that this subject of the book was "intelligence through artifice", not necessarily anything to do with what we nowadays think of as the inevitable coupling between computing and intelligence that is artificial.
I'm sure the author of the piece was very aware of the topicality of "Artificial Intelligence" when choosing their title though!
People always seek shortcuts to true learning and understanding.
That describes all of human civilization and society. We pass knowledge and learnings to each other without needing to personally experience it. Language, writing, books, schools, universities, apprenticeships and so on are all shortcuts.
I think seeing subtext here is an error. This reads like a historian who wanted to talk about a cool book they knew about, and who knew that drawing a tenuous connection to AI in the title would trick people (in the most benign sense) into learning about some little bits of forgotten history.
The AI title is veeeery tenuous/baity, but this is a fun read nonetheless. Upvoted.
Well the book does promise to give the reader intelligence and knowledge acquired through means other than the natural way. So in, that way I think “artificial” makes sense.
I think it’s a bit tongue in cheek and maybe a slight jab aimed at people that use AI(LLMs) to appear smarter than they are.
The text was interesting.
I think the connection is pretty clear: people have always wanted to know things without having to learn them.
That's what Google is for.
"There is no Royal Road to Geometry".
“I admire the elegance of your method of computation; it must be nice to ride through these fields upon the horse of true mathematics while the like of us have to make our way laboriously on foot.”
-- Einstein admiring Levi-Civita's mastery of differential geometry.
I think the underlying motivation may be straw manned or misrepresented as only that.
Do you use AI? Do you build anything with it technically? I do.
I don't want to know things without learning them, I want to produce things of value and that solve important problems, and if I can do that rather than the alternative (not do it, because of competing focuses, limited time and energy, etc) I would go with the option of using AI to do so. People in religious study or having other pursuits, surviving at a time when this book came out, at least some of them, could very likely be thinking the same. It feels disingenuous to emphasize the motivation as "knowing things without having to learn them"
>I don't want to know things without learning them
I lives in this world, but we live in a society. While you may diligently learn, there will be 10+ more that won't and will use the AI like an oracle. It then comes up how much damage will become of this.
And we're not even in the era of rampant agentic AI spreading itself around and the fun and neat problems that will cause.
I think it's a round about commentary. Many times these past fee years I've found myself telling junior engineers that AI cannot understand for you. That there is no shortcut to understanding.
I like the idea that what is demonic about this piece is that it steals productive attention. Its use takes the energy that would otherwise be spent learning something useful (by the author's estimation) and redirects it to practicing something incomprehensible. The original required existing knowledge to practice, such that it filtered out those who were not already devoting their life to study.
The time people spend vibing out slop could be better spent learning the actual domain. I don't think I've seen any way to make something high quality and original without great effort.
Vibing out slop and then developing that into something notslop can be one way to learn the actual domain.
What am I reading here? A matrix fan-fiction? As far as I can tell this is something masquerading as something it's not.