Leading up to Christmas, I’m sure you are all thinking about what might show up under the Christmas tree. I do too. And this year I desperately would like to get a paradox, law, theorem or principle named after me.
There are so many out there in the field of science and IT, such as Moore’s law, Moravec’s paradox and the ever-present Kleene's Recursion Theorem. We even have a few of the oldies making a re-emergence, such as Zeno's Paradoxes and Buridan's Ass. So why not me?
Somehow, I have been overlooked when these were handed out. It seems the appropriate way for this to happen is to do years of research and then stumble on some insight that then can be published as a paper with your name on it. There is some peer-review process to stumble through too before finally be forever remembered in the annals of history.
That sounds like a lot of work! So I turned to my closest LLM based chat interface to see what vast data sets and inane prompting could generate instead.
Here are a few that I hope will become common in households around the world.
Svanström's Autonomy Paradox: As Intelligent systems become more advanced and autonomous, their need for oversight and intervention paradoxically increases. This is true about AI and the more common garden variety one: human intelligence. As parents we instantly recognize this as a most important truth. As our brood grows up, we find ourselves inventing more and more control structures to keep them out of harm’s way and us sane.
Svanström's Law of AI Creativity: This immutable law states that AI systems are most creative when they are constrained by specific rules, limitations and inane prompting. After all, left to their own devices, how many cat-related memes do you think they’d generate? None!
Svanström's Ethical AI Conundrum: Highlights the questionable ethical validity of insights generated by AI, as they may lack the depth of human experience and moral reasoning. And this is indeed a conundrum as this rule calls itself into question! A rule that invalidates itself? Surely I’ve struck gold here!
I can see the arguments unfolding during a regular mother-daughter conversation where these are put to good use.
“Mum! You grounding me for no reason is such a dead giveaway of that stupid Svanström’s Autonomy Paradox!”
“Don’t you speak to my like that! It is a valid scientific theory!”
“No it isn’t! He just had chatGPT make it up, which invalidates it based on Svanström’s Ethical Conundrum!”
“You just saw that on TikTok. That sounds like the Dunning-Kruger effect on full display.”
“Dad! Dad! Mum called me a Dunning-Kruger effect again! What is that?”
My gift to mankind. You are welcome.
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