alt Hacker News> There was no standardization of parts in the probe. Two widgets intended to do almost the same job could be subtly different or wildly different. Braces and mountings seemed hand carved. The probe was as much a sculpture as a machine.
> Blaine read that, shook his head, and called Sally. Presently she joined him in his cabin.
> “Yes, I wrote that," she said. "It seems to be true. Every nut and bolt in that probe was designed separately. It's less surprising if you think of the probe as having a religious purpose. But that's not all. You know how redundancy works?"
> “In machines? Two gilkickies to do one job. In case one fails."
> “Well, it seems that the Moties work it both ways."
> “Moties?"
> She shrugged. "We had to call them something. The Mote engineers made two widgets do one job, all right, but the second widget does two other jobs, and some of the supports are also bimetallic thermostats and thermoelectric generators all in one. Rod, I barely understand the words. Modules: human engineers work in modules, don't they?"
> “For a complicated job, of course they do."
> “The Moties don't. It's all one piece, everything working on everything else. Rod, there's a fair chance the Moties are brighter than we are."
- The Mote in God's Eye, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle (1974)
[…too bad that today's LLMs are not brighter than we are, at least when it comes to writing correct code…]
Replies
Yeah, I've had that thought too.
I think a lot about Motie engineering versus human engineering. Could Motie engineering be practical? Is human engineering a fundamentally good idea, or is it just a reflection of our working memory of 7 +/- 2? Biology is Motie-esque, but it's pretty obvious we are nowhere near a technology level that could ever bring a biological system up from scratch.
If Motie engineering is a good idea, it's not a smooth gradient. The Motie-est code I've seen is also the worst. It is definitely not the case that getting a bit more Motie-esque, all else being equal, produces better results. Is there some crossover point where it gets better and maybe passes our modular designs? If AIs do get better than us at coding, and it turns out they do settle on Motie-esque coding, no human will ever be able to penetrate it ever again. We'd have to instruct our AI coders to deliberately cripple themselves to stay comprehensible, and that is... economically a tricky proposition.
After all, anyone can write anything into a novel they want to and make anything work. It's why I've generally stopped reading fiction that is explicitly meant to make ideological or political points to the exclusion of all else; anything can work on a page. Does Motie engineering correspond to anything that could be manifested practically in reality?
Will the AIs be better at modularization than any human? Will they actually manifest the Great OO Promise of vast piles of amazingly well-crafted, re-usable code once they mature? Or will the optimal solution turn out to be bespoke, locally-optimized versions of everything everywhere, and the solution to combining two systems is to do whatever locally-sensible customizations are called for?
(I speak of the final, mature version, however long that may be. Today LLMs are kind of the worst of both worlds. That turns out to be a big step up from "couldn't play in this space at all", so I'm not trying to fashionably slag on AIs here. I'm more saying that the one point we have is not yet enough to draw so much as a line through, let alone an entire multi-dimensional design methodology utility landscape.)
I didn't expect to live to see the answers, but maybe I will.
That book is very much fun and also I never understood why Larry Niven is so obsessed with techno feudalism and gender roles. I think this is my favourite book but I think his best book is maybe Ringworld.