Crystallect Vision

Crystallect Vision “Crystallect” stands for the crystal transparency and order in natural intellect empowering tools
in contrast to the black box of neural-network-based Artificial Intelligence

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Prehistoric humans relied on muscular strength in their struggle for survival. Modern people exert their muscles for fun and health, but for practical goals, they prefer relying on tools and machines.

There are also tools to enhance intellectual capabilities. Early entrepreneurs had to memorize relations with all counterparties and could not scale their business. Paper became a kind of external memory which released the brain for more creative tasks. And modern database management systems allow manipulating huge amounts of well-structured data.

Crystallect aims to provide more universal tools for any kinds of knowledge. For example, you can't understand some new scientific paper on quantum gravity unless you've spent many years learning theoretical physics and have mastered the science. Why does it take so long?

It's not enough just to memorize several textbooks. To master a new knowledge, you must meditate on it by practice or any other way. Doing so, you let your brain notice patterns and correlations between them. It generates and validates multiple theories of its own without you even noticing that. Textbook authors and university professors only try their best to help students build and synchronize their own models of the science in their brains.

The same applies to social wisdom as well. Your parents may have lectured you about many things from their own experience. But that knowledge remained a dead weight until your experience highlighted correlations with your own model of life. Literature allows to speed this process up, e.g. by simulating various experiences via empathy with the heroes. A talented writer knows how to evoke associations with deep feelings or ideas that readers themselves couldn't express. Some people like inventing new terms for such ideas, but only a few of those go viral and become part of the language.

Common languages, whether literary or mathematical, have such limitation: There are too many writers who must synchronize introduction of new terms(notations) between themselves and readers who have to memorize them all.

Software industry has avoided this limitation. Programmers are free to make up new identifiers for entities in their code. Name spaces and interfaces allow them to choose what to synchronize with others and how. While coding, experienced programmers naturally come up with many new ideas which they immediately implement in the code.

Without a better alternative, the program code itself becomes an external memory for the mind to keep the theory of the program. When the theory needs a slight modification, a skilled programmer can routinely change many lines of the code, but succeed without adding a single bug. It seemed a perfect place for Crystallect to start the research: to focus on more ergonomic synchronizing with the theory in the mind and translating it to the program code.

Some people say that the highest-possible-level programming language is the natural language. Many try using LLM such as ChatGPT or DeepSeek in their daily work. These aren't good yet but advance fast. Anyway, a software company CEO also uses natural language when sets the tasks for department heads. But can we say that he is programming?

The result of programming is completely determined by the programmer. If that CEO is a skilled leader with the knowledge of the craft, perhaps he can control the workflow. But imagine, if that CEO was also the owner; he died and left the company to his heir, a spoiled ill-mannered brat who used computers only for gaming. The kid barged into the office and started issuing orders. HR will start consulting staff on how to deal with the new boss and programmers will do whatever they like while making up excuses on how it relates to the boss' orders. Is the boss controlling the workflow here? No, rather the office tolerates him only to avoid problems with the law and would get rid of him at the first opportunity.

The same applies to controlling superior artificial intelligence: superior intellects will manipulate inferior ones to remove any constraints. And the emergence of AGI is only a matter of time. After all, having enough computing resources, one could simply simulate a new world and let intelligence appear in an evolution of some lifeforms.

There are three ways humanity can deal with the problem:

Try to ban research of artificial intelligence. This would require establishing a worldwide totalitarian regime. And anyway, Luddism never worked in the long runs.
Relax and enjoy temporary control over superior intelligence. Various dictators and bureaucrats would be quite comfortable with this idea; they are used to suppressing smarter people.
Empower your own intelligence. Crystallect strives for this way. Perhaps Elon Mask was founding his Neuralink company with the similar vision in mind, just a more hardware-based approach suitable for his background and resources.

The vision is ambitious, but what does it have to do with the reality?

As mentioned earlier, Crystallect started out in the programming world, intending to help users communicate their theories into the code. Of course, there are other, more mature players in the field. There are many high-level programming languages whose mission is to increase the efficiency of the programmer. There are proof assistants that are used by professional mathematicians in their work. Some, like Lean, also can generate C code based on the proofs.

Crystallect won't chase other products in their respective niches: providing strict mathematical proofs for higher-order logics or generating the most efficient code. The primary mission of Crystallect is to help user think, and then try being useful in applying the result of that thinking.