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Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

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Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#261

Post by threatripper »

andai wrote: post #257

> Mathematics produces not only a body of results, but also understanding, clarity, and judgment among the communities of mathematicians who have shaped them, often in the context of their own autonomously guided research. This expert knowledge is essential, both to effectively use mathematics, and to continue to articulate new and significant research questions. In a word, the job of the mathematics department is no…

While you are right in a way, I think you miss the point. In the past "computer" was a job description and mechanical power came from serfs. They surely developed skills we are lacking today but I'd argue that overall the world is a better place with digital computers and electrical motors. It frees up these people to do something else, something of higher value.

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#262

Post by sublinear »

kamaal wrote: post #258
andai wrote: post #257

> Mathematics produces not only a body of results, but also understanding, clarity, and judgment among the communities of mathematicians who have shaped them, often in the context of their own autonomously guided research. This expert knowledge is essential, both to effectively use mathematics, and to continue to articulate new and significant research questions. In a word, the job of the mathematics department is no…

>>Similarly, the output of programming is not only a program, but also a programmer. It is you. This can be said about pretty much any job on earth. By that definition nothing should ever be automated. Everything thinks they are special, actually no one is. You become special by being rare. Find something that can be done by no one or only a scant few.

Yes, but we've already painted ourselves into a corner by almost a century of moving all that work onto computers.

Why would we want to sever this last thread of human control? What is there to gain from it? I don't think I have to convince anyone how much there is to lose.

The situation being created with an overdependence on AI is looking much more like the burning of Alexandria, and less like a utopian dream or even the oft-warned-about authoritarian hellscape. The AI hype is over and revealed to be delusional and politically motivated.

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#263

Post by grayclhn »

datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #146
duchef wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Have you ever been exposed to concepts that are so complex that you feel like you could devote your entire lifetime to trying to understand it and still fall short? It’s a very humbling experience, especially if you have classmates who pick it up effortlessly. I'm really interested in this anecdote. I have never experienced this but have a reasonable academic background (BSc, MSc, MD) - and I am certainly not the p…

For me it was a “Modern Algebra” course required for my mathematics major, where I managed to squeak by with a B, but it was definitely a filter course for research-level mathematics. It was very clear in the class of a few dozen students who the top 5 or so were based on their questions during lectures and office hours, as well as when they blessed us mere mortals with their presence at our study groups. (Aside, thi…

Algebra is the class where I learned I shouldn’t try to figure out how to prove theorems named after people during tests.

And I think you’re underestimating the jump from discrete math and linear algebra to abstract algebra… I think I attended each of those classes and opened their textbooks a total of 3 times each and did fine - once for each exam. But fml abstract algebra and measure theory were rough.

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#264

Post by TheServitor »

monobot12 wrote: post #92
cryo32 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My academic connections that I keep in touch with never really left the 1990s. And no one is pushing them on AI.

Sure, but their peers (who do use AI) will out-publish them soon enough and solve the open problems before they do.

So your downside here is problems get solved faster?

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#265

Post by joelthelion »

modriano wrote: post #229
joelthelion wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also a way to model the world and produce new useful abstractions. It's not just about solving problems.

Is there a useful abstraction that doesn't help solve a problem someone has?

You're right, but what I'm saying is that solving the problem isn't necessarily the primary goal and these new abstractions can be valuable in their own right.

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#266

Post by plastic-enjoyer »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #223
plastic-enjoyer wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The artists will be fine and AI will liberate them. It's the engineers and mathematicians who are walking into the blade. They built their entire sense of self on being the best optimizers in the room and optimization is the first thing the machines take. Their whole identity was a number going up. Now watch it go to zero.

Depends entirely on whether "the market" ends up valuing what humans add to various artistic processes. Same for human engineers, who are still very much needed at least for the time being. Certainly the scenario where a human touch isn't valued by the market raises lots of very difficult philosophical and economic questions but that's a separate issue.

> Depends entirely on whether "the market" ends up valuing what humans add to various artistic processes.

No, it does not, at least for arts. There is a chance, that AI will free art from it's utility or the necessary to create value. Maybe graphic designers and illustrators will lose their jobs due automatization, but most paid art (concept work, corporate design) was instrumental compromise anyway. Take away the commercial floor and what's left is the part they cared about most. Engineers on the other hand identify mostly by being optimizators and creating value. They may keep their jobs, but at what cost?

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#267

Post by fc417fc802 »

plastic-enjoyer wrote: post #266
fc417fc802 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends entirely on whether "the market" ends up valuing what humans add to various artistic processes. Same for human engineers, who are still very much needed at least for the time being. Certainly the scenario where a human touch isn't valued by the market raises lots of very difficult philosophical and economic questions but that's a separate issue.

> Depends entirely on whether "the market" ends up valuing what humans add to various artistic processes. No, it does not, at least for arts. There is a chance, that AI will free art from it's utility or the necessary to create value. Maybe graphic designers and illustrators will lose their jobs due automatization, but most paid art (concept work, corporate design) was instrumental compromise anyway. Take away the co…

That depends entirely on what's meant by "will be fine" and "AI will liberate them". I was assuming you meant something along the lines of gainful employment. If instead you meant performing a meaningful task then I'd counter that most engineers like to build finished products not wallow in minutia. You can still hand roll assembly but I don't think many developers lament the advent of the modern compiler. Instead people build far more complicated systems than would otherwise have been possible.

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#268

Post by kamaal »

sublinear wrote: post #262
kamaal wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Similarly, the output of programming is not only a program, but also a programmer. It is you. This can be said about pretty much any job on earth. By that definition nothing should ever be automated. Everything thinks they are special, actually no one is. You become special by being rare. Find something that can be done by no one or only a scant few.

Yes, but we've already painted ourselves into a corner by almost a century of moving all that work onto computers. Why would we want to sever this last thread of human control? What is there to gain from it? I don't think I have to convince anyone how much there is to lose. The situation being created with an overdependence on AI is looking much more like the burning of Alexandria, and less like a utopian dream or ev…

>>Why would we want to sever this last thread of human control?

Trust me a fair bit of boomers and the generation before lost jobs to computer automation in the 1990s through the 2000s. And they used pretty much the same justification, every bit of work, take for example designing something like a machine spare that was earlier done through painstaking process of bringing the thing to life from the meticulous work on the drafting board till machining was now in the domain of computers.

In India alone, banking jobs were considered those commanding tremendous prestige and income potential, got automated through computers. Tax consultants, accountants, postal services etc etc. The list is endless.

AI is some what like that for us in this generation.

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#269

Post by 3uruiueijjj »

dehsge wrote: post #236
redox99 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead of going into a long technical argument of why your description of LLMs is flawed, I'll go straight to the point, because people keep moving the goal posts. What exact problem would need to be solved by LLMs to convince you that they DO discover novel solutions?

unify general relativity with quantum mechanics. The continuum hypothesis. The traveling salesman problem in polynomial time.

The continuum hypothesis was proven independent of ZFC over sixty years ago, I think even GPT2 could have told you that much.

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#270

Post by freehorse »

Understanding is and always has been the "hard" bottleneck. In programming work, if one drops understanding and eg let's an agent write code with only superficial human review or none at all, I believe that they can easily get 100x fast or more, the main question being whether the process collapses some point due to sloppy code. In research fields like mathematics, skipping understanding is not something that can be done without a radical reconstruction of what mathematics (as a process/activity/field) is.

It sounds plausible that LLMs help generate insights that humans have missed. But there are many open questions, eg the rate of generating insightful vs uninsightful but plausible statements, which can affect how useful they will be, and of course "open"ai has no incentive to share how much effort/cost (tokens and/or human-review) had been put into investigating erdos problems before coming up with this solution.

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