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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

#291

Post by golemotron »

oblio wrote: post #283
threatripper wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> In the past "computer" was a job description and mechanical power came from serfs. Serfs, all right, but in what world do you live where "computers", people who did manual computing (i.e. mechanical additions/multiplications/... with very large numbers) are the same as actual research mathematicians, who are basically pure logicians? The only perspective where it makes sense to root for mathematicians to go away is…

I don't think that "root[ing] for mathematicians to go away" is the problem. The problem (if there is one) is that the process by which that occurs is economically determined. No amount of complaining will stop AI from being useful in mathematics or erase the incentives to make it better. It's automatic process, like photography sidelining painting or shoe factories sidelining cobblers. We go through this with every technological advance and the outcomes are pretty much determined. No cheerleaders are needed.

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#292

Post by j-bos »

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…

The foundations of a great our mathematics came from landed gentry who enjoyed the work and were not paid for it. Today we prosper in our technologies and algorithms (not talking about recsystems) because of them. If math should once again become the pusuit of the curious and free but with even greater "skills", that does not seem to be an issue for math, or for those of us who benefit from math. An issue for people as a concept and for mathemeticians, yes. But that's a separate topic, like the anguish of not getting into the Premier league.

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#293

Post by Archer6621 »

coldtea wrote: post #276
kamaal wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>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…

For many of those automations, we're worse off for them. Like not being able to get some actual human when you call support, and talking to some fucking automatic system. This includes many of the " 1990s through the 2000s" ones, and earlier ones too. Sometimes what was lost was an added layer of attention and quality that was previously required, but it was sacrificed away for efficiency.

That really depends on who is the one that benefits from automation. Companies automate support systems in order to keep their support staff small, because apparently for many of them it is more profitable to frustrate their customers with crappy support than to pay more support staff to do a better job.

In addition to your last paragraph: lots of things that we used to do the less efficient way had side-benefits that were not immediately obvious, probably because they compounded over time. Now that we're not doing them anymore, we notice all kinds of widespread societal problems (in particular among young people) that come up that were never there before.

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#294

Post by HighGoldstein »

cout wrote: post #210
nyxtom wrote: post #192

For every interesting problem AI solves there are a long tail of really dumb things that AI performs that humans would never do. Some days I am in awe of one-shot magic eight-ball output and other days I'm so frustrated by the sheer stupidity of what it produces. It remains to be seen whether that long tail of stupidity can ever be resolved in the current form of LLMs.

Are you sure you aren't underestimating human capacity for stupidity?

At some point I was thinking that maybe I am too hard on the AI and that humans routinely produce exceptionally stupid code, however after a while I've realized that this is only partially true. AI produces a class of mistakes that humans would almost certainly not make because creating even the context of the mistake would require a level of skill that would preclude such mistakes. It's like if you took a mid/senior engineer and randomly lobotomized them mid-task.

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#296

Post by gabaix »

XenophileJKO wrote: post #285
rwl wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, the world is a better place with fewer serfs in it, but what exactly is of "higher value" than being a research mathematician? It's already a profession that consists essentially of exercising our highest and most distinctly human capacities: creativity, abstract reasoning, and passing the results of those on through a distinctive language and culture. I don't think the comparison with serfs is useful. I'm sure…

Sure, recreational mathematicians. Just like people that like to ride horses for fun.

Constant recreation may be the ultimate purpose of humanity.

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#297

Post by drfloyd51 »

threatripper wrote: post #261
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.

When I was a child, I lived in a neighborhood. Every week a garbage truck picked up the house hold trash.

5 guys were on that truck. 1 driver and 4 guys that actually lifted up various shaped trash cans and dumped them into the truck.

Today I live in an apartment complex. 100 families take their trash to the compactor. 1 guy in a garbage truck comes once a week to collect the compacted refuse.

I wonder what happened to the other 4 guys. 80% of the garbage collecting labor… freed up to do something of higher value.

Maybe they cured cancer.

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#298

Post by zelphirkalt »

wongarsu wrote: post #35
Spacecosmonaut wrote: post #24

Accelerationists may argue that the eroding of proper attribution and proof verification by humans is a meaningless short term struggle of a dying field. Mathematics seems to be entering an era where human + machine maximizes performance, much like chess in the 1990s. However, imagine a future where even talented mathematicians are nothing but noise in the machine (as is the case in chess now). A future where AI gene…

Much like for many the point of chess is that it's played by humans, with truly superhuman AI relegated to a training aid, mathematics is in many ways about human comprehension. You can use AI to find and proof new theorems. But if you get to the point where humans can't understand it, is it even still math?

Is it still chess, if humans cannot understand it? Because that's the point we are at in chess. Engines making moves, that humans cannot understand, but somehow they work out to be best or seemingly best. Look at the Leela Zero games, when it came out. These engines play kind of other-worldly chess.

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#299

Post by My_Name »

The way humans beat AI, at least until AGI, is to innovate conceptually. If what you do is simply rearrange existing concepts then your work will likely get replaced by AI. Coding is a good example of this, you put documented commands, with known behaviours, in sequences that produce defined outcomes. That is the perfect job for AI, if we can solve their irrational desire to please and hallucinate along the way.

AI is simply not able to innovate, only combine.

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#300

Post by dehsge »

redox99 wrote: post #251
dehsge wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think it's cool how in a decade we went from "Neural networks will never be able to understand this sentence that's obvious to humans" to "LLMs must be able to solve problems that humanity hasn't been able to after almost a century, and that might even be unsolvable"

So that is kind of the point of studying maths right?

Why something in unsolvable or undecidable can be as important as the output of a theorem.

Questions like these, fields medal level problems or Karp’s 21 NP-complete problem are problems working mathematicians are interested in.

Will LLMs help as an human assistant in the future? Probably.

Will LLMs answer these questions themselves, provide insights and bounds to these new mathematics and teach other mathematicians why this new math they create is true?

Will these models have phds and take candidates teaching them how to apply and think about the maths problems they are interested in?

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