Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, recreational mathematicians. Just like people that like to ride horses for fun.
Constant recreation may be the ultimate purpose of humanity.
Put another way, wage slavery is not the ultimate purpose of humanity.
Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground
301–310 of 366 posts
Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground
#302> 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…
> Outsourcing the work deprives you of who you become by writing it.
Just because AI can do something that resembles work should not mean outsourcing work to it. Mathematicians should not outsource their work to AI just like programmers should not outsource programming to AI.
Humans working with AIs in a tight loop means intellectual work becomes more high-level and creative, but a human should always own the work, validate it and stake their reputation to it. Simply ban any humans who produce low quality work using AI.
Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground
#303Earlier 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.
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…
The cancer of p50 users having comfy housing, 2 cars and a life. Almost all of the efficiency gains move to the 1%.
Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground
#304I think we just haven’t spent enough time creating the systems to help people learn faster - so far, only the systems that teach AI to know more and for people to rely on AI to retrieve information.
Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground
#305Much of math (or science) research has the strange quality of being mostly curiosity-driven, but having giant benefits that occasionally spin out to the public. Some questions are more urgent and practical. My feeling is that the more directly practical a question is, the more likely the research community is to support AI usage in that question. The annoying thing about recent AI advances is that they target questio…
I've been spending 3 weeks, as a non mathemetician, chasing down a particular, very simply-stated, but secretly quite complex problem, and AI has been _so incredibly helpful_, not just in making progress on it, and doing obvious stuff like formalizing in lean, doing literature searches, reading through 10 or 15 papers and summarizing the results for me and how they apply to what I'm doing, giving me enough of an introduction to _entire fields_, that I can talk intelligently about it (I've had email correspondence with a couple of professional mathematicians in a few different fields about it, who agreed that it's an interesting, simple, but difficult problem). I've gone from "this should be easy", to "okay, I've almost got a proof", to "this is impossible", to literally just nailing down a few remaining sub-cases out of an infinite family.
I don't want to call anyone out, but I emailed one fairly famous mathemetician, and he literally said: "This is very interesting, I thought about it for a while, couldn't figure it out, but I thought ChatGPT had an interesting response..." and he linked me to his chatgpt transcript... (which, was actually helpful, because he asked it a better question than I was asking).
I have a suspicion that math will quite soon be exactly like programming and fall to the same machinery that coding is.
One thing that I noticed is that a common workflow I had was isolating hard subquestions in a self contained way and then "surveying" multiple different LLMs in a totally clean context. They would often say: "Oh, this is a obvious example of such-and-such" and immediately clear the barrier.
Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground
#306Earlier 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.
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…
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Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground
#307Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
>mathematics is a human-endevor Just like numbers and logic, it isn't and never was reserved only for humans. They need to adapt.
Idk man creativity is something pretty human. insufferable people are very fine if, for example, music & art is outsourced to AI so they can make a some $$. But those things are meant to be enjoyed, not consumed.
This fact is no longer true. The mathematic domains are up for grabs by anything that can conquer it: https://openai.com/index/model-disproves-discrete-geometry-c...
Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground
#309Earlier 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.
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…
I wonder too, could you maybe actually check your theory?
Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Exactly, when you hire a junior engineer the distribution of code quality is fairly well known. By the time an engineer becomes senior, you can generally expect similar level of quality across any given task. Whereas with AI, sometimes the output is senior and in the middle of a task you'll get unpredictable low quality output. This makes the system both frustrating and unreliable. Now apply that to other domains like self-driving vehicles, where perhaps 80% of the time on a generally stress free freeway it does fine, and then randomly it may decide mid drive to slam on the brakes because of a random variance in the sensor stack.