Welcome to the world of Chess a couple of decades ago...but look at chess now: more popular than ever. I hope that this doesn't mean that you need write proofs while streaming Twitch. ;)
MacDonalds is popular - does that make it a good thing?
The Dark Night of Mathematics
241–250 of 321 posts
Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics
#242Imagine an invention that does a perfect job of brain surgery. And brain surgeons complain.
Now imagine a day where a new type of disease is discovered, but it needs some mechanical help from a surgeon because the AI just can't make the leap to do that. But there are no more surgeons because they didn't want to pursue a worthless career. What then?
The problem with your argument is that word "perfect". AI will never reach that stage and there will always be costs.
Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But the reduction began when you yourself started putting more importance on your enjoyment of the process over the value being provided to your customers. Why would you make this comment? Is it envy? They were able to do things only some people can do. They enjoyed what they did and it provided value. Now the fun has been taken out of it and you seem to be saying that they deserve to have no fun? What should they…
The AI will not stop them, or anyone else, from doing what they enjoy. It will stop them from getting paid for it. And nobody has the right to get paid for having fun. To get paid you need to deliver customer value.
A large part of enjoyment is having a community who cares about what you're doing. So people will find it harder to enjoy it. Plus, some jobs actually are fun. Are you saying we should eradicate that fun because you hate your job? Some human being you are.
Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many of my friends are mathematicians, they are saying pretty much the same thing the article is saying. Unfortunately, even the "I have wondered if it is the express goal of these companies to make me kill myself" line I haven't heard for the first time today. I assure you they're not in it for the money, I make more than they do and hardcore math research is definitely harder than whatever the fuck it is that I do.…
If they want to jump off a bridge or seppuku because discoveries with the potential of improving lives in some way are accelerating... well let me say no more.
And what about the discoveries that are worsening lives like military appplications and people who'll use the tech to discover better weapons?
Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly! I have some many colleagues who typically say that they do "math for the beauty" while holding permanent research positions funded by the state.
One could also see it this way: shouldn't the goal of society be to allow more and more people to do things for the beauty of it rather that producing ever more useless stuffs and destroy the planet on the way?
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Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics
#246I can’t help but confess some sense of satisfaction with the upheaval described in the post. Many proofs and textbooks laden with statements like “without loss of generality”, “immediately”, or “obviously” are followed by anything but. AI now counters that streak of smug by toppling some long held theorems and it’s fun to watch.
Bit weird that your first reaction to a human expressing genuine emotional pain is glee.
Yeah I think it's weird too. But tech really does amplify narcissism because it makes us very independent from people and community. So it's really not surprising that half the people in this thread are more concerned with manufacturing discovery than they are with having a cohesive society.
Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Every single knowledge worker is going to face this kind of crisis. It will be worse for people who cared deeply about their craft, but the crisis will have the same shape. Normally I'm very sympathetic to the plights of those socially affected by AI, and rarely pass up the opportunity to clown on institutional actors papering over these plights with glib cliches. But in this case, I really feel like this is a case…
> We have always been in the business of discovering and understanding math, have we not? And the way we understand the maths is to do the maths. You can't outsource the maths to AI and continue to understand it. I don't believe we can have it both ways.
You can't remove the humans entirely and still be said to be in the business of doing math. On that I fully agree. We should still be spending the same number of hours on math, just with different tools (you might even call them oracles) at our disposal.
Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics
#248Well for me the twilight had already come when I realized I’d never amount to a decent mathematician. Maybe this is rather a common experience? LLMs just democratized that process.
The whole point of math is to just have fun discovering things. You might be able to discover math with an LLM, but you'll never be a mathematician if you don't do it yourself. LLMs don't democratize anything. They just let you spew out results that aren't particularly impressive if you can't even understand what the hell you're creating.
You misunderstood me.
LLMs democratize the process of mathematical disillusionment. There may come a day that Terence Tao himself will have this democracy delivered to him. When the human mathematical towers are crumbled and spirits left humbled.
Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
> First off, the phrase in the article is "I am suffering a profound spiritual crisis due to these developments.", and you continue that by agreeing to something nobody said and that isn't true. Ahem. From TFA: "There is something about mathematical discovery (progress, advancement, creation) which is vital to the spiritual, experiential quality of doing mathematics. The creation (or even the pursuit) of novel mathem…
I stand corrected, and frankly, since that misunderstanding made me a bit "mad" on behalf that person, I think I would have written my response very very differently if I hadn't made that mistake. I want to apologise for that. Math is still based on axioms, AFAIK, but since I the author also seems to disagree and I'm the non-mathematician here I don't think I should press on that point, either.
The quote about ineffable/divine/mystical is indeed the one I was implicitly referring to. No worries, I should've been more clear.
Most math people I know don't have a religious conviction in Platonism or anything, but their zeal for math since early childhood often does boil down to awe in something larger, more primordial, more significant than the mundane business of humanity. This tends especially to be the case for pure math people.
Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics
#250Every single knowledge worker is going to face this kind of crisis. It will be worse for people who cared deeply about their craft, but the crisis will have the same shape. The way through is to change the way you relate to your work, and to appreciate the fact that you can now produce far more output. Mathematicians should realize: instead of spending decades on individual theorems, you can now create whole new subf…
The creation is the actually enjoyable part. Taking a helicopter to the top of Everest is not as rewarding as climbing the mountain. You are completely discrediting the joy humans derive from actually -doing- the work, and not just, telling someone else to do the work. There is a reason artists hate AI, its because they enjoy the actual act of painting, like mathematicians enjoy the act of proving theorems and progra…
"like... programmers enjoy the act of typing lines of text into a file on their computer"
ehm, no!