I 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.
I’m also a human expressing genuine emotion. Why is one more valid than the other?
"like... programmers enjoy the act of typing lines of text into a file on their computer" ehm, no!
Yes exactly, that jumps out as a strange thing to say. The enjoyable part of programming is the puzzle, the act of figuring out how to solve the problem elegantly and well. Although I can't speak for artists, surely the joy of painting is in the creation of a piece of art they can be proud of? Enjoyment in work is generally about taking pride in the end result, not in the repetitive mechanical part.
Not exactly, no. What is "the problem" - is there really only one problem? - and where does the creativity go? This depends on what you're doing and how you're going about it. Maybe every little mark you make on paper or canvas or a text file is a puzzle, with associated meta-level questions, and the interest is in hundreds of intimately small creative notions, and when it all approaches the end you have mixed feelings because the (very much non-mechanical) process has stopped.
This the problem. The need to make money in order to justify your right to survive is the problem. Painters shouldn’t be mad at AI, they should be mad at the system.
It might be a philosophical kind of "can't". You need to believe that what you do is valuable.
When I was in mathematics, reading other people's work was always more rewarding to me than doing my own. I would spend years on a question to get some progress, versus spending a few days or weeks reading a paper to enjoy something new. I understand not everyone is like me but I really welcome the omniscient mathematician machine people are predicting. I can't wait to ask all the questions I care about.
> When I was in mathematics, reading other people's work was always more rewarding to me than doing my own. [...] I really welcome the omniscient mathematician machine people are predicting. Curious, as someone who relates strongly with both the OP and your first sentence: did it matter that you were reading "other people's work?" Or was it simply the satisfaction of understanding an answer? Personally, one of the th…
It does not matter to me. As long as the prose is good and the arguments are well-exposed I don't mind if an AI wrote it or a human. It would be different if we were talking about music, art or literature. But for science I care about the content, not who created it. The social aspect of mathematics was never alluring to me.
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. 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…
> Taking a helicopter to the top of Everest is not as rewarding as climbing the mountain.
Flying from Atlanta to New York is not as rewarding as walking there. You are right, but if we would be walking everywhere, we would still be stuck somewhere in ancient times.
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. 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…
But you can still try to climb Everest even if helicopters are available, and likewise you can still try to do maths even if LLMs can do it quicker.
I never felt that the theorems were the most useful part of mathematics, strange as that may sound. In my professional experience, math offers a framework, a language of expressing ideas in an exact way. It clears things up for the writer and the reader. It is like speech; would we stop talking if a machine could utter all phrases?
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.
You should stop asking people for money for any other reason except that you provide value in return. Your enjoyment is your own business.
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?
Technological advances have been militarily applied since wars were a thing. Many times it's the military application that drove the advancement; like GPS was originally for military navigation and targeting, computers advanced quickly for codebreaking, the internet itself began as ARPANET (defense networking project), jet engines for faster fighter planes, etc. And look at where those advancements stand today in our lives.