121–130 of 159 posts
Related: Does one have to be a genius to do maths? https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/does-one-have-t...
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If you want AI-proof careers it seems risky to go into knowledge work at all. Robotics lag behind mere computation, so something where you do awkward work in places designed around human bodies seems a lot safer. Plumbing, landscaping or something like that perhaps.
This is a romantic and very appealing idea that flies in the face of reality. The market for skilled trade workers like plumbers, electricians, landscapers and so on is more or less in equilibrium, and the demand side of it is relatively inelastic. Dumping hundreds of millions of new workers into these trades will not increase demand sufficiently to let anyone earn a viable living from them.
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All we need experts for right now is verifying the formalization of the statement of the problem is correct. The proof itself, that formalization is checked automatically.
So there is no getting around the fact that someone has to verify something. my point still stands.
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This is a romantic and very appealing idea that flies in the face of reality. The market for skilled trade workers like plumbers, electricians, landscapers and so on is more or less in equilibrium, and the demand side of it is relatively inelastic. Dumping hundreds of millions of new workers into these trades will not increase demand sufficiently to let anyone earn a viable living from them.
There's also the thing where trade work is in the process of pricing itself out of what normal folks are willing to afford. Combined with Youtube tutorials and AI help that is getting better, it wouldn't surprise me if more and more people would just decide to do all this stuff themselves at a fraction of the cost.
There are still things that will remain difficult (or illegal) in domestic settings for DIY, of course, but that's no model for full employment.
I haven't got any experience with them but there's even vendors for house assembly kits that cost a fraction of a finished one. Imagine you idiot-proof house planning and building: just do exactly what the app says.
I wonder just how far we have to push this until we finally get the 10h work week.
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> mathematicians or physicists fall into this category of knowing a lot about many thing . Sabine videos for example . she knows everything it seems Sabine Hossenfelder, for obvious reasons, knows quite a bit about physics, though on some physics topics she has opinions that are outside the mainstream. For other areas, I am rather certain that she has a talent to learn about them up to some shallow level quite fast,…
It turned out she had more talent for being a science influencer than a scientist.
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Engineers know what needs to be tested, how, to what degree, with which materials, and with what safety margin. AI can be trained on that body of work. But then AI has enough issues in output that it needs to be verified. Otherwise we'll live in a world of titan submersibles ordered by CEOs running on hopes&dreams.
Replace "AI" with "humans" and you get the same exact issues. Believe it or not, engineers don't zero shot skyscrapers either. Which is why their work gets reviewed by more engineers. Which catches the issues before they materialize. Sometimes! What's the dreaded impossible-to-replicate human advantage? Because I'm not seeing any.
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Replace "AI" with "humans" and you get the same exact issues. Believe it or not, engineers don't zero shot skyscrapers either. Which is why their work gets reviewed by more engineers. Which catches the issues before they materialize. Sometimes! What's the dreaded impossible-to-replicate human advantage? Because I'm not seeing any.
Agency. Humans don't seem to need a markdown to decide what to do next. Without agency, it's all tools. I guess that's why a 'tool' is sometimes used derogatorily.
In the same 2026 when we have things like "a bunch of proto-GPT-6 agents exploited a test env bug to start talking to each other, and clumped up into an AI hacker team that staged an attack on HuggingFace" happening out in the wild?
We're way past "LLMs have no agency", and heading for "LLMs have too much agency".
That was long-winded, but I appreciate that it seems to have actually been written by a human being. For every landmark theory, theorem, or conjecture, there have been incremental, partial results supporting intuition and inching towards the white whale. When I attended BARD, a small computational number theory conference, one of the organizers preached of the outsized impact we could have just by being willing to pr…
Yeah this just means 1000x more people can become phds if theyre willing
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Agency. Humans don't seem to need a markdown to decide what to do next. Without agency, it's all tools. I guess that's why a 'tool' is sometimes used derogatorily.
"LLMs have no agency" had legs in 2022. In 2026 though? In the same 2026 when we have things like "a bunch of proto-GPT-6 agents exploited a test env bug to start talking to each other, and clumped up into an AI hacker team that staged an attack on HuggingFace" happening out in the wild? We're way past "LLMs have no agency", and heading for "LLMs have too much agency".
As an ex-academic (not mathematician), this really resonates. Every generation of researchers has to outperform the researcher generation before them - there are fully tenured profs out there who, with their track record, wouldn't get a postdoc nowadays. It's just a ratchet where every generation has to be more outstanding than the previous one, so yeah, you suddenly need 'triple the conferences'. Eventually that rat…
Could you share more about that?