Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI • Hacker News Board

Re: Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI

#401

Post by magicalist » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 3:28 PM UTC

munksbeer wrote: post #390

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't this seem to be where all domains are headed? I get kinda freaked out when I feel like all the AI "utopianists" haven't taken the next logical step of thinking about what society looks like when humans are subpar in every domain (and you may argue this won't happen, though I'm becoming more and more a believer that it will, but my point is the utopianists believe that this absolutely will happen, and that it'…

Obviously it is a ludicrous example, but there are books for this: The Culture novels by Iain. M. Banks. I'd be quite happy as a citizen of The Culture. But, on a more serious note, or more realistic, I find it vaguely insulting that you think that so many of us are just so shallow we'll not figure out how to live meaningful lives in an AI dominated future. The world is already meaningless. Some people live in the US…

> infuriating to see spoiled developed world complaints sometimes

Maybe glance back at your comment history and find you mostly are complaining about very developed world things and investigate why there might be a disconnect between these two aspects of you?

> If an AI can bring a few billion 3rd world people out of misery, I don't think I'm going to shed tears if that means you have to somehow "find meaning" outside of a high paying tech job.

Well, this is begging the question (how awful are people for worrying about the future when the future is going to be so great?), but you're also missing that there's more to humanity than surviving or not, and there always has been. There's no reason to reduce this to a dichotomy.

Re: Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI

#402

Post by gre » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 4:35 PM UTC

BeetleB wrote: post #397

adastra22 wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Truth.

What is truth if we are free to pick our axioms? The universe is either Euclidean or not. If it were, how can theorems on non-Euclidean geometry be true?

You pick your axioms and you see what must be true. With math and logic, we can reason about any possible universe even though we live in only one of them.

Re: Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI

#403

Post by SAI_Peregrinus » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 4:45 PM UTC

bohrbohra wrote: post #354

mitxela wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you still using RSA?

Wait what ? Does nobody use RSA anymore ?

ECC allows greater security for key exchange (because it is so cheap to generate keys we can have "ephemeral" exchanges and forward-secrecy). It isn't significantly better for signatures in most cases.

Re: Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI

#404

Post by program_whiz » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 5:54 PM UTC

squidbeak wrote: post #377

program_whiz wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So when AI is also better at coming up with the tasks and already solving the frontier problems? 1M AI agents running full time thinking at 10M times faster than humans, with 100 times the intelligence in each agent? Any human ideas regarding "frontier problems" or "what the AI should focus on" are irrelevant. We have automated our own thinking and human cognition will be about as important as being "the best at abac…

Before AI, did you find that the existence of human expertise in the world far surpassing yours 'automated your thinking and cognition' or limited your intellectual scope to inventing party-tricks? I've always found greater intelligences than mine are like runways for curiosity. It's hard to believe anyone in their presence would fall into a stupor instead of being highly stimulated by them - and I can't see why it w…

yes to a degree. When I was 16, my idea about "what cutting edge thing to work on" was pointless, I couldn't make a meaningful contribution. Most developer's work is mundane and wrote. Things they think are "cutting edge" are actually just ideas they haven't considered, or markets they don't realize are saturated with really good players already. It takes time, effort, and knowledge to make a meaningful contribution. But if those fields are saturated by players that are beyond human ability, then its a bit like trying to become a competitive chess player when the bar for entry is stockfish -- no human will ever again pass this bar. At a certain point, the bar for being paid for intellectual contribution will surpass human abilities. The things humans can understand and ideas they contribute will not be worth much.

To make an unrelated anology, the presence of Lebron James definitely dampens my ability to contribute meaningfully to basketball. Even with all my practice, I cannot achieve his level. But if he didn't exist, and the best 90% of basketball players were eliminated, then I might be able to meaningfully contribute. Of course, I can still play basketball as a hobby, but you were talking about making meaningful contributions on hard novel problems at the frontier of knowledge and ability. That frontier is moving away from humans and will soon be the domain of electronic experts.

Re: Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI

#405

Post by an0malous » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 6:23 PM UTC

Davidzheng wrote: post #373

an0malous wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Libgen isn’t trying to sell you back the content for $100/month. No one would be complaining if OpenAI open sourced their models.

the second part is definitely not true

No one's complaining about stolen content from any of the labs releasing open source models

Re: Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI

#406

Post by hn_throwaway_99 » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 6:56 PM UTC

shakadak wrote: post #336

znnajdla wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think humans necessarily become subpar when AI can do most of the work. Taking my own personal example, I have far more intellectual curiosity and improved my skills in programming far more with Claude Code than for 15 years of programming without AI simply because I was bogged down by boilerplate and grunt work. Now that AI handles most of the boilerplate and grunt work and can handle harder and harder probl…

> what society looks like when humans are subpar in every domain > when AI can do most of the work You're not really responding to the core hypothetical of his comment To me it reads as that: for utopians, you may benefit from LLMs now, but they'll still surpass you later, what then ?

Thank you for putting it so succinctly. I find that lots of people get "stuck" in the current state of things - they think that AI will continue to improve, but they inherently believe (perhaps subconsciously) that humans will always have the edge in things like "ingenuity", "inventiveness" or "curiosity".

I don't blame them, I also believed that until very recently. I thought there was something unique and special about sentience and consciousness, but my thinking has changed in that I don't think machines need to develop the sentience we experience to still surpass us cognitively along all dimensions.

But iff you really examine what grounds your beliefs, and then consider that AI very well could surpass humans even in domains like curiosity and real creativity (at several orders of magnitude faster), it starts to look like a very, very uncomfortable future for humans IMO.

I saw this quote on Twitter:

> Best outcome: we become pets

> Worst outcome: we become cows

Re: Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI

#407

Post by znnajdla » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 7:49 PM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #406

shakadak wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what society looks like when humans are subpar in every domain > when AI can do most of the work You're not really responding to the core hypothetical of his comment To me it reads as that: for utopians, you may benefit from LLMs now, but they'll still surpass you later, what then ?

Thank you for putting it so succinctly. I find that lots of people get "stuck" in the current state of things - they think that AI will continue to improve, but they inherently believe (perhaps subconsciously) that humans will always have the edge in things like "ingenuity", "inventiveness" or "curiosity". I don't blame them, I also believed that until very recently. I thought there was something unique and special a…

I don't get this take at all. Do you feel inferior that bears are stronger than you? Or that a machine can lift more weight than you? Or that a calculator can calculate faster than you?

These AI things are machines which are completely under our control. Even if they become more intelligent than us, that doesn't mean that it has authority over us. There are plenty of very intelligent humans which work under the authority of much less intelligent humans. Many engineers are smarter than their CEOs.

What makes you think that just because an AI is more intelligent that it will not be completely subject to our authority? It's just a tool in our hands.

Re: Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI

#408

Post by znnajdla » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 7:52 PM UTC

shakadak wrote: post #336

znnajdla wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think humans necessarily become subpar when AI can do most of the work. Taking my own personal example, I have far more intellectual curiosity and improved my skills in programming far more with Claude Code than for 15 years of programming without AI simply because I was bogged down by boilerplate and grunt work. Now that AI handles most of the boilerplate and grunt work and can handle harder and harder probl…

> what society looks like when humans are subpar in every domain > when AI can do most of the work You're not really responding to the core hypothetical of his comment To me it reads as that: for utopians, you may benefit from LLMs now, but they'll still surpass you later, what then ?

So, what if they surpass me? It's still a tool under my control. Many engineers work under the authority of a CEO, even though they're smarter than them. Just because AI might be more intelligent doesn't mean it's still not a machine that is completely under my control.

Re: Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI

#409

Post by znnajdla » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 7:54 PM UTC

aprilthird2021 wrote: post #370

znnajdla wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think humans necessarily become subpar when AI can do most of the work. Taking my own personal example, I have far more intellectual curiosity and improved my skills in programming far more with Claude Code than for 15 years of programming without AI simply because I was bogged down by boilerplate and grunt work. Now that AI handles most of the boilerplate and grunt work and can handle harder and harder probl…

> I have the time and space to work on unexplored frontier problems. Like what?

Mostly low-level performance optimization and new programming language design.

Re: Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI

#410

Post by peri-cl » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 8:23 PM UTC

andrelaszlo wrote: post #376

vessenes wrote: post #3

That’s not untrue. But it’s also a misstatement of mathematical history. Many leading mathematicians historically have been highly competitive — Gauss comes to mind. Woe betide the lesser intellect that sent Gauss some ideas. The Newton Leibniz controversy was very serious business at the time in the UK and the continent. It was considered at the least a sin to reveal that sqrt(2) was irrational to those outside Pyth…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49617391 Did you comment on the wrong thread? The original one makes more sense :)

/meta Their comment got involuntarily migrated; it was originally a reply to a toplevel comment in the Navier-Stokes thread (before the dedicated Tao thread existed),

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49613262#49617249