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A misalignment of AI in mathematics

mathandai.org

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Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#921

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

ndriscoll wrote: post #696
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Humans can then work on clarifying why it's true. Presumably you're a human. Are you going to do that?

There are vanishingly few research mathematician positions and it's one of the most competitive fields, so no. But I'm not sure how that's relevant. As the OP says, usually the value of a proof is not the knowledge that something is true per se, but the reasoning techniques to understand why. How can it be anything other than helpful then to have a truth oracle as you try to figure out why things are true?

So you're not going to do it yourself and you want someone else to do it for you? Some mathematician that dedicated their life to understand mathematics must now toil unpaid and unwillingly to understand the AI slop proofs that you want us to be able to understand?

Do the job yourself. And if you can't, that's maybe a hint that you should listen to the people who can.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#922

Post by Marha01 »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #909
user43928 wrote: post #908

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a more optimistic outlook on the abilities of our governments as well as the motivations of rich people. I believe we will distribute the fruits of AI's labor at the very least to the extend where everyone can live comfortably. No one has an interest in putting large parts of society on the streets in some sort of dystopia.

You are assuming that people remain in control.

And you are assuming they don't remain in control. Which of you is right? We don't know yet, but I don't find the arguments of card-carrying doomers any more convincing that those of card-carrying singularitarian utopians.

Historically though, technological improvement has lead to large increases of living standards for the overwhelming majority of people, so I think that past trends support the utopian view more than the doomer view.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#923

Post by rvba »

phoghed wrote: post #606
robotpepi wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes no sense to compare mathematics with chess. Chess is a sport. No one is interested in watching two machines compete. Chess doesn't have a practical impact. Etc. What you seem to suggest is that AI will be able to completely (or at least in a great part) replace mathematicians. It could be the case in the future, but no one knows right now, and more importantly: tech companies don't even think about it! they…

> No one is interested in watching two machines compete I’ve watched quite a lot of YouTube videos where two machines compete, so you may not be completely right here

There are chess engine tournaments too, to see who can build the best one

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#924

Post by rvba »

Marha01 wrote: post #918
JoshTriplett wrote: post #829

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replacing people leaves no room for people.

> Replacing people leaves no room for people. I am much more than my job. If I receive basic income, please replace my job ASAP! And if I don't receive a basic income in a world where AI is capable of replacing all human jobs, then the problem is not AI, but the powers that be.

You know your basic income will be some minumum to make you shut up, while the owner class will own everything?

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#925

Post by Marha01 »

dns_snek wrote: post #891
eru wrote: post #822

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's lots of competition in AI. Where do you see the 'insurmountable advantage in everything'?

They said "We're looking at a future". And if that future ends up developing the way these companies want it to then we're looking at extremely dystopian future where AI is essential to all work and people have to buy their "intelligence" from an oligopoly of large providers who have total control over the price and capabilities whilst simultaneously having unfiltered read/write access to people's stream-of-conscious…

Open AI models are just a few months behind closed models, and the gap is actually getting more narrow.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#926

Post by rvba »

eru wrote: post #823
coderenegade wrote: post #810

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At a certain point, you don't have a choice. Before China got into the game, the only way to avoid giving Luxotica money if you wanted a pair of glasses was to essentially not buy glasses. This is the same for many industries -- consolidation behind the scenes.

Huh? I've been able to buy reasonably priced glasses for all my life. (However, I've never lived in the US nor China.)

What is reasonably priced? Lenses are lenses so one vould debate the real cost, but the frames are incredibly overpriced for a piece of metal or plastic with two joints and those components that land on your nose.

Frames could literally cost 1 dollar (only happened after china entered this market), but good luck finding ones like this with good lenses.

You need to buy from one supplier who intentionally offers cheapest frames for 50+ dollars and those frames look like crap. The ones that look better (even if same plastic) cost 500+ dollars - and all due to price gouging.

For lenses I am not sure, but suspect something similar.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#927

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

gwd wrote: post #243

This sounds a lot to me like people in the 90's complaining that computers were destroying chess. Thirty years later, chess is more popular than it ever was, and chess players are better than they ever have been. I wouldn't be surprised if there are now more chess books now than there ever have been. Furthermore, it turns out that a lot of chess books written before computers were just wrong about a lot of things. It…

>> This sounds a lot to me like people in the 90's complaining that computers were destroying chess.

Genuine question: who were those people saying that? I don't know that criticism.

The criticism I know is from AI researchers and it is that beating humans at chess using a computer running an algorithm unlike anything that humans do when they play chess, tells us nothing about the way that humans play chess, which is what we are trying to understand when we try to get computers to play chess.

This criticism is exemplified by John McCarthy's article (the real godfather of AI; because he named it) "Ai as Sport" whence I quote:

Ideas about chess algorithms as well as advances in computer hardware were involved. However, it is a measure of our limited understanding of the principles of artificial intelligence (AI) that this level of play requires many millions of times as much computing as a human chess player does. Moreover, the fixation of most computer chess work on success in tournament play has come at scientific cost.

In 1965 the Russian mathematician Alexander Kronrod said, "Chess is the Drosophila of artificial intelligence." However, computer chess has developed much as genetics might have if the geneticists had concentrated their efforts starting in 1910 on breeding racing Drosophila. We would have some science, but mainly we would have very fast fruit flies.

https://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/newborn/newborn.html

A more recent criticism that can be made is that getting computers to beat humans at chess (and later Go, and Shoggi and Atari and Stratego) has turned out to only be possible with techniques that are too narrow to have real-world application. Btw, this includes Reinforcement Learning which is still much more capable in virtual environments than in any real-world environment.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#928

Post by eru »

rvba wrote: post #926
eru wrote: post #823

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? I've been able to buy reasonably priced glasses for all my life. (However, I've never lived in the US nor China.)

What is reasonably priced? Lenses are lenses so one vould debate the real cost, but the frames are incredibly overpriced for a piece of metal or plastic with two joints and those components that land on your nose. Frames could literally cost 1 dollar (only happened after china entered this market), but good luck finding ones like this with good lenses. You need to buy from one supplier who intentionally offers cheape…

I grew up in Germany, but I got frames in UK and Singapore and Australia, too.

Fielmann in Germany has been offering very reasonably priced glasses and frames for ages.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#929

Post by eru »

rvba wrote: post #924
Marha01 wrote: post #918

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Replacing people leaves no room for people. I am much more than my job. If I receive basic income, please replace my job ASAP! And if I don't receive a basic income in a world where AI is capable of replacing all human jobs, then the problem is not AI, but the powers that be.

You know your basic income will be some minumum to make you shut up, while the owner class will own everything?

Hasn't happened so far.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#930

Post by eru »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #903
user43928 wrote: post #898

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of 3.5 billion employed people globally, only 10% are professionals. Do you really think making labor obsolete and giving humans back their time is such a bad thing?

When cars made horses obsolete, it didn't go so well for horses. In the short term, AI is disempowering the vast majority of people in favor of a very small subset. In the also way too short term, AI is disempowering all people.

> When cars made horses obsolete, it didn't go so well for horses.

I'd guess horses today have on average a better life than back then.

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