881–890 of 1001 posts
As a mathematician maybe I am a little more optimistic than this declaration. I am thinking of Mochizuki's abc conjecture: He worked in relative isolation, and dumped a huge incomprehensible proof on the community (to oversimplify a bit). That's not totally unlike what might happen if AI generates a huge, incomprehensible proof of let's say RH. Well, what is the result? In the Mochizuki case, it was a lot of skeptici…
It’s frustrating that this comment is at the top because it, along with lots of the replies it inspired, absolutely misrepresents the actual declaration. The declaration is not making any statements about not using any AI in mathematics. The entire point is to push the use of the technology in a direction which is compatible with positive pre-existing features of the math community, and to make it better known what s…
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Yep. Perhaps humanity would be better off if we instituted and enforced the notion of "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind." It's worth thinking about; just because we can build AI systems doesn't mean we should.
I would remind you that the fictional society that did this was also described as a feudal monarchy in which a tiny class of nobles exploits the economic output of trillions of people reduced to serfs by controlling all means of interstellar trade. Oh, and they also have legal slavery.
Thank you for commenting this. I'm tired of hearing about Dune like its some kind of utopia
We have an intellectual structure that has been largely the same irrespective of the level of technological advancement. The brightest among us think about hard problems. Even though all of us may not understand those advances, we all appreciate and celebrate them to varying degrees. Those who are able to comprehend have time to absorb, generate more discussion. In time, we honor those achievements that withstand the…
Sure, but in your scenario, the process is the experience for a small group of people, while the result benefits everyone (perhaps not directly, but ultimately via a chain of applications). Which one is more important?
It's not at all a new dilemma either. Jacquard looms destroyed the "human experience" of manual weaving for craftsmen who spent decades to perfect their skill. They also made clothing orders of magnitude cheaper for everyone else.
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It’s frustrating that this comment is at the top because it, along with lots of the replies it inspired, absolutely misrepresents the actual declaration. The declaration is not making any statements about not using any AI in mathematics. The entire point is to push the use of the technology in a direction which is compatible with positive pre-existing features of the math community, and to make it better known what s…
I don’t see why the two are mutually exclusive to be honest. I’m not a mathematician, but I’m a software engineer and whether I like it or not, AI has changed my field dramatically forever. I understand the distaste for the way AI might be affecting the field of mathematics, but the genie is out of the bottle, and it will never be the same. It just took a little longer for it to hit the math community. Software engin…
It reminds me of Frédéric Bastiat's Candle Makers' Petition. It satirised protectionism in the 1800s: >We candlemakers are suffering from the unfair competition of a foreign rival. This foreign manufacturer of light has such an advantage over us that he floods our domestic markets with his product. And he offers it at a fantastically low price. The moment this foreigner appears in our country, all our customers des…
This is a straw men argument The petition is about a much broader problem: if we’ll demotivate people from understanding math, vibe math in a rush without making it understandable - math becomes useless Basically with pic generation at least we all understand what is on a pic - some cat or something With math it is trivial to generate a lot of stuff that is half-assed and just gives a plain yes/no but doesn’t get abs…
It answered about the Navier Stokes too but not at a very deep level https://share.google/aimode/JD69g15GIQiYo9L65
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It’s not a parallel. No one ever claimed photography to be the same as painting or some other medium - it was a new medium that wasn’t respected. AI is being treated and pushed as a replacement for every medium.
It literally was a replacement for portraits.
An LLM can produce a portrait of you as well by generating a facsimile of you based on existing material (or functionally a “guess” if you describe yourself I guess).
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But its normal, and good, that technologal progress creates, and destroys some jobs. Imagin a cheap, 100% reliable, self driving car would be released. Death from Traffic incidence fall by orders of magnitude Would you argue it didnt benefit humanity, because taxi/bus drivers are nolonger required
I'm actually a AI optimist. I think it'd be great to have everybody getting around in self driving vehicles. If all that AI brought resulted in just taxi/bus drivers being phased out of their jobs in a thoughtful way, then that would be more manageable at the society level. But we're talking about almost all sectors of the economy. If the magnitude of changes that OpenAI and Athropic believe will be delivered with in…
It cannot. The problem is that everything gets automated, so there's nowhere for people to "transition" to.
More fundamentally, the problem is that capitalism is simply incompatible with this. Specifically: capitalism is a system of property rights which in the long run always results in concentration of capital in a few hands. What made it tolerable so far is that capital cannot produce wealth by itself - you need people to use it to that end. Which in turn means that you need to pay for labor, at least enough for it to sustain itself. So even if you pocket most of the wealth that is generated in the process, the workers still get the crumbs at least.
AI is not like automation in the past because its end goal is doing everything that humans can do. Taken to its logical conclusion, you get capital that doesn't need labor at all: those who own the robots live in a personal post-scarcity utopia, everyone else starves. A slightly better case is when everyone else gets a meager pension, just high enough that people have something to lose and don't try to burn everything down - this is why you hear so much about UBI from the likes of Sam Altman (this isn't to say that UBI is inherently a bad thing! but make no mistake, what they actually want would look a lot more like The Expanse and a lot less like The Culture). It "minimizes disruption" in a sense that there are no riots, and it might even be a material improvement for a lot of the globe, but it sure isn't an improvement for most people living in developed countries today.
So I would argue that, if anything, we need more disruption here, not less. All the way to the top.
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I am on this track too. If AI leads to advancements, objectively that's a positive (depending on the advancement I guess) but it's only when mathematicians realise they'll get beaten to every thing now that they're outraged.
Say AI becomes the best at everything. Best at chess/go, best at maths, philosophy, economics, romantic advices ... and so on. Then what's the point of thinking by oneself? Of talking to one another? What's the point of being human if we dont do human things but entirely rely on AI? I believe this is more or less these mathematicians' argument.
It's fun.
> Of talking to one another?
It's fun.
> What's the point of being human if we dont do human things but entirely rely on AI?
It's fun.
Well, it's not fun today because most of us have to spend most of our waking hours working some bullshit job for a living. But imagine that there's no bullshit job?