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A misalignment of AI in mathematics

mathandai.org

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Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#901

Post by int_19h »

boelboel wrote: post #749
pseudotensor wrote: post #717

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easy game. Protecting math jobs limits cancer progress even being a choice of what to pursue. You could choose to allow 24/7 surveillance, but why would you? At least with math progress society can choose what to allow from it, but slowing it down universally blocks all choices.

Lmao this guy thinks people ever decided who/what/how much things should be surveilled.

People do exactly that with every vandalized Flock camera.

It sucks that our democracy is really mostly just for show and thus such measures are required, but yes, we absolutely can decide such things if we really want to.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#902

Post by pks016 »

noosphr wrote: post #826
pks016 wrote: post #627

I never expected this many people (on this thread) arguing semantics and what not. I know that not everyone has morality and ethics, but I didn't realize it was this bad. I'm afraid of the ripple effect of the agenda pushed by AI companies will have. In future and even now, they say AI has significantly progressed math and scientific research in general. There is truth to this, but the narrative has done more damage…

Academia has been a toxic wasteland for decades. The ship caught fire and sunk long before open AI strip minded it prestige.

Academia is toxic for sure. But, also there are genuinely good people who work for greater good and whose training and teaching transcend across domains.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#903

Post by silver_silver »

int_19h wrote: post #840
nmeagent wrote: post #713

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The implication in the book is that the exploitation enabled by AI in their history was somehow even worse.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#904

Post by an0malous »

ls612 wrote: post #691
Creamsicle47 wrote: post #663

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All of the places facing an unusually high outage rate are places that have seen huge growth in their service usage (Anthropic, GitHub, etc) which is to be expected. That's not true, many of these outages have been directly attributed to AI tooling. > The rest of the world has been happily chugging along with coding agents for almost a year now and things seem to still be working just fine. Many more services are n…

So far for most organizations and services other than the ones I mentioned reliability has been the same this year as it was before. So I call that "working just fine".

How many major companies are pushing unreviewed code to prod? Seems like mostly an early stage startup thing and their bugs and outages aren’t going to make the news. I’m skeptical that even a majority of Anthropic and GitHub’s code new code this year was unreviewed.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#905

Post by pks016 »

raincole wrote: post #848
pks016 wrote: post #627

I never expected this many people (on this thread) arguing semantics and what not. I know that not everyone has morality and ethics, but I didn't realize it was this bad. I'm afraid of the ripple effect of the agenda pushed by AI companies will have. In future and even now, they say AI has significantly progressed math and scientific research in general. There is truth to this, but the narrative has done more damage…

I think the impact is heavily exaggerated. Yes, it means mathematics will be transformed into a field that relies on tools instead of your mind alone. Just like most fields. Doctors heavily rely on (really expensive!) tools to make diagnoses and do surgeries too. But it doesn't make them less valuable. If anything it makes them more valuable, as the society needs a long training and filtering process to decide who to…

That's the thing. It might be. We won't know the impact until the next few years. The things that are changing now: culture of research, aspects of collaboration and sharing of knowledge.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#906

Post by int_19h »

dwa3592 wrote: post #42

While I agree with this and appreciate Tao and other mathematicians to take the time to do this. There are similar concerns for many many other fields aka there is a general misalignment of technology. Take Software engineering for example, I can't believe there is a class of software engineers who wake up everyday and tell themselves, "today is the day I am going to automate the rest of my job". Lets forget the hype…

> can't believe there is a class of software engineers who wake up everyday and tell themselves, "today is the day I am going to automate the rest of my job".

The whole point of software engineering is automating processes; it's literally all that we do.

Not only that, but the endgame has been explicitly stated by Our Lady Ada of Lovelace herself:

> [The Analytical Engine] might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine... Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#907

Post by benlivengood »

The broader problem is that current AI and AI companies are not aligned with humans, human values, or human flourishing. AI is a powerful tool that can be aimed at quantified goals but we don't actually know how to quantify human values and flourishing (Goodhart's Law).

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#908

Post by talon8635 »

gpt5 wrote: post #632
pks016 wrote: post #627

I never expected this many people (on this thread) arguing semantics and what not. I know that not everyone has morality and ethics, but I didn't realize it was this bad. I'm afraid of the ripple effect of the agenda pushed by AI companies will have. In future and even now, they say AI has significantly progressed math and scientific research in general. There is truth to this, but the narrative has done more damage…

I think that the main thing people in this thread are missing, is that it's not about math. AI progression is very likely to affect every single thing humans can do today. Mathematicians are feeling the blow this week, especially as there was wide spread denial in that math community over the capabilities of AI over the last few years, but it's the same problem everywhere.

I work at a top tier academic institution and they are completely asleep at the wheel on this topic. They just blindly assume people will keep taking on a potential lifetime of debt when there is a genuine existential (for ed, at the very least… ignoring humanity for the time being) crisis looming

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#909

Post by talon8635 »

int_19h wrote: post #840
nmeagent wrote: post #713

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Honest question, is an oppressed human society better than no human society at all? Isn’t there at least a hope for humans to free themselves from human oppressors?

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#910

Post by talon8635 »

david-gpu wrote: post #140

Tao's critique of AI in the field of mathematics reminds me of what French art critic Charles Baudelaire said in the 19th century about photography [0]. Baudelaire argued that photography became a haven for failed painters, the sorts of hacks that could not finish proper training. Photography, as a mechanical rendering of the world, could only record what already existed; it couldn't transform reality the way a paint…

I’d agree art has deteriorated massively since then, so maybe we are in for an intellectual dark age to accompany our cultural hellscape.
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