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A misalignment of AI in mathematics

mathandai.org

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Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#871

Post by jrowen »

jrowen wrote: post #869
jrowen wrote: post #854

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for this response, and I will clarify. I would roughly lump all of those into "social issues," whereas I would put "using AI to advance math" under "technological progress." That's why one article likened it to Socrates's fear of the written word. In broad strokes, I would say that once a technology becomes available, no amount of social pressure will stop it from proliferating. If there's a distinction bei…

To expand further, I think it's interesting that both replies to my comments in this thread sort of alluded to the idea that I might be a corporate shill or at best a patsy. I feel like that couldn't be farther from the truth, I walked away from the software industry and corporate world years ago. Perhaps I'm looking at this from a too zoomed-out or detached perspective. I'm just thinking about the concept of the tec…

To expand EVEN further, look at the history of the written word. Being a scribe was a high class position in service of the church. The printing press was invented to print the bible. These were the information-theory projects of the hegemonic institutions and propagandists of the day. I don't think anyone today would argue that these developments ultimately benefitted and liberated the people.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#872

Post by bonoboTP »

pks016 wrote: post #584

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 was already crumbling for various reasons. This just hastens it. The reasons are manifold and will never be acknowledged. There will be a lot of gnashing of teeth, but it was unsustainable anyway. And historically the bloat was a very short period, a few decades only.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#873

Post by qingcharles »

pred_ wrote: post #745
qlte wrote: post #665

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It includes Terrance Tao who has made the front page several dozen times at this point for his usage of AI such as to help the community write proofs for Erdos problems. But to many commentors he's a now gatekeeping AI-hating Luddite clinging to a dying profession out of bitterness and envy because his position is more nuanced than "throw AI at everything and turn off your brain".

It's the same on Reddit, and if you look up a few comment histories, you'll find that it's mostly /r/singularity users and /r/accelerate posters that are spamming. So I assume that people are just deliberately misreading the letter and trolling here as well, and I wouldn't read too much into it, but on the other hand, if you never had to think about what scientific misconduct looks like, it's harder to see why the be…

They're not deliberately misreading it, they are simply just not reading it and just assuming they know what it says.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#874

Post by jgord »

cc my comment from reddit :

This is true of almost any field - if we have black-box technology that only the AI can understand / fix / augment / extend, then we will lose the ability for humans to learn and understand that tech.

Its similar to outsourcing manufacturing, you lose the ability to manufacture. If you don't exercise a muscle, it atrophies. If some people dont learn to write code [ or do math or write music or books ] the hard slow way, we will lose that deep skill.

If young people don't grapple with hard problems in science, math, economics, creative writing, drawing, music making .. they will not be trained, their cognitive skills will not develop with use. We will have no doctors or engineers or musicians or lawyers in a decade or two.

We don't want to become a race of fatties who never exercise, or dummies who just scroll social media feeds without exercising their minds.

This is real.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#876

Post by momojo »

jgord wrote: post #874

cc my comment from reddit : This is true of almost any field - if we have black-box technology that only the AI can understand / fix / augment / extend, then we will lose the ability for humans to learn and understand that tech. Its similar to outsourcing manufacturing, you lose the ability to manufacture. If you don't exercise a muscle, it atrophies. If some people dont learn to write code [ or do math or write musi…

I don't think this is a perfect analogy, but i think it's closest to the original articles declaration.

I wish they had stayed this as the very first paragraph.

Maybe I'm too stupid to grok the original declaration. Does anyone have a better summation?

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#877

Post by bonoboTP »

uonr wrote: post #492
david-gpu wrote: post #137

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…

Both of Baudelaire’s criticisms were reasonable, and the same thing happened again when AI image generation showed up. You think the opponents look ridiculous because you’re viewing the history from the winner’s side. As for “the public,” people had a real demand for photography as a way to record things, which is also why it won. There is no comparable public demand for proving Fermat’s Last Theorem.

> There is no comparable public demand for proving Fermat’s Last Theorem.

It's a capability demo, not the main point. There is plenty of demand for intelligence on tap. These flashy results are necessary though, otherwise people keep claiming AI is just hype, it can't do anything etc. So they need something to point at. And it seems to be working because the anti-AI narrative has changed from the previous stance that it's just the new NFT that will simply go away to how it will replace human intellectual work and will be bad for artists and desk workers.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#878

Post by bonoboTP »

gjulianm wrote: post #789
david-gpu wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tao doesn't go as far as Baudelaire, but there are some similarities. In particular, Tao has criticized that AI is not being used to create new interesting conjectures, and that the rush to prove old conjectures is not giving human mathematicians enough time to carefully analyze and understand the proofs and the methods used in those proofs. My answer to both is the same: nothing stops mathematicians from doing both…

There are no similarities whatsoever, other than them having opinions on a new tech that affects their field. > nothing stops mathematicians from doing both of those things Actually yes, and they explain that pretty clearly in the letter. These problems have been used as "goals" not because the solutions are necessarily worth it, but because they set a clear direction whose process would probably yield very useful th…

> get funding

It all comes down to this. Yes, they will need to give a good and convincing argument to the taxpayer. And at the end of the day, if the circumstances change, and you're unsuccessful in making your case in your plead, the taxpayer and their representatives may not want to keep the same level of funding and instead put that money to use elsewhere. So make a good argument why your job is still worth that cash under the new circumstances. The argument can appeal to aesthetics and art and philosophy and a kind of feeling of religious elegance and so on, it's fine. I can't say how well that will work, but it's worth a try. Taxes also fund theology and other pursuits with no tie to cold hard engineering etc. But that level of funding is not the same as for math currently. That gap may shrink.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#879

Post by nxobject »

jeremysalwen wrote: post #20

To me it doesn't seem like what AI has destroyed is the ability for mathematicians to develop understanding and share it with each other, but rather it's destroyed the yardstick (solving open problems) that has traditionally been used to measure how much they have contributed to that understanding. I do see how this is a problem in terms of assigning credit, but I think the cat is already out of the bag in terms of t…

> To me it doesn't seem like what AI has destroyed is the ability for mathematicians to develop understanding and share it with each other, but rather it's destroyed the yardstick (solving open problems) that has traditionally been used to measure how much they have contributed to that understanding.

I think you're missing key details in the statement. You can hate problems and sprinting towards solutions, and still have a deep impact in mathematics – Grothendieck once famously said you can often "soak the walnut" to crack open an issue. Rather, it's how frontier labs are inherently commercial incentivized to act like this, because it is in their best fiduciary interest. That is the misalignment.

Re: A misalignment of AI in mathematics

#880

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

40four wrote: post #803
GPerson wrote: post #660

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The difference is that most software engineers don't care about bringing up a new generation to keep their field alive when they retire. Software engineers usually don't give a flying fuck for other software engineers, young or old, nor for software engineering itself. Mathematicians apparently care deeply for their subject, their field, and its future.
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