141–150 of 171 posts
Math is not dead, it (and i guess programming to a lesser degree?) is something people do to better themselves, akin to meditation. Just because AI can meditate (it cant) doesnt mean humans will stop meditating. We may become irrelevant in that AI can generate results and proofs that it doesnt need us for, but then AI will make itself irrelevant to us! The slippery slope slides both ways.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except that your view doesn't change the reality, and both views are true at the same time.
So you decide that the reality is another view and that's settled?
Maybe reread my comments in both contexts.
Capitalistic acceleration will most definitely keep trampling on anything in front of it. Because, the humans with capital will steer it that way.
Eg OpenAI steering the “AI the tool” at Navier Stokes on a rumor (inaccurate as we found out) of Anthropic having solved it.
I think as a civilization we need to postulate a new term: “purpose death” Defined something like: temporary state of complete loss of personal purpose and the experience of existential dread from never achieving self-actualization in spite of the tremendous time commitment towards excellence in a now automated intelligence. I truly think because of the pace of innovation this will be a universal feeling for every hu…
I would argue that purpose death is a normal step towards enlightenment and it was only the fierce, unrelenting, all consuming drive of capitalism in the western world over the last 4 or 5 generations that have pushed everyone to define themselves (nearly) solely in terms of their work. I do not at all feel purpose death from AI (been a software developer professionally for 20 years, now a founder), but I consider my…
Regarding AI getting better than humans, in some ways it may be more like the invention of the microscope - instead of worrying about it reducing demand for people with good eyes it may open up new discoveries.
One example I'm kind of excited for is that I've long suspected that the inability to combine quantum mechanics with general relativity is because the maths gets too hard for humans. I mean Navier Stokes on singularities in fluid flow in euclidean space is hard enough. Particles may be singularities in quantum fields in relativistic space time which is probably mathematically far harder. But it would be interesting to know how that works.
I think as a civilization we need to postulate a new term: “purpose death” Defined something like: temporary state of complete loss of personal purpose and the experience of existential dread from never achieving self-actualization in spite of the tremendous time commitment towards excellence in a now automated intelligence. I truly think because of the pace of innovation this will be a universal feeling for every hu…
I read > The important question is, therefore, not whether AI will defeat mathematicians, but which mathematical ends we want AI to serve. and had the opposite interpretation as I see you having. To me, it reads as the authors [1] acknowledging, as you put it, that > AI will run and trample anything that stays in front of it. and that mathematicians need to find out where they want to go: > Rather, it is an opportuni…
I think you’re right that mechanically I’m saying the same thing as they are saying “use AI to build your dreams”.
I think the psychology is the difference. Specially, “oh it can now do that too” has to be met with “finally” rather than “no way! That was supposed to be human only”.
eg “what are we after?” Is also likely a question that will be solved by AI in N years after mathematicians chip at it for all that time.
Any and every singular focus will be eliminated. There will be more tho to work on - that’s where the purpose rebirth is. I think.
Maybe said differently, I think one day these same authors will write the post - “more of math is handled by AI. It doesn’t matter. We will work on the infinite amount of it that’s left. Whatever that happens to be, even when we are surprised it wasn’t what we tried to control it to be.”
That will be acceptance. That we’ll be purpose rebirth.
Chess and Go have most definitely not been solved. In AI research when we say that a game (and usually we mean a traditional board game) has been "solved", what we mean is that we can correctly predict the outcome of any game instance from any board position provided both players play perfectly [1]. This can mean we have an algorithm that chooses the perfect play for each player in any position or that we have mapped the entire game tree for that game: every move in every game, from start to finish.
There are games that have been solved this way: tic-tac-toe; connect four; nim; othello, checkers. But not chess and Go.
Rather, what we have for chess and Go are super-human engines, i.e. computer players that no human has ever beaten in the full game. So for example a chess engine like Stockfish can always choose what move to make in order to win against a human player in any board position. However, that is still not the same as knowing how to play perfectly in any board position. Like the old joke with the two guys trying to outrun a bear, a chess engine doesn't have to play perfect chess to be super-human: it just has to play better than any human.
To the extent that chess and Go are games it could be said that winning is the whole point of AI game-playing [2]. But the article above suggests that there is no point of "winning" in maths. In AI chess it is unfortunate that the development of super-human chess engines has ended all research in using AI chess to understand the way that human players play chess (which is to say: not by alpha-beta minimax, or Monte Carlo Tree Search, or anything like that) which was the original reason that luminaries of the field such as Shannon, Minsky, McCarthy, Michie, and even Turing himself were interested in the question in the first place. The concern then for mathematics is that AI "winning" at maths will kill mathematics research and replace it with ... as McCarthy would have it "very fast fruit flies" [3].
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solved_game
[2] Then again see John McCarthy's criticism of that idea written in the wake of DeepBlue vs Kasparov: https://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/newborn/newborn.html
[3] ibid.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I’d say Terrance has recently left the denial phase, the anger phase I’m sure he wisely kept off the Internet, and is currently in the bargaining phase - ie scrambling to change the goal posts. I wonder if he will wisely keep the depression / burnout phases also off the internet. You're making up a narrative about another person. You have no clue what's happening to him, without talking to him.
Not only that, but this blogpost wasn't written by Tao.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
From personal experience in a small (total <10 people) company, we have definitely 10x our product in the last two years. What 4 devs did in 4 years have been dwarfed by what 2 devs were able to do in 1 year with AI. I'm not so familiar with the giant companies, but from afar it seems like they already have practically all the code-writing capacity they wanted anyway. Google could say "let's build a browser" or "let'…
Again, I've heard that countless times on HN. Every time you ask, everyone is 10xing it and building amazing things that will go to market very soon now. But it's been a while; where is it? Somehow, everyone is just sitting on all these revolutionary advances while selling the exact same stuff as they were selling before, with the same warts and the same annoyances. Gmail is the same, Chrome is the same, Photoshop is…
Anyway, Sturgeon's law and all that.
What I don’t see much of in the article - and still less in the comments that seem to see AI-led progress in mathematics as nothing but a disaster, because mathematics exists only to provide employment to mathematicians - is a sense that mathematics has a social purpose, or duties beyond the community of mathematicians. I thought the reason we were encouraging people to go into STEM, and providing clever people with…
> I thought the reason we were encouraging people to go into STEM, and providing clever people with large salaries, was that mathematical results were of practical value to the wider human race. In which case, it’s surely very good news that AI can get those results. The impact of mathematics on other disciplines goes much further than specific results. Just as important, if not even more so, are the language and way…
What makes you think so? I can think of lots of specific results that helped e.g. economists - convex optimization or supermodularity, say - but I don’t think the broader way of thinking of mathematicians has had any input into economics for the past fifty years, and arguably nor should it - the discipline can think for itself. Similarly, sociologists can use linear regression, or geneticists can partition variance, without having to think like mathematicians.
I think one of the traits of people who feel a sense of loss about AI is that many of them value the bond that comes from discussion within their field. You could call it a sense of comradeship, or a shared sense of purpose.
Old timey mining, or the more romantic eras of seafaring also provided more camaraderie than what modern jobs provide. There may be some longing for those more pure and valiant days, but we moved on. You can still discuss about AI assisted results with your peers. I guess it's like how people miss the days of heated arguments about factual questions whereas the smartphone era led to someone just pulling out their pho…
In a sense, programming (et tu, mathematics) has become a bullshit job. Though, it will take some time (~6 months) before "fulltime" investors or serial SaaS founders start to lose that high of shared purpose when celebrating around the campfire how they each surprised themselves with an artisanal leverage of "network effects" that one time..
Those of us still trying to extract personal purpose by commiserating on quirks of fable or astra in this warm-colored forum..
May want to contemplate the personal (but unrelated to ozempic or pharmaceuticals) meaningfulness of "month-scale network effects" next