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The Dark Night of Mathematics

kirwinhampshire.substack.com

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Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics

#101

Post by skeledrew »

geophile wrote: post #4

> "They are forbidden from creating original works to express themselves. However, they are still permitted to comment on writing, interpret it, share their taste. They are still valued for their appraisal, presentation, understanding and appreciation of creative writing. They just can’t write creatively anymore. They can go on as an enthusiastic spectator. > ... It revealed that the process of prompting novel proofs…

> AI is stealing all the fun parts.

Disagree. AI has is taking all the parts that remove the fun. Now people can truly have fun with that which they find interest in, because there's a way to avoid the parts they're not interested in engaging with, with little to no consequence.

Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics

#102

Post by m0llusk »

Seems like maybe now we have sufficient tools to actually get on top of string theory. And ultimately it is all about coming up with explanations and formulas and tools that people can use in facing real challenges.

Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics

#103

Post by neonstatic »

Nevermark wrote: post #97
neonstatic wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I think you have AI psychosis.

Five years from now you won't. Ten years from now, robotics will upset another capability/economic apple cart. I am not expressing any opinion of what I think should happen. Just what is already happening. Which you didn't offer a credible critique to. That might have been interesting.

You make a fair point, I did not elaborate.

My comment about AI psychosis was provoked by this comment in particular:

> AI isn't a tame long term transition - in scale it is bigger than any transition since the first individual cells.

It's such a wild hyperbole. You are casually claiming the stochastic text generator is a greater invention than fire, combustion engine, electricity, a transistor, computers, quantum mechanics... do you not see how unreasonable that is?

Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics

#104

Post by i_idiot »

d_burfoot wrote: post #92

Every single knowledge worker is going to face this kind of crisis. It will be worse for people who cared deeply about their craft, but the crisis will have the same shape. The way through is to change the way you relate to your work, and to appreciate the fact that you can now produce far more output. Mathematicians should realize: instead of spending decades on individual theorems, you can now create whole new subf…

I don't understand. Can't you just ask LLMs to do the same and collaborate with other LLMs?

Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics

#105

Post by jbxntuehineoh »

iahds9uasd wrote: post #25
zemvpferreira wrote: post #10

This is what locking yourself away in an ivory tower gets you. Do things ‘for beauty’ and watch as they are automated and commoditized by the people who depend on them for their continued wellbeing, reduced to a hobby or sport. But the reduction began when you yourself started putting more importance on your enjoyment of the process over the value being provided to your customers.

Customers? It's math. This is like a comment a golem built to raise the S&P 500 would write.

just another pathetic case of terminal economicsbrain. sadly there's nothing to be done to help these people; it's best to just ignore them

Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics

#107

Post by c7b »

The endangered art form of human mathematics is one thing. Another thing is that there seems to be little concern for whether a theorem was created using a documented open-weights model or some unknown model in a web chat.

If you want to make the case that the journey of creating the proof is part of doing mathematics, then you should also document that path and make it reproducible, as science should always be.

There were some examples of mathematicians publishing their AI proofs like that in the last days, but by far not all.

Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics

#108

Post by tidojo »

Jtarii wrote: post #99
d_burfoot wrote: post #92

Every single knowledge worker is going to face this kind of crisis. It will be worse for people who cared deeply about their craft, but the crisis will have the same shape. The way through is to change the way you relate to your work, and to appreciate the fact that you can now produce far more output. Mathematicians should realize: instead of spending decades on individual theorems, you can now create whole new subf…

The creation is the actually enjoyable part. Taking a helicopter to the top of Everest is not as rewarding as climbing the mountain. You are completely discrediting the joy humans derive from actually -doing- the work, and not just, telling someone else to do the work. There is a reason artists hate AI, its because they enjoy the actual act of painting, like mathematicians enjoy the act of proving theorems and progra…

you can’t climb to the moon, you need rockets for that. In the hands of great researchers, AI will accelerate and propel human knowledge far beyond what we could achieve with pencil and paper alone.

Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics

#109

Post by joe_the_user »

oytis wrote: post #83
joe_the_user wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only "fields" where a genie appearing and doing all your work for you are fields (jobs) where you only about the money at the end. There are some fields where a serious practitioner might be happy to have a genie do all the "grunt work" (though what people that is varies - I'm not sure what "discovery work" means here but it doesn't matter since present AI promises to do everything in the future if not now). And…

Wouldn't it be great if we had a cure for cancer, working fusion energy or at least a proof for P vs NP even if no human had a joy of discovering it?

OK,

I should have put have put things as "when you are primarily interested in some benefit outside of the task at hand". Some of those benefits might be great, sure. But it's still not necessarily going to improve the enjoyment of the professional.

Edit: Also, not all of the things on your list are the same. I would note that P!=NP would be a theorem whose proof would offer no practical benefits except for the potential mathematical machinery created to achieve the proof rather than what it tells us about practical algorithm time (the theory is about worst case, not average case, an algorithm that's O(n^100) is as effectively intractable as an algorithm that's O(2^n), etc).

Re: The Dark Night of Mathematics

#110

Post by pineaux »

Zsfe510asG wrote: post #69
jostylr wrote: post #63

As a mathematics person, I find this at odds with my views. I know the current regime rewards new mathematical discoveries for professional advancement, but that is a job thing, one which can be altered by the powers that be. To me investigating mathematics is fun whether it is new to the world or not. The complaint is similar to lamenting how everywhere has already been visited and there is nothing to be done other…

Yes, we'll have free health care, boomers will rent their apartments for $100, everyone will have UBI and a Tesla with a warp drive that travels to the terraformed Mars. Hayek and Friedman predicted it!

I almost never hear the story that I find the most believable: that a small group of people will use AI to demolish the 99.999% of us.
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