Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground • Hacker News Board

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#161

Post by orangecat » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 9:51 PM UTC

mswphd wrote: post #138

RugnirViking wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what's wrong with artists having jobs via a program? whats wrong with struggling alcoholics having jobs via a program? athletes? politicians? there is no inherent virtue in the struggle and effort associated with great mathematical achievement. It may be satisfying and worthwhile for the solver, but not for society at large, any more than any other pleasurable activity. No, as it is, the sole reason for it is in the…

for mathematicians, they do a form of fundamental research that is 1. (generally) incredibly cheap to fund, and 2. (occasionally) has extremely out-sized commercial impacts. This is to say that jobs programs for math (and more generally fundamental research) have lead to extremely positive ROI for society, which is the typical justification given for funding them.

This is to say that jobs programs for math (and more generally fundamental research) have lead to extremely positive ROI for society

Which makes it not a "jobs program" as the term is generally used.

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#162

Post by martin1975 » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 9:53 PM UTC

bitwize wrote: post #106

psyklic wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most important part of math is advancing human understanding. A correct answer by itself is not as important as understanding why it is correct.

The value of human understanding just cratered because we have machines to understand for us now.

Not quite.

You have machines that can aid and expand your (human) understanding greatly, that wasn't possible without machines.

Machines don't think. They aren't human. They have no soul, agency/free will, self-reflection/awareness, moral imperatives or ethics.

You've been watching too much Terminator, son.

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#163

Post by Huntsecker » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 9:54 PM UTC

Anyone else draw similarities with this and the artists and authors who complained when gen ai first came out. I think a lot of people don't realise the disruption ai will cause to many industries, until its directly impacting them, basically personal fable at scale (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_fable).

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#164

Post by le-mark » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 9:55 PM UTC

ccppurcell wrote: post #108

yieldcrv wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an interesting perspective and I wholly disagree with the conclusion You are saying that tough problems with no applicability are useful because people that you happen to respect got good by their curiosity and pursuit of trying to solve these kinds of problems and failing, but branching off into other cognitive areas as mathematicians Now if I know anything about math for the sake of math, and academics, thes…

I think you've slightly straw manned the lamentation there. Not that I agree with the lamentation, but using your talent to make the rich richer (which is what quants do, they are paid a fixed amount to provide a larger value up the chain), as opposed to advancing human knowledge, is the reason for the lament, not some sort of respectability issue.

Quants benefit from substantial bonus structure as part of their compensation.

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#165

Post by Joel_Mckay » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 9:57 PM UTC

martin1975 wrote: post #158

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general, most researchers already incorporate LLM into their workflows, as it is quite good at context search. However, the relevant training data is based on the collective works of the field of experts. Collecting current data on that work is what makes the LLM sound relevant, and any improvement of the LLM model requires frequent new data from both researchers and the chat bot users themselves. LLM are not real…

Reading this invoked the image of ouroboros in my mind.

The Ouroboros in western mythology is a cautionary tale about the uselessness of the first perfect immortal being, and why humans should suffer our imperfections with insightful grace. The concept also made a great Red Dwarf episode.

LLM are more like the Mechanical Turk trick, but the persons inside the machine running the con is unaware of how their actions affect the confounded observers.

Have a wonderful day =3

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#166

Post by danbruc » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 10:02 PM UTC

math_dandy wrote: post #121

turzmo wrote: post #48

Much of math (or science) research has the strange quality of being mostly curiosity-driven, but having giant benefits that occasionally spin out to the public. Some questions are more urgent and practical. My feeling is that the more directly practical a question is, the more likely the research community is to support AI usage in that question. The annoying thing about recent AI advances is that they target questio…

To me, the most interesting feature of the OpenAI solution of the Unit Distance (Erdös) Problem is that the solution - using deep algebraic number theory as a source of extremal combinatorial/geometric constructions - is much more interesting than the problem’s elementary statement might lead one to expect. Writing off Erdös’s problems as random, useless, or meaningless dismisses his mathematical intuition, second-to…

I am not a mathematician and did not read the unit distance solution too carefully, but my impression was that it used a variation of a known technique to solve the problem. And that makes perfect sense to me, there are a lot of techniques and lot of less relevant problems, I am not surprised that one can solve some of them with known techniques that just nobody has tried [hard enough] before. I am much more sceptical when it come to the important unsolved problems where every known technique has probably been tried several times over. In those instances it will probably take a true leap in understanding to solve them and I am sceptical that large language models are well suited for that because of the way they work.

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#167

Post by math_dandy » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 10:04 PM UTC

azeirah wrote: post #152

turzmo wrote: post #48

Much of math (or science) research has the strange quality of being mostly curiosity-driven, but having giant benefits that occasionally spin out to the public. Some questions are more urgent and practical. My feeling is that the more directly practical a question is, the more likely the research community is to support AI usage in that question. The annoying thing about recent AI advances is that they target questio…

Do you not think that solutions to erdos problems might end up stepping stones to other important problems? Either by introducing new tools, or by proving things that were previously unproven that end up helping in unexpected ways? That's often how math goes, isn't it?

This is, indeed, how math often goes.

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#168

Post by HDThoreaun » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 10:05 PM UTC

QuantumNoodle wrote: post #137

1970-01-01 wrote: post #135

Why is it wrong to expect humans (mathematicians) to adapt here? AI is already producing solutions to problems that humans could not find. Culture holds value until it does not.

Sorry did you read the article or just the headline? The theme is mathematics is a human-endevor and automation undermines that, particularly the ones starting out. It risks killing the culture entirely. Some other key points: - AI-generated papers could overwhelm peer-review systems with low-quality work. - It may become difficult to assign proper credit for discoveries. - Researchers who choose not to use AI tools…

Mathematics is not inherently a human endeavor and claims such as those are why the GOP voters are fine with cutting research funding so heavily. Even if you think it's true you probably shouldnt write think pieces that say so because it's bad politics.

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#169

Post by jazzyjackson » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 10:05 PM UTC

brador wrote: post #70

BigGreenJorts wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like yet another example of how AI is kneecapping industries from the bottom by "removing the barrier to entry" but really just removing the training path by doing the work itself with no guidance for juniors.

We are on tiny 1-5T parameter models with local power stations. We can reach Q models just by throwing resources at it. That’s a million times current B models.

You cannot think fast enough when your wires are kilometers long. The only way up is in, and silicon transistors just cannot compete with density with biologic brains, ergo, super intelligence is a pipe dream

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#170

Post by munificent » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 10:06 PM UTC

zerobees wrote: post #115

silveraxe93 wrote: post #5

> However, the declaration argues math is more than a machine for producing correct answers. There might be more to maths than that, but that is definitely the most important part. I love science funding. But not because it's a jobs program for nerds.

Culturally, mathematics is a jobs program for nerds. The field very explicitly takes pride in working on problems that have no obvious applications, and most practitioners are funded publicly or supported by private endowments, with zero pressure to deliver specific results. Of course, this produces useful results every now and then, but it's not like we pursued ruthless efficiency / maximum rate of knowledge advance…

> We just let them do their thing, essentially treating them as artists and letting them pursue the craft for its own sake.

I think we generally did that because that seemed to be the best known process for maximizing the quantity of useful mathematics that they occasionally stumble upon.

It's not like we treat math as a charity project for eccentrics who like blackboards. What we want is new mathematical discoveries that have a huge positive impact on other areas of the world. It's just that math and/or human brains are such that seemingly the best way to find those discoveries was to let mathematicians wander around randomly in mindspace.

If a more guided structured process produced more results, we'd probably do that. But it doesn't seem to, so we don't. I don't think anyone knows yet what the best process for producing useful mathematics with humans + AIs looks like.