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Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

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Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#321

Post by jmalicki »

bluealienpie wrote: post #272
threatripper wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While you are right in a way, I think you miss the point. In the past "computer" was a job description and mechanical power came from serfs. They surely developed skills we are lacking today but I'd argue that overall the world is a better place with digital computers and electrical motors. It frees up these people to do something else, something of higher value.

We argued that AI would free us to explore the arts. Instead it first came for written language and images. So what's left when it can write all the programs, drive all the cars, and AI sensors on farms can monitor and distribute nutrients. I remember watching TED Talks about how AI weapons need to be carefully studied, and instead we see them autonomously picking targets. I'm not seeing any higher values, instead I'…

Picking vegetables is still really tough for robots.

Pick and place robots, or humanoid robots that can fold laundry, are still a lot tougher than automating knowledge workers and a lot more expensive to the point it's questionable if they're worth it.

We may not be on a path to assured destruction, we may be on a path to becoming livestock.

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#322

Post by jmalicki »

gowld wrote: post #319
oblio wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually a very old AI insight, acknowledged at least as early as the 80s, let me see if I can find the quote. Found it: > Rodney Brooks explains that, according to early AI research, intelligence was "best characterized as the things that highly educated male scientists found challenging", such as chess, symbolic integration, proving mathematical theorems and solving complicated word algebra problems. "The t…

Brooks is weirdly sexist, but it's unsurprising that (higher) "intelligence" should mean things that are hard, not things that are easy.

But the hard things are things a child can do.

The things like proving complicated theorems are things that are acquired by education within a lifetime, and that's why they're easy for AI.

The things a child can do are acquired through millions of years of evolution. While they don't require much explicit education, that doesn't mean they're easier.

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#323

Post by FabHK »

gowld wrote: post #319
oblio wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually a very old AI insight, acknowledged at least as early as the 80s, let me see if I can find the quote. Found it: > Rodney Brooks explains that, according to early AI research, intelligence was "best characterized as the things that highly educated male scientists found challenging", such as chess, symbolic integration, proving mathematical theorems and solving complicated word algebra problems. "The t…

Brooks is weirdly sexist, but it's unsurprising that (higher) "intelligence" should mean things that are hard, not things that are easy.

Moravec's paradox:

> "it is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec's_paradox

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#324

Post by rayiner »

> However, the declaration argues math is more than a machine for producing correct answers. The discipline, its authors believe, is a deeply human endeavor built on creativity, understanding, collaboration

Mathematicians of all people should be free from such emotion-driven thinking. I guess people’s self interest in continuing to make an income trumps all.

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#325

Post by oblio »

gowld wrote: post #319
oblio wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually a very old AI insight, acknowledged at least as early as the 80s, let me see if I can find the quote. Found it: > Rodney Brooks explains that, according to early AI research, intelligence was "best characterized as the things that highly educated male scientists found challenging", such as chess, symbolic integration, proving mathematical theorems and solving complicated word algebra problems. "The t…

Brooks is weirdly sexist, but it's unsurprising that (higher) "intelligence" should mean things that are hard, not things that are easy.

I'm a guy and stereotypes exist for a reason.

Also, who do you think were the vast majority of AI researcher in the 50s, 60s, 70s?

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#326

Post by empath75 »

losvedir wrote: post #313
empath75 wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been spending 3 weeks, as a non mathemetician, chasing down a particular, very simply-stated, but secretly quite complex problem, and AI has been _so incredibly helpful_, not just in making progress on it, and doing obvious stuff like formalizing in lean, doing literature searches, reading through 10 or 15 papers and summarizing the results for me and how they apply to what I'm doing, giving me enough of an intr…

I'd be very cautious about "AI psychosis" here, or at the very least becoming a "crank". I've read too many stories of people convincing themselves they're on the verge of some great discovery to not hear "3 weeks to become conversational in mathematical fields" and not see all kinds of red flags. I studied math at MIT and have several friends who are professors now and they deal with cranks all the time and since th…

> I'd be very cautious about "AI psychosis" here, or at the very least becoming a "crank". I've read too many stories of people convincing themselves they're on the verge of some great discovery to not hear "3 weeks to become conversational in mathematical fields" and not see all kinds of red flags.

---

it's not a great discovery, it's a pretty minor question, that I thought would be easy and it's not -- i've just been poking off and on at it for weeks, and I'm relying on lean to verify everything. It's actually a quite specific CS-adjacent problem that I came up with trying to write code, that just is hard to solve, and nobody in the literature that I could find has looked at directly. The end result of it will have exactly zero consequences other than proving an interesting lower bound for a question that as far as i can tell, nobody has bothered even looking at but me. The reason it touches on multiple fields is that it's sort of both an algebra problem and a CS problem, so i keep having to flip between them to understand what I'm looking at, and there are a lot of sub-fields that span both that have different tools, and it took me a while to find the right one.

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#327

Post by empath75 »

handle584 wrote: post #316
empath75 wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been spending 3 weeks, as a non mathemetician, chasing down a particular, very simply-stated, but secretly quite complex problem, and AI has been _so incredibly helpful_, not just in making progress on it, and doing obvious stuff like formalizing in lean, doing literature searches, reading through 10 or 15 papers and summarizing the results for me and how they apply to what I'm doing, giving me enough of an intr…

Having been in academia for a bit, I find it somewhat hard to believe multiple professional mathematicians in different fields give meaningful reply to a random email solicitation from an internet stranger within three weeks, simply because those people's inboxes are absolutely bombarded every minute. In reality people would be thrilled to have such response even with a finished preprint on arXiv. Anyway if you reall…

Well, I was emailing specific people who were working on very closely related things, and had recently published papers about it and I had very small, concrete questions about their results and not much about my question, except for context.

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#328

Post by jrflowers »

oblio wrote: post #325
gowld wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brooks is weirdly sexist, but it's unsurprising that (higher) "intelligence" should mean things that are hard, not things that are easy.

I'm a guy and stereotypes exist for a reason. Also, who do you think were the vast majority of AI researcher in the 50s, 60s, 70s?

> I'm a guy and stereotypes exist for a reason.

What reason is that?

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#329

Post by fasterik »

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…

It seems to me that when you have a tool that automates part of the work, it doesn't make the curiosity go away, it changes the landscape of what problems humans find interesting. Maybe Erdos problems are no longer a good entry-level benchmark for a researcher, but that's going to drive young researchers to explore other areas that might have been out of reach before AI-human collaboation.

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#330

Post by ccppurcell »

le-mark wrote: post #164
ccppurcell wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well exactly.

One way to make money is to create a great product that solves a problem people have and market it effectively. That's a sort of idealised situation, an aspiration, but it's what I would call socially valuable. Another way is to help people who are already rich move their money around so that they become richer, in return for a fraction of the increase in wealth. I personally have no problem with that, everybody has to make a living, but that is not socially valuable. It is debatable how socially valuable pure mathematics research is. But you take a fixed fee and all your best work is public domain.

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