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Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI

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Re: Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI

#421

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

munksbeer wrote: post #390
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't this seem to be where all domains are headed? I get kinda freaked out when I feel like all the AI "utopianists" haven't taken the next logical step of thinking about what society looks like when humans are subpar in every domain (and you may argue this won't happen, though I'm becoming more and more a believer that it will, but my point is the utopianists believe that this absolutely will happen, and that it'…

Obviously it is a ludicrous example, but there are books for this: The Culture novels by Iain. M. Banks. I'd be quite happy as a citizen of The Culture. But, on a more serious note, or more realistic, I find it vaguely insulting that you think that so many of us are just so shallow we'll not figure out how to live meaningful lives in an AI dominated future. The world is already meaningless. Some people live in the US…

> Some people live in the US, get tech jobs and live lives of almost indescribable luxury compared to someone born in South Sudan. There are beggars on the streets of most African countries, who are deformed of malnutrition and suffering in pain. There are children who will never know true happiness, and die in misery.

It's a bit baffling to me that folks think that the reason so many live in poverty now is a resource problem, and that an abundance of resources from AI would solve this problem. It is certainly a resource allocation problem, so I don't understand why folks believe that AI or our AI overlords will decide that everyone gets 40 acres and a mule.

Re: Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI

#422

Post by torginus »

By the way, am I ignorant of modern mathematics? I love the thrill of a good puzzle, but I'd say a lot of solving these kinds of intellectual challenges is mostly for the mental thrill, rather than advancing humanity. It's self-serving.

That's how I view modern math. There's the occassional discovery, like Linear Algebra, or the Fourier Transform which has basically allowed math to improve civilization to such a degree, that they deserve to be counted among the most important works of civilization.

Yet the best these weird math theories usually provide is proving something is fundamentally hard to compute, or distributed in some peculiar way, or maybe knock down some of those aforementioned problems into easier tiers.

This all ends up practically in cryptography. Hashes, symmetric asymmetric crypto, zero knowledge proofs etc. etc.

These are well and useful, but not that useful and the new ones often end up functionally identical to the old, from an utilitarian point of view.

Re: Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI

#423

Post by throwawayy6767 »

torginus wrote: post #419
kamaal wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>which actually deals with the finiteness of the list of problems that a machine successfully exhausts. This is already the case with most DevOps jobs with Claude Code. There are only that many finite issues that need fixing in production, even for very large systems. So you don't need all that many people to run ops these days.

I am kind of saddened by technology in general that we need LLMs to deal with it in the first place. It used to be that you compiled an executable, copied it onto the target computer and it worked. Then came servers, where you had to open some ports, set up some init scripts, maybe a db connection string. This has evolved into a fractal of awfulness of a myriad of options and problems, each of which more elaborate an…

Software's always been painful to run and use.

>It used to be that you compiled an executable, copied it onto the target computer and it worked.

Java had been marketed last century as a 'write once, run anywhere' language. Tells you a lot about how portable executables in other languages were.

Re: Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI

#424

Post by mitxela »

LtWorf wrote: post #378
mitxela wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you still using RSA?

I'm convinced that all the quantum talk is the NSA propaganda to convince us to drop RSA and move to some secure post quantum algorithm that they can easily break.

The NSA did indeed try that, and some federal honeypots adopted quantum-only crypto, but everyone else is using hybrid - you need to break both sides.

Re: Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI

#425

Post by mitxela »

bohrbohra wrote: post #354
mitxela wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you still using RSA?

Wait what ? Does nobody use RSA anymore ?

ECC is much faster (like 1000x) and with much smaller keys (like 10x) that are just random numbers so generating them is also free.

Re: Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI

#426

Post by p0ckets »

dvt wrote: post #52

I'm with @nilesh on this one, and not exactly sure how merely the existence of a solution precludes the advancement of human knowledge. If a problem is "solved" (say, symbolically verified) without any insights gained, it doesn't seem very interesting to the profession. Navier-Stokes is a bit different (because there's a prize attached, so "scooping" matters), but almost all interesting problems don't have any prizes…

Rephrasing the argument made in the post, math was like a "take a book, leave a book" exchange where you solved a problem, and in the process you discover more problems so the pool of interesting open problems is renewed. What OpenAI and the other labs are doing is akin to

- taking all the books in the exchange (which is technically allowed, no rules about how many books you can take)

- destructively scanning them (still technically allowed, no rules about what you do with the book)

- and not leaving any new books in their place (which is frowned upon, but there's no rule that says you have to replace books you take)

Re: Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI

#427

Post by p0ckets »

Alien1Being wrote: post #252

Tao's central point seems to be : "In short, the indiscriminate use of powerful solution-extraction tools can achieve the immediate short-term goal of solving problems at hand, but at the cost of sustaining the ecosystem for the next wave of progress, or in understanding the progress already obtained. " I am no mathematician, may have misunderstood his point and would be delighted to receive any corrections.

Rephrasing the argument made in the post, math was like a "take a book, leave a book" exchange where you solved a problem, and in the process you discover more problems so the pool of interesting open problems is renewed. What OpenAI and the other labs are doing is akin to

- taking all the books in the exchange (which is technically allowed)

- destructively scanning them (still technically allowed)

- and not leaving any new books in their place (which is frowned upon, but there's no rule that says you have to replace books you take)

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