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Mathematical methods and human thought in the age of AI

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Re: Mathematical methods and human thought in the age of AI

#51

Post by layer8 »

shafoshaf wrote: post #38
chromacity wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you serious? People get upset about losing jobs because they need jobs to pay their bills. Further, we often build our life identities around work; if you're a good car mechanic or a successful restaurant owner, you're proud of that. It's a part of you. Having to repeatedly restart your career is risky, painful, and demoralizing. I have no problem seeing why people don't like that and why it can lead to populist…

I don't think the point is that the transition isn't difficult. It is that there is an overall benefit that outweighs the challenges of the transition. The sad part is that industrializing societies have not been very good at reconciling the benefits with the costs. The benefits first go to a select few and have seeped out to the masses slowly. Railroads in the US are a good example. The wealth accumulated by the Van…

My impression is that the transition is such an open-ended process that you can’t really call it that. It’s unclear if and when the challenges will be overcome.

Re: Mathematical methods and human thought in the age of AI

#52

Post by cowpig »

schmidtleonard wrote: post #33
cowpig wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "free market" is often used as a dogma against companies that are actively harmful to society This is a predominantly America-specific piece of propaganda, and it's pretty recent. Adam Smith's ideas are primarily arguments against mercantilism (e.g. things like using tariffs to wield self-interested state power), something he showed to be against the common good. The "invisible hand" concept is used to show how sel…

> arguments against mercantilism It has been funny to watch the rise of "China is beating us" rhetoric against the steady backdrop of "mercantilism is obsolete/bad" dogma, because the elephant in the room is that China has been running a textbook mercantilist playbook.

Looks to my uneducated eye like China has been enforcing competitive markets internally, with consistent economic policies. Meanwhile the US has stopped enforcing antitrust altogether and keeps violently changing its mind about economic policy every four years.

And then externally Chinese policy is oriented around suppressing the value of its currency, which is basically a monopolist's tactic--artificially lowered prices in order to crowd out competition.

I think that's mercantilist-ish, but kind of a modern version?

It's definitely the opposite of what the US does, the currency is the world reserve and therefore drives the price of the dollar above what it would be without trade, which I guess makes exporting from the US much more difficult?

Anyone who is an expert in global economics please correct me here :)

Re: Mathematical methods and human thought in the age of AI

#53

Post by nh23423fefe »

myhf wrote: post #47
mchinen wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't seen any negative sentiment toward Terence Tao before. Coming from outside the academic math sphere, genuinely curious if there's a real issue or if this comment is just spam itself.

A big trend in AI spam is to take achievements in one field that could be called "AI" and use them as evidence of advancement in other fields that happen to be called "AI". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Package-deal_fallacy Tao has been doing a lot of demonstrations of using LLMs for search and translation by experts who already know enough about a field to judge whether generated text is valid or meaningful. Those a…

Tao is being paid to boost LLMs. That's your argument? This is what human creativity is capable of? Baseless conspiracies?

Re: Mathematical methods and human thought in the age of AI

#54

Post by swimmingbrain »

gradstudent wrote: post #5

I skimmed the paper a couple of times, hoping to find the promised (from the abstract) > pathway to integrating AI into our most challenging and intellectually rigorous fields to the benefit of all humankind. There's very little insight here though. It seems mostly a retread of conversations we've been having in the academic community for a few years now. In particular, I was hoping to see some discussion of how we m…

[dead]

Re: Mathematical methods and human thought in the age of AI

#55

Post by zitterbewegung »

woolion wrote: post #7

> We assert that artificial intelligence is a natural evolution of human tools developed throughout history to facilitate the creation, organization, and dissemination of ideas, and argue that it is paramount that the development and application of AI remain fundamentally human-centered. While this is a noble goal, it seems obvious that this isn't how it usually goes. For instance, "free market" is often used as a do…

Not even sure if AI was ever "human-centered" . DARPA funded a large amount of AI reseearch from even the 1960s. The DART tool used in the Gulf War made back all of their previous investments. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Analysis_and_Replannin...

Re: Mathematical methods and human thought in the age of AI

#56

Post by bonoboTP »

lo_zamoyski wrote: post #41
bonoboTP wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are simply not enough teachers who can provide such an ideal, imagined education, at least not for the current rate of teacher salaries (and it's very far off). The educational strategy has to scale to real people, real teachers and real students as they are in the flesh, not some ivory tower pipe dream. We've had decades of this "we should teach how to think, not what to think". Alternatively,if you don't care…

This also assumes that universal education is a sensible aim. I think that's doubtful and that it contributes to these sorts of burdens and waters down the quality of education in the process. As a concrete example, for a few decades now, we're been pushing primary school students toward university education quite aggressively and broadly. It was quite common to scare students toward university by claiming that witho…

Yes, Germany has different educational tracks that are decided fairly early, at 10 or 12 years old (with some opportunity to change tracks). I don't think Americans like this idea.

Still, 40% of young adults have a tertiary degree (https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2025/09/education-at-a-...) while it's 47% in the US, so I wouldn't say it's a huge difference. And its not just a US thing, Denmark stands at 45%. So I wouldn't spin too big of a narrative around this.

Education is a field where decade after decade they try some new fad which is basically the old fad re-dressed and never really learn much. That's because teachers and their methodologies don't really have that big of an effect. A stable non-chaotic learning environment and access to the learning material though any kind of presentation, and books gets you to pretty much as good as it gets. To have a real effect, you need private tutoring for the gifted or very small groups of talent nurturing, which goes far beyond the default curriculum. But again, these don't fit the current zeitgeist, so they will keep on pushing "critical thinking" and "how to think", no matter how much they fail.

Re: Mathematical methods and human thought in the age of AI

#57

Post by logicchains »

layer8 wrote: post #50
naasking wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Thiel's book has influenced so many entrepreneurs into believing Monopolies are Good. Haven't read his book, but the idea that monopolies are good isn't typically made in a vacuum, it's made relative to alternatives, most often "ham-fisted government intervention". It's easier to take down a badly behaving monopoly than to change government, so believing monopolies are better than the alternatives seems like a dece…

How would a bad monopoly be likely to be taken down if not by government intervention?

It eventually becomes so big and inefficient that it gets overtaken by new competitors.

Re: Mathematical methods and human thought in the age of AI

#58

Post by nutjob2 »

palmotea wrote: post #39
nutjob2 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> supersede human "labour" altogether For certain types of labor this has always been the case. The idea that AI will entirely replace all, or most, human labor makes no sense and is just AI hype. Like all technology before it AI will improve most people's lives.

> Like all technology before it AI will improve most people's lives. 1. Let's be clear: what you're describing is faith. 2. And what are you smoking to assert " all technology before ... AI [improved] most people's lives"?

> 1. Let's be clear: what you're describing is faith.

And what I am countering is not? You can easily argue technology generally improves lives. Is it optimal? Beyond abuse? No. Does it have unintended consequences? Yes. Are we better of without it? No.

> 2. And what are you smoking to assert "all technology before ... AI [improved] most people's lives"?

OK social media is an unmitigated disaster, I'll give you that.

But, for example, nukes have given us the longest period of relative peace in history.

Re: Mathematical methods and human thought in the age of AI

#59

Post by esafak »

palmotea wrote: post #37
km3r wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Society is better if we sacrifice one horse and buggy driver job for two engineering jobs. The drivers suffer from that, but the net win for society is so plainly obvious that it's a better investment to retrain the driver or just pay the off rather than support a job that dying anyways.

> Society is better if we sacrifice one horse and buggy driver job for two engineering jobs. That's a "statistic" you're pulling out of your butt, and it's doing a lot of work. No one ever knows if something like that will actually happen. It could actually turn out that AI sacrifices 100 engineering jobs for 10 low-level service or prostitution jobs and a crap-ton of wealth to those already rich. > The drivers suffe…

> It could actually turn out that AI sacrifices 100 engineering jobs for 10 low-level service or prostitution jobs and a crap-ton of wealth to those already rich.

That's where wealth redistribution (Taxation) comes in. The USA is not good at progressive taxation, but everyone could be better off if it were implemented properly.

Re: Mathematical methods and human thought in the age of AI

#60

Post by esafak »

intended wrote: post #34
Izikiel43 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Globalization was great for poor countries, not so much developed economies.

Oh come now - globalizations was great at the regional level. It was not that great for sub groups within developed nations. The original thesis believed that people would be retrained into other equally well paying roles. Turns out people can’t retrain into new domains, and led to under employment.

Why not, because they're too old to learn, or because the support infrastructure is not there? I believe most people are capable of continued learning, but they might need help (financial etc.) to make the transition.
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