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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

#61

Post by nutjob2 »

chromacity wrote: post #27
nutjob2 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't correct. The deal is that the poor countries get development and increased employment, and the rich countries get lower prices. Generally speaking both types of countries get richer. That some workers lost their jobs is a symptom of any change. I don't know why people always get upset people losing their jobs. It's like death, if no one died relatively few people would be born. If you resist job losses you…

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…

You're missing my point. Job losses are a fact of life, just like death. Why should people get upset about the fact that someone might lose their job, or die? It's not amoral. These things happen constantly to millions of people, we'd we worn out. We happily send young healthy people to their death fighting in wars so we don't have to. I don't see people weeping because the armed forces exist.

Or is this just some sort of PC bullshit, that we can't talk about this sort of progress without carefully lamenting job losses? If you're not useful doing a job, why should you be employed in it? That's the bottom line.

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

#62

Post by nutjob2 »

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…

> But what actually happens is our free-market society doesn't give a shit.

Maybe in the US, but in other countries those things actually happen. It's a political issue, not a moral issue with technology.

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

#64

Post by yoyohello13 »

logicchains wrote: post #57
layer8 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A Monopoly implies an organization powerful enough to stop competition. Seems like this solution that relies on competitors is fatally flawed. If there are enough competitors to meaningfully compete then there isn't a monopoly.

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

#65

Post by slopinthebag »

cowpig wrote: post #10
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…

> "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…

The government is a rare example of an extremely strong monopoly and not just a duopoly or a company holding significant marketshare. And yet people never seem to criticise it on those grounds despite it suffering from all of the same problems that corporate monopolies are accused of.

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

#66

Post by gettingoverit »

In fact, the paper has an error in the argument that AI might find Fermat's theorem to be incorrect due to definition of natural numbers including a zero, because paper's version of a theorem explicitly says that the number should be greater than two, and zero cannot be greater than two.

Surprisingly, this mistake proves the author's point that human can implicitly understand what was said, and that it still has value to it, even if it's incorrect.

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

#67

Post by gettingoverit »

mchinen wrote: post #20
bluecheese452 wrote: post #4

Enough Terence Tao spam.

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.

It's actually a strange situation. Tao is the only high-profile mathematician who tries to resolve the reproducibility crisis in math by popularizing proof checkers, and who used LLMs in probably the most legitimate way: to produce formal undeniable proofs with them, that cannot really suffer from LLMs being wrong all the time.

On the other hand, I still find content and arguments he produces to be quite weak, and honestly it's getting annoying to hear them that often. It's the case when he could really get some help of a ghost writer who is more experienced in popularization, otherwise this repetition might cause some serious harm instead.

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

#68

Post by runarberg »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #32
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…

Economic behavior is inherently game theoretic - agents take various actions and get some positive/negative reward as a result. Whether an agent's reward is positive or negative and of what magnitude, depends on the strategies employed by all agents. If some agents adopt new strategies, the reward calculus for everyone involved can completely change [1]. Over the past few centuries, countless new economic structures…

> Economic behavior is inherently game theoretic.

Game theory is just math. As with any math, the calculations can all work out, but that says nothing of how it reflects nature. All you can say is that if the axioms are all true, then this is the necessary outcome. Look for string theory as a cautionary tale here.

Game theory assumes rational systems. But we have over 6 decades of behavior science which contradicts that fundamental assumption. Economic behavior is not necessarily rational, and subsequently it is not inherently game theoretic. You will find plenty of dogmatic, idealistic, superstitious, counter productive, etc. behaviors in an economy. You need psychology, and not just math, to describe the economics which happens in the real world.

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

#69

Post by layer8 »

logicchains wrote: post #57
layer8 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A monopoly comes with serious moats, otherwise it wouldn’t be one. It can stay big and inefficient for decades.
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