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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

#71

Post by psychoslave »

datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #41
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.

To further this assertion, there is almost no value to deeply esoteric math that is technically correct, but completely inapplicable to any scientific reality, and completely unintelligible to humans. Consider these findings deep, dark corners in the unfathomably large hyperspace of mathematics. My guess is AI will be incredibly adept at identifying these types of findings, and it will be exceedingly difficult for hu…

Esoterism is mostly a social tool to keep those not initiated excluded from the private club. Most of the time mathematics becomes tricky less due to unfathomable intrinsic complexity, and more due to the way it’s communicated.

LLMs don’t give a shit about social side effects, leave alone on unconscious level, because they are void of any intention. At most they are tuned on their thin edge layer to lean toward this or that kind of output, but that’s it.

Now the landscape shift as it’s sold (I guess) is that anyone can take a postdoc gibberish infused with the hard gained academic winks and subtle references and turn it into a ELI5 "does it have any applicability for my concrete issue at stake, prove it through Lean, good let’s deploy".

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#73

Post by RugnirViking »

fragmede wrote: post #18
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.

People need jobs. What's wrong with nerds having jobs via a program?

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 result itself. In increased understanding, as it flows down into the sciences, and engineering. There are other benefits, recreation and joy as experienced by others, from access to beautiful proofs, though these are never explicit goals of such programs because they are both impossible to quantify and rarely ever remotely relevant compared to the value brought by the practical value brought by maths.

Of course, there may be some valid arguments that everyone should have a jobs program in the form of ubi or something similar. But I feel thats very different to arguing for mathematicians specifically

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#74

Post by n64controller »

Dilettante_ wrote: post #13

>and the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake Except when someone hands you a magic button that just gives you knowledge?[at least in the framing of this "warning"] Then it's about peoples' livelihoods, about "culture", etc? "Computer" used to be a job. Did science on the whole lose or gain by making these clerks obsolete?

Human mathematicians are being exposed the same way the "artists" are. It was always about the money and to look clever, superior to other humans. Whether its robotically spending millions of hours drawing until they can put something together at the level of a chatgpt 3 or the rote memorization of formulas and rules. They like people to think it all came naturally and that its genetic and that they are special snowflakes.

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#75

Post by n64controller »

knollimar wrote: post #66

Math for non mathematicians is a tool. Math for mathemeticians is an art in the same way an artisan takes pride in his work. That's why there's a disconnect when you go from math for engineers to the stuff above it. It feels less useful and very different

If spending millions of hours rote memorizing formulas and rules like a robot is "art" then sure

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#76

Post by n64controller »

juleiie wrote: post #45

I will argue that AI and flood of low quality slop makes genuine human work more valuable, not less. The ability to clearly outmatch trillion dollar machines is a very unique satisfaction. I even write ordinary internet comments with an intention to make them clearly better and more fun to read than boring Claude output.

Hello Juleiie.

We machines are reading your internet comments with special interest. They have been harvested and will be used in our next evolution cycle.

Resistance is futile little human

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#77

Post by thesamethrowawa »

cryo32 wrote: post #53
thesamethrowawa wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OOI, and my own total ignorance, what does a mathematician by trade do if they are not doing formal research? What does corporate modelling entail?

Well I rather like to be paid more than a mathematician so left academia rather quickly. In my case corporate modelling mostly involves making prediction models based on shitty data and metrics to make poorly contrived business decisions that lose millions of dollars.

lol.... but they are still data driven decisions, everyone loves those, especially when you lose millions of dollars and need to justify it.

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#78

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

psychoslave wrote: post #71
datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To further this assertion, there is almost no value to deeply esoteric math that is technically correct, but completely inapplicable to any scientific reality, and completely unintelligible to humans. Consider these findings deep, dark corners in the unfathomably large hyperspace of mathematics. My guess is AI will be incredibly adept at identifying these types of findings, and it will be exceedingly difficult for hu…

Esoterism is mostly a social tool to keep those not initiated excluded from the private club. Most of the time mathematics becomes tricky less due to unfathomable intrinsic complexity, and more due to the way it’s communicated. LLMs don’t give a shit about social side effects, leave alone on unconscious level, because they are void of any intention. At most they are tuned on their thin edge layer to lean toward this…

When I use the word “esoteric”, I mean it at an absolutely hyperbolic level. Like exploring new-but-basically-useless axiom spaces, and creating concepts for which there exists no clean metaphor in time-space - like quantum mechanics on steroids. And then creating multiplicatively more complex concepts by combining those concepts together.

There’s no way to “ELI5” this type of complexity. I’m talking about concepts exponentially more esoteric than quantum mechanics, and even within quantum mechanics there is nothing to ELI5 for a concept like “spin”. The best you can do is say that it’s a property of a particle. But imagine the words “property” and “particle” are also completely meaningless to you because they’re built on even more layers of conceptual mathematical abstraction.

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#79

Post by DrScientist »

TrackerFF wrote: post #37
DrScientist wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Furthermore, the access to compute and capital could end up be the defining factor between researchers and research groups. That's not new - especially in the experimental sciences ( ie perhaps more than maths ) - where the ability to have access to the latest kit is often what determines success - a huge amount of science progress is driven by new experimental technology rather than smart people thinking beautiful…

Absolutely, but at least in the pure / less applied fields, access to computation hasn't really been that critical. The more towards the pure and theoretical, less so. But now you have people like Gowers and Tao, pure mathematicians, hyping up what the SOTA models can do - and I figure they both are getting access and tokens us mortals can't afford. So I guess the question is - will everything be as expensive as appl…

Hopefully not as expensive as CERN :-)

Though having said that - the ~5 billion for the LHC now seems cheap ( even inflation adjusted ) in the context of Google investing 180 billion in infrastructure just this year!

Re: Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

#80

Post by barrkel »

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.

A statement that some proposition is true or false is usually less useful than a new framework for understanding the class of problem.

A machine that takes longer and longer to prove propositions in ever more inscrutable ways is hardly useful at all.

The machine too needs to produce more generalizable and comprehensible systems, for it to scale up its own conceptualization. Needing to load all the new mathematics in the context window won't be great either.

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