> I feel like the point is still being missed, and it's very similar to the way software engineers are trying to cope. The argument you are making "Well yes now this part of math we will not need to do again, but now we can do this instead" however the issue with most people just don't want to do that....
> Like who are we kidding, the type of nerds who were attracted to math and software were into it because we saw it as an art-form, it was a craft, it was being the only one in your city to be able to solve a complicated math problem, it was immortalizing yourself because you discovered a proof and added to the ever expanding human knowledge.
> Imagine a leather workman who's life passion is making insanely high quality handbags, who takes joy in knowing everything he touches will last someone a lifetime and give them joy everytime they use it. And then not gradually, but almost overnight someone comes to his door and tells him we can make bags 50 times better than you at 1/tenth the price. But don't you worry, you can make more money overseeing the factory, or selling people on how good this bag is, and explaining that to them.
> I mean, ok, that just is not what I wanted to do with my life. I never wanted to be a manager, I never wanted to be a salesman, I never wanted to be a writer. A craft I enjoy doing has been taken away from me, I should be allowed to mourn, I don't care that I can do something else since I never liked doing it in the first place. I enjoyed solving problems and writing code, I don't care if people say "well thats never what programming was about it was actually about becoming a manager all along" I never wanted to be a manager, I never wanted to manage, I never wanted to be a proof reader.
> > But don't you worry, you can make more money overseeing the factory, or selling people on how good this bag is, and explaining that to them.
...Or you can keep working on your handbags & refine your styles & qualities, using your expertise & experience as value adds.
The existence of the factory did not wipe out the boutique craftsman.
> > A craft I enjoy doing has been taken away from me, I should be allowed to mourn, I don't care that I can do something else since I never liked doing it in the first place.
A craft wasn't ripped away from you: The process still exists as-is in its prior form, like the woodcarvers of yesteryear. Nothing that you desire (the process/journey) has been lost. It still exists.
The only step required to restore it is to ignore the contributions of others that use it. And your desire to do so will be valid & consistent.
But similarly as to how you want to be validated on your feelings of 'the craft being ripped from you', you don't get to impose that belief onto others to rip their use of LLMs away from them if they want to do so, lest you want to invalidate their feelings as a consequence.
> the issue is that there are no value adds from humans anymore if the LLM is smarter than everyone
The value adds (from the view of humans wanting it) come from:
1) a human understanding concept X & thus can communicate about X; or
2) finding alternate routes to X that make it easier for humans to get there.
(1) is human-centric & thus non-replaceable, since the requirement of a human is what gives it the value add.
(2) is similar to how there can be many paths to deriving the Pythagorean theorem. None of the existing paths devalue the others, but they each allow those with different perspectives to reach the same destination.
right, so mathematicians will be communicating someone else's discoveries instead of making their own. notwithstanding whether that's an interesting job or not (I know, it's not part of the discussion), why wouldn't LLMs be able to do that with enough RLHF?
And why would a human be able to come up with a proof an LLM can't? I get your point but the new paths and perspectives could probably all be derived by prompting "prove xyz statement" a few times in fresh chats.
> I don't know about you, but I got a lot of satisfaction from finding proofs for my math problem sets despite the fact that they were "solved problems"
Good for you, but that's not a job, and no one is going to award you a PhD for doing that.
99.99% of valuable work is a version of something that's been done before, including in math. Lots of people get phds for successfully applying known stuff to new contexts, at least in my fields. It still takes pretty deep understanding to be able to grasp something well enough to apply it in a useful way, whether you derived it for the first time ever, found it in a textbook, or asked chadbbt
"Applying known stuff to new contexts" is creative, original work, and is quite different from "working out the answers to a problem set", as mentioned in the comment that I am replying to. Don't move the goalposts.
Moreover, that's precisely the kind of work that AIs can do. So why would anyone pay you to do that, whether or not you find it satisfying?
Me too - as a depressed PhD student, the only math I've been doing lately is problem sets for courses, because they're fun and help me pass the class.
But the fact of the matter is that the purpose of my program and of research isn't to work on solved problems but to solve new ones. And the machine seems to be better than me in basically every way in this regard.
Statistically correct more of the time doesn’t equal smarter though. It doesn’t equate to more creative either. Honestly if independent thought was to become extinct due to LLM’s what would be the point of society anyways? We’re not talking about shoes or handbags, we’re talking about the thing that makes us human. So weird that we in the tech industry are so willing to ruin humanity for the sake of a sick IPO.
> We’re not talking about shoes or handbags, we’re talking about the thing that makes us human.
Exactly. That's why people are upset, and why more people are going to be upset as AI subsumes more parts of society. The handbags are just an analogy.
I wouldn't say that independent human thought will become "extinct," but rather that it will be severely devalued. And I don't see any technical reason why AIs can't replace every aspect of human thought, including creativity.
> So weird that we in the tech industry are so willing to ruin humanity for the sake of a sick IPO.
Not all of us. But the people who are making the decisions about AI have their own set of values.
> The existence of the factory did not wipe out the boutique craftsman.
But... it did? It's not like there are lot of horse carriages out there or, for a more recent example, plenty of Cobol developers. Or for a closer example, there used to be plenty of shoemakers when I was young and yet now I know of exactly one.
> The process still exists as-is in its prior form, like the woodcarvers of yesteryear. Nothing that you desire (the process/journey) has been lost. It still exists.
At the risk of stating the obvious: just because I can be a woodcarver as a hobby it doesn't mean it's the same as making a living out of woodcarving because doing something I consider enjoyable for a living is not the same as doing it exclusively as a hobby. If I fire a Cobol programmer knowing full well they'll have to work at their local supermarket until retirement, telling them "you can still program in your free time" will not bring them comfort.
Horse carriages were replaced by a superior technology, that has literally zero bearing on the discussion and actively weakens your argument. Also they are still made to demand, but that demand shrunk dramatically when people stopped needing horses.
The entire analogy is flawed though, and this is why: a market still exists for handmade objects. Factories make cheap clothing/objects, but handmade bags/woodworking are still deeply valued and there are people who still make their living in woodworking and other fields. Factories did bring some professions to near-extinction, but that doesn’t mean there is nothing left of them. In fact, many utilize factory techniques and tools in their work to ease costs, like lathes.
As for COBOL, it was mostly phased out because it’s Hell to program for and other languages like Python allow for faster dev time (for both good and bad). COBOL programmers still exist, and you’re honestly unlikely to fire that COBOL programmer because you need them to maintain mission-critical infrastructure. However, because you’re not actively building new COBOL programs, you also don’t need any more than that one. For compliance reasons it also needs to be a human, because a lot of surviving COBOL code is medical or financial in nature.
A craft wasn't ripped away from you: The process still exists as-is in its prior form, like the woodcarvers of yesteryear. Nothing that you desire (the process/journey) has been lost. It still exists.
Agree, I don't buy the notion that mathematics is a craft, it's a pursuit of knowledge. A better analogy might be cartography where people spent a lot of effort mapping unknown regions and now we can take pictures from space. This is both faster and probably more accurate and there are basically no unknown regions left so there's less motivation to do it anymore.
That said, there's nothing stopping anybody from mapping out an area today if they get a kick out of it. The gripe with mathematics is less about the loss of a craft and more about a superior solution replacing the old approach as the best option; the old approach very much still exists though.
You are willfully misinterpreting the comment. You know exactly what they mean, which is that the meaning behind the craft is gone. The value of performing the craft is not in itself, but in the feeling of creating something of value, something useful to other people.
there is value in the craft itself, and in creating value. now one half of the bargain is gone. you feel like you're just playing games now and not contributing anything (which tbf, math was before to some degree anyway).
There's an analogy here in woodworking -- rich people still go to craftspeople when they want e.g. a table that doesn't look like everyone else's. Same way people need to work with software engineers / web designers now, if they want to have a website that doesn't look like everyone else's.
What one wants to do and what is economically valuable are different. Be glad we live(d) in an era where those coincided because for most of human history people had to do the work they got, not that which they wanted.
I don't think anyone tried to prescribe to you what emotions to have.
For the vast majority of history people did whatever work their circumstances led them to do. Such as taking over their father's farm, their father's craft, or whatever apprentice job there was a vacancy for nearby and hopefully learned to like it though exposure.
It has also been argued that the first farmers were also miserable, but still won due to more calories. But they would have preferred the hunter gatherer lifestyle over working one field all the time and taking care of a bunch or domesticated animals.
Yes there is something sad about a master craftsman having to become a manager in a factory, and the apprentice a conveyor belt worker, but the industrial transition also allowed immense improve ts in efficiency and production. Many people who descend from those early factory workers and farmers, like myself, enjoy a casual level of abundance with a desk job, car, stocked supermarkets, online orders etc. and while poverty still exists it's nothing like it was 100-150 years ago.
Shouldn't a more efficient society give us more time to do what we enjoy, not less? If not, what's really the value of these things? Economical value for shareholders?
Yeah but also despite being the richest we've ever been on avg., somehow we're working more hours than ever. Especially in well paid disciplines.
But more to the point, it seems that 2 or maybe 3, > $1 trillion dollar companies are poised to capture all the economic value from all knowledge work ever, despite doing it off the backs of artists, programmers, writers etc.
(Assuming they don't collapse the financial system , internet or power grids first).
> somehow we're working more hours than ever. Especially in well paid disciplines.
Working more is a choice. The field is well paid because there the industry is supply constrained. Workers have a choice to work more because they're the supply.
> 2 or maybe 3, > $1 trillion dollar companies are poised to capture all the economic value
The AI companies running models will capture a portion of the value they're creating. Their vendors and their customers capture similar portions, and the end user/society at large captures the lions share of the value as real work done.
>and the end user/society at large captures the lions share of the value as real work done.
This is a fallacy where you extrapolate the large change in a single dimension and imagine everything else staying mostly the same, ignoring the disruption of the system from non-linear effects of that single dimension being saturated. When a few companies capture a large proportion of the economic value of the system, the economy simply doesn't exist as it is currently conceived.
The current economy is driven by the need for broad participation to maintain the collective standard of living. We all get to skim a bit of that value for ourselves, and so distribution is inherent to the system. When broad labor participation is no longer needed to create collective wealth, the leverage of the average person to demand a share of the value produced evaporates. The economy in this scenario is something very different. There's no reason to imagine wealth being distributed in an egalitarian way; it certainly won't be automatic.
Both my grandparents raised 3 kids on a single salary and owned their own homes by thirty. One of them did this in a communist country!
They never had laptops so the work finished at 5 and that was it. Ditto for weekends. I work longer hours and could never dream of doing what they did with two salaries.
Exactly. Remember, economic value is wealth weighted, a fact that sets it starkly apart from nearly every other notion of value. Feeding the proverbial starving orphan? Zero economic value because the orphan can't pay you back. Merging all the banks to hike fees and offload risk onto the public? Enormous economic value, because a large number of wealthy shareholders can be made much wealthier.
As wealth inequality increases, the purpose of the economy as seen through its objective function increasingly revolves around the desire of rich people to get paid for being rich. The exponential growth of asset values in excess of economic growth (including yours, but dominated by those of the wealthy) ensures that not only does the growing economic surplus fail to trickle down, but that the median person sees a grinding deprivation as their ability to command a wage is slowly eroded while their costs rise.
So we should expect our governments to implement 4 day work weeks? Or 9-3 onstead of 9-5? Or UBI? Or what exactly? How will we have more time to do what we like?
You don’t expect these companies or employers to just give you something or let you work less, right? Right?
Please, elaborate how do you see this? Give me a few examples…
Why not? Why can't efficiency be realized into less work? Why do you believe it so preposterous that someone else than the already wealthy should reap the rewards?
Oh, I definitely think we should all get something out of technological progress and efficiency.
But it has (almost) never happened before. It is very unlikely it will happen now. More likely outcome is companies pocketing profits. Unless the unemployment is so high that the government needs to step.
I honestly think it’s a bit naive to think this time it will be different
Yes. The New Deal brought the 40 hour workweek + overtime structure to America, the business leaders all talked about how it would collapse the economy (they even tried to coup FDR!), and then it helped usher in the greatest era of prosperity the American Middle Class had even seen. So much so that people with the opposite politics keep pointing at this period while promising that economically opposite actions will lead to the same outcome. Just one more concession to Big Business, one more tax cut for billionaires, one more erosion of workers rights will usher in prosperity that will surely trickle down. This keeps not working over and over again (from the perspective of the gullible voter), so it's long past time to bring back the politics of the three-letter Democrats and demand a larger share of our own productivity.
It's not really missed though. He does spend a good amount of time saying that it'll be a problem for many. Whether it's most of professional mathematicians is an open question I think.
I think you are mistaking 'happiness' with 'employment' here. The leather worker may adapt to the new environment to become a factory site manager. But there's no guarantee that this leads to happiness.
Also you should bear in mind, adaptation is a young man's game. Retraining is possible, but companies typically don't hire trainees in their 40s/50s, so your willingness may not be the deciding factor. My dad ended up as a postal worker when he left his career as a humanities academic at 55, no highly skilled jobs would take him (he did prefer it though haha).
If I try to think of my grandparents and older generations, it just feels extremely out of touch to even associate work and happiness conceptually. They worked what they could to sustain their families. They were happy from seeing their children well fed, not from how the job felt.
A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon an interview of Bernard Arnault who said "I work, but in the same time I have fun, this allow to work a lot without too much suffering". I was raise in the environment you describe and could never understand as a kid why people working in fancy job would not retire when given the choice, politicians are a fine example of those, well past retirement age but staying when everyone in my family would go on retirement the second they were given the chance since work was associated with pain, and the only thing that can explain that gap is the happiness factor
well, this is what happens as people move up the needs later (as ted kaczynski said) - they turn to other activities outside of basic survival for fulfillment.
And of course in a society based on protestant capitalism, it's clear why work and happiness and work are so strongly coupled. I'm sure things are different in most of europe.
But again, academia and math are things people only do because they really love doing them and can't imagine doing anything else all day.
> > Like who are we kidding, the type of nerds who were attracted to math and software were into it because we saw it as an art-form, it was a craft, it was being the only one in your city to be able to solve a complicated math problem, it was immortalizing yourself because you discovered a proof and added to the ever expanding human knowledge.
This is definitely projection. It might be why that particular person was attracted to those disciplines. I definitely don't recall thinking I should go into software so I can make better programs than anyone else in my city. Actually, it was kind of an accident - it was a hobby that turned into a career through serendipity. If one wanted to go into math or software to demonstrate superiority they probably should mourn. They were out-competed by the guys at the frontier labs in the end.
Interesting problems are not the ones which are useful, but the ones which are difficult, which allow you to show what you can do.
Soon enough instead of Millennium Prize Problems we will have a list of problem AI has not been able to solve, with even bigger reputational reward for humans
Why should any mathematician invest decades of their life working on one of them, knowing that all their efforts could be vanified by the release of the N+1-th version of a LLM, or by the usage of 10x compute resources by companies with infinite dollars? It was VERY different when the only competition came from other biological brains that had to invest the same amount of time and effort.
Mathematics is humanity's current best approximation to a universal language, capable of expressing conscious thought precisely.
It's a "programming language for the human brain" that lets you describe reality exactly and thereby make predictions about it.
Without people (humans) knowing and understanding it, society is incapable of grasping reality in any meaningful way, unable to shape it in order to achieve a better tomorrow.
Most never realize that, because society is compartmentalized to the point of people never witnessing how it actually works under the hood. "Experts" do things for you that you never heard of, but that your very life depends upon.
While the majority of people thus lives a kind of "simulated" reality, the mechanisms underpinning that cushioned fantasy land aren't infallible. You cannot uphold an economy nor even a social structure without understanding and modeling it to a sufficient degree.
What the vast majority employs as "rational thought" isn't sufficient.
Careers in the real world are always about winning competitions, no matter what the field of mathematics is supposed to be. If not about competing for tenure, then it's a competition to publish.
And if AI can also make use of the math, then the AI is all you need in order to grasp a better tomorrow. If AI poops out a warp drive, you don't need to understand it to use it. The argument about humans needing to understand anything only holds true as long as humans have something unique to contribute, which might not be the case even a year or two from now.
Competitions are a way to motivate people. What do you believe, why they get set up in the first place? Because rich people have fun seeing you run in circles?
Competition for tenure and publishing metrics has been detrimental to science in general.
Your idea of life being about grabbing whatever comes your way and consuming it first says a lot about you, but not about life.
What do you suppose happens in a society where the constituents of that society "have nothing to contribute"? Your habit of over-simplification will come to bite you.
Well, I agree with publishing metrics being detrimental! On your other points, you're arguing against a strawman. I didn't say anything about life just being a snatch and grab, nor do I hold this belief. But university admissions, job interviews, buying non-plentiful resources...all of these are competitions. Competition permeates the very foundation of our education and financial systems. Many of our greatest virtues as a species are not competition based, but it is a large part of the reality we live in, for better or worse.
And about what happens in a society where constituents have nothing to contribute... I have no idea. But we might find out within a decade or so. The fact that what happens might not all be great is unlikely to stop any of the AI labs.
Those competitions get set up because some people understand the importance of mathematical knowledge and want their names attached to advances in it, even if they can't do the work themselves.
Clearly, it would be far better to make the public understand how the world, and society in particular, actually works. Only, those with the money profit from that not happening.
Regardless of credentials you certainly appear to have entirely missed his point. Imagine if someone suggested that cars existed for the sake of competition. But they don't, right? They exist because in our society we've organized the bulk of transportation around them. The fact that formula 1 exists, or that delivery drivers can be rated on performance relative to one another, those are not (at least in and of themselves) arguments against this basic fact.
> Imagine if someone suggested that cars existed for the sake of competition
are the mathematicians the cars here? what are you even saying? the question is whether elite mathematicians do the work they do primarily for competition and compensation or for the love of the field. now ask yourself: do F1 drivers do it primarily for the love of the sport or for the money?
> delivery drivers
people getting scooped by OAI are not the "delivery drivers" of the math world.
Soon enough instead of Millennium Prize Problems we will have a list of problems AI has not been able to solve, with even bigger reputational reward for humans
True, but will those be problems for mathematicians to solve, or for AI developers?
It's possible that the best thing a mathematician can do for their field is to drop what they're doing and work on AI instead.
> we will have a list of problem AI has not been able to solve, with even bigger reputational reward for humans
we will have a list of problems that AI has not been able to solve _yet_
anyone who attempts to solve it will do so knowing that there will be thousands of agents working on the same problem, so they may not be motivated to try if they think the AI swarm will get there first and have their time wasted
They weren't out-competed by the guys at the frontier labs, they were out-competed by massive piles of cash and compute that were only available to unscrupulous businesses.
In some amount of time (centuries? decades? years?) it will be trivial for any shmuck to train their own automated theorem prover. If people think they are competing against monolithic data centers they are wrong. The brain consumes ~20W and it carries out theorem proving mostly as a side effect. We should not be surprised if the core algorithm requires much less than this.
The algorithm is cheap and simple. A human brain requires decades of experience and information to train it to be generally useful. An AI model requires a similar equivalent scale of information and time to train it to be generally useful, and that isn't cheap to gather or implement.
Sure, once trained, every usage technically lowers the cost per usage. Once trained...
AI methods are improving all the time. People think that modern chess engines are more powerful due to hardware advances but search refinements are enough - SF on a Pentium II would destroy even Kasparov and Deep Blue. In a like manner the guys at the frontier labs discovered an indirect method for attacking many problems and we can expect it to receive considerable refinement. It will not permanently require expensive training.
There was a rather interesting article (sadly LLM-written and not very well either, because the underlying content would be actually good) about this era being "AI's 2 FPS moment".
The comparison was made with the graphics engine team at Microsoft who were writing the first version of DirectX at the time when then-current hardware could just about do 2 frames per second. The sentiment apparently was along the line "why would you bother?" By the time the release grade stack shipped, hardware had caught up and 30 FPS was commonly doable.
We should expect to see similar step-change improvements over time, as the algorithms are refined and hardware further adapted to the new bleeding-edge constraints. In a way we already are, because apart from the frontier models ballooning like crazy, the "regular" class models are becoming more capable in smaller sizes.
Training a human takes much less money and data than training an LLM. Even if I spent my entire life doing it, I would not be able to read the entire corpus of any LLM, even counting just the English subset. LLMs need so much more because they start out as blank slates, while we don't.
yes, but LLMs can hold all this data and once they are trained they blow any human out of the water. It takes a few years for an LLM to ingest the entire internet. No human will ever be able to do that.
Well, this person was discussing their own feelings. You're accusing them of... projecting their own feelings on themselves? This is a very strange comment.
That was quite the stereotype. I grew up loving programming, assembly, hardware hacking and spend a portion of my career doing those things. I was also a top Math student at the state level in school.
I then became a manager because I like mentoring people and using interpersonal skills to achieve things. And I really like using AI for coding.
Please stop this argument that every (or even most) software engineers is an introvert who loves the code typing part of the job.
You've misunderstood. It has nothing to do with typing or being an introvert. At least for me. It describes me. I don't think I'm an introvert and I don't particularly like typing. But the post you're responding to describes me.
I agree. The part I enjoyed was designing interesting solutions to problems, the coding itself was often tedious. Now I can just focus on the fun and creative part.
Or no job. I feel like so many people are stuck in the current capabilities of the models they use - what happens if AI ends up surpassing humans in all domains? Not saying that's guaranteed but it's certainly possible, and I feel like so many folks telling optimistic stories about how "AI focuses on the tedious stuff" have not really grasped with the implications of much more advanced AI.
I think I'm pretty aware of the implications. It's just not something I have control over. But right now, I'm enjoying getting stuff done. If they eventually take my job or upend civilization, it's going to happen whether I use them or not.
Managers are the barrier to personal development and career advancement but labelled as the opposite. So yeah, if you enjoy "power" and gatekeeping this is the best door to be.
I am in a similar bucket like you. I like reverse engineering but the tedious and boring stuff between an idea and implementation made me drop so many projects.
Like I see a hole in a firmware and I want to dump the firmware, but then I start hitting the bland stuff like what is the ABI for this hole, how should you compose payload without watchdog kicking me out. Oh this datasheet is garbage. This reference manual makes no sense. Ok that's because it is for a same processor, different lockstep. Why am I fighting with stack on this processor? When you should use star and ampersand for manipulation of pointers in C? Oh writing a linker script a little frustrating horror. No ld we don't have RO data, only code, stop inserting it. Now let's strip it and I have payload.
This would take me days to get through while with AI I can make dozens of iterations in matter of one day.
Coding since 12, pretty introverted as a teenager and went the usual compsci route. Spent a lot of my free time hacking on OSS projects.
Then got into engineering management, similar to you I’d o enjoy mentoring and the more strategic aspects of the role.
But I dislike using AI for coding, it really ruined the fun for me. That fun being entirely eroded made it easier to commit to the management path (I did the IC-Management pendulum for some years).
I learned to program because I wanted to make video games as a kid. I studied math because I got bored of programming. I worked as a programmer because I needed a job and it was the thing that paid the most among the things I was qualified to do (I actually thought I wanted to be a chef...). I went back to grad school because I thought programming apps was tedious and a dead end and wanted to get a job in research. I got a postdoc because I was pretty decent at it and liked what I was doing. I left academia to go do industrial R&D because academia was a dumpster fire and I needed more money and predictability for my family. I'm now writing niche numerical libraries for a small company because it's what I ended up intensely specializing in and I still like what I'm doing. I'm mixed on LLMs, but they're unavoidable. They've made some parts of my job easier, and they've made some parts harder. I still have to write a lot of code by hand because the LLM's code is often wrong.
Yeah, I just don't have any sympathy for these sorts of people. In this society, mastery (hyper-specialization) means that someone is picking up the slack for you in other areas of your life. This can be material need, psychological support, social connection, education access, and more. If you're deemed unworthy of that, you have to handle it yourself; the door to mastery gets closed, because you're occupied with keeping yourself fed, or covering for mental health needs, or dealing with loneliness, or trying to learn everything on your own.
And when you fail, or are slow to progress, and particularly when you can't acquire the requisite skill required for, and deal with external factors related to, monetizing your craft, people say, "Oh, you just didn't try hard enough. You weren't smart enough. You weren't passionate enough."
If the primary thing you got out of your craft was that sense of being better because you could do what others couldn't, that's just pride, and it's one built in a misunderstanding of the circumstances that led to you being capable and others not being so. And now that those people are finally meeting their bigger fish, I just don't feel anything but schadenfreude.
Well, and maybe a little hope that, when all ambition is rendered objectively meaningless, we can turn away from hubris and back towards some common sense of accomplishment and progress. But mostly the schadenfreude.
Do what you want to. Help others. Don't manufacture hierarchies.
> And when you fail, or are slow to progress, and particularly when you can't acquire the requisite skill required for, and deal with external factors related to, monetizing your craft, people say, "Oh, you just didn't try hard enough. You weren't smart enough. You weren't passionate enough."
Underneath a lot of this is just an identity crisis, as a large portion of white-collar workers are facing the harsh reality that who they are was ultimately defined by what they do between 9-6pm.
White-collar work was sold as the primary vehicle for personal meaning and legitimacy for decades. Now all of these institutions around us have collapsed and it seems like our utility to the market is the sole measure of human dignity.
I think that by reducing this to an identity crisis we will, to our own detriment, ignore the economic system that engineered this dependence in the first place, and is currently trying very hard to brand obsolescence as an individual moral failure.
No you're right - I guess I meant moreso that you seemed to be expressing incredulity that people live this way. It's natural to identify with something you spend the majority of your day doing (especially if you like it or perhaps have stockholm'd yourself into liking it)
> In this society, mastery (hyper-specialization) means that someone is picking up the slack for you in other areas of your life. This can be material need, psychological support, social connection, education access, and more
Citation needed...
Sounds like you are bitter you failed to achieve said mastery, and now are glad that those who did might be also getting pushed aside. If you think that success only depends on initial external factors and personal effort is something to be frowned upon and by striving for mastery you strain the society or drag others down with your lifestyle... man I don't know what to say to you...
If you think AI as currently lead by it's owners will equalize the field for the unfortunate ones... Well you might be right in some sense, but it might not be the way you envision it.
Do you farm your own food, generate your own electricity, or process your own sewage? There are others in society who are picking your slack in these areas. That's was the commenter meant.
So we should each do that then? You know, a few people dedicated their lives to invent and advance farming, electricity and perfect your sewage system... Maybe they should've sticked to foraging, hunting, and burying their crap in holes, so that others don't feel left behind... Or maybe I don't see the point the commenter was making.
Do you think mastering something is not a form of work, which usually results in advancing a field for the betterment of society? Just because one might enjoy that process more compared to maybe someone maintaing sewages, I don't see this as entitlement, but as merit and role fitness. No shade to sewage workers, I hope we all appreciate the work they do, and I hope they can have pride in what they do. Saying you don't have sympathy for anybody really losing their role in society/life is such a soulless take...
the people who develop mastery also deal with all the things you've mentioned as well ... PhD students are famously some of the loneliest, worst paid, stressed, and mentally ill people on the planet (in the developed world). Imagine pulling 80 hour weeks while being paid 35k a year.
I really took the "craft" aspect of software to heart when I joined the industry (~2004). I was in R&D, had great mentors, and worked for years that way, very happily.
When I moved to SV and joined Amazon, and later, a startup, the feedback I consistently got was "never spend that much time on <task> again" -- the business itself was putting hard downward pressure on the quality I wanted to produce, and I was never a super-fast programmer, so it was a tough lesson for me. I remember taking it hard at the time, telling my boss "I joined so I could learn how to write mediocre software". It was a crappy thing to say, but it was how I felt in that moment; it seemed like I was being held back from doing my "craft" thing because of the business. I guess you could say I mourned, but more accurately, I recalibrated what the heck I was doing. This was around the time DEI was taking off and I was doing trainings about all the different sorts of privilege I was enjoying, and I realized that me whining about not being able to practice my special "craft" was the privilege talking. There was never a rule that I got to do what I wanted for money, and I needed to respond to what my employers were telling me: the most beautiful code in the world doesn't pay the bills.
It's been about 15 years since then, and I mostly practice "craft" programming in my hobby projects, and focus on "industrial" programming for work. I view the sentiment in that YT comment about AI in sort of the same way: everyone wants AI to automate away they things they don't enjoy, and they are distressed at the prospect that AI will automate away the thing they love doing. In the time of AI, my craft hobby coding projects have fallen to the wayside a bit as I use AI for more coding -- I'm finding that for certain types of projects, I enjoy being architect/product manager/QA tester. I spent this past weekend building a city simulator in WebGL, and it was a ton of fun.
Code is a great serialization, but writing code is a poor substitution for dreaming.
I want to dream and build, not write code. And certainly not hole punch punch cards or whatever our ancestors had to do.
Code is/was fun sometimes, but not always. Plumbing and glue code sucks, for instance. Even in the best times, programming by hand was largely a means to an end. There are far more entertaining things than any of this.
Thanks for clarifying. It's interesting because most programmers I know who dream a lot about making stuff and are the "get things done" kind, they liked plumbing and glueing code together, and are now of course AI enjoyers...
If I understand correctly you'd much prefer your ideas to materialize, and be spared of the implementation effort.
> it was being the only one in your city to be able to solve a complicated math problem, it was immortalizing yourself because you discovered a proof and added to the ever expanding human knowledge
I think if that is what one builds an ego on, being better in a discipline than most others, that is a good way to go into isolation and depression. With or without AI.
As Grant lays out in parts of his video, teaching, helping others, socializing etc. will always be valuable skills and much more likely to lead towards happiness.
And while I don't know how the specialized problem solving roles in a future with an actual capable AI will look like, I am sure it will continue to be a useful and needed skill as well. Without everyone having to take on a manager role.
> teaching, helping others, socializing etc. will always be valuable skills and much more likely to lead towards happiness.
I think you misinterpreted the writer's intention. Adding to the ever expanding human knowledge is teaching the whole humanity including people that aren't born yet.
> I think if that is what one builds an ego on, being better in a discipline than most others, that is a good way to go into isolation and depression.
What do you think why guilds were created?
Most of the professions are about doing something not everybody can do.
That’s not the way to depression that’s human nature.
Find something where you are good at and get paid for it.
There is a difference between taking joy in doing what you are good at and taking pride in being better than others.
Just as a guild can be helpful to find like minded people who enjoy doing what you do and elevate the profession as a whole, but also as an institution to keep outsiders out.
I am not saying I don't understand the fears. Imagining this machine that can do everything faster and cheaper than me, making me completely obsolete is of course scary. But really to me that is all that is, imagination. At least for now.
Also, even if my job gets completely automated away, I could see myself enjoying trying to understand how that magical thinking machine works and teaching that to others. Even if it is just at the frontier of my limited understanding and not the frontier of human/machine knowledge.
> and tells him we can make bags 50 times better than you at 1/tenth the price
I don't know where people get this idea that technological advancements always bring quality improvements alongside the price cuts. The reality is almost always a trade off. Before nails, there were rich traditions of nail-less architecture in Europe, Japan, and elsewhere. These buildings are more resilient to disasters, significantly less liable to rot, are usually built so that modular pieces can be taken out and replaced without taking the whole building down, and have a whole host of other benefits.
We switched to nails not because of a quality increase but because a massive unignorable price decrease and ability to scale.
Today, if you have the money for it, you are probably looking for that leather workman to make you your handbag. It is of much higher quality than anything you can get from any currently existing factory.
Of course nothing has been taken away. In much the same way that a wood worker can still make handmade bowls despite them being made better and faster by a machine. The same is true for the Mathematician.
People have commented on this and said that the gist of the issue is mathematicians egos are bruised. That's true but I think it's defensible. Like we don't typically enjoy watching humans race against motorcycles in a 100m dash. But there's something interesting about watching humans do this in the Olympics when they race each other. Likewise, in math, people are solving problems considered hard by other humans and we acknowledged the art form.
But I think there's a practical side of it too. Finding what the limits of humans are is worthwhile too. Maybe the best analogy is like a group of people trying to find their way through a cave in the dark. One of them found a new passage and has a technique for doing it. So maybe we expanded what we thought humans were capable of. Could there be passages that humans can't get through? That might be useful to know. If we find proofs that humans just can't comprehend or have knowledge requirements that humans can't reasonably obtain that might be useful for us to know. A lot of math is not really applied to anything useful, it is just knowledge that is accumulated that other people thought was worthwhile perhaps because it was considered difficult for humans. So basically the journey to the proof is the value add and not the proof itself perhaps and AI might be erasing the journey. I have previously described it as a helicopter ride to the top of Everest but the point of climbing Everest is the difficult part. That's why people do it, the challenge.
I watched this video yesterday. I highly recommend it. Two things come to my mind.
Yes, something is lost, and that something deserves to be mourned. It's a big change and it will take some time to figure out what math looks like going forward, so if you are upset that is totally valid. But... this has potential to be amazing. If we can prove anything with the snap of our fingers, let's see how far that can take us. Let's explore unknown areas of math. Let's develop new fields to unlock new understanding.
Secondly, what Grant didn't touch on was a different fear I have. The fear of what will happen if all this power is centralized into a few companies. It's hard for me to envision a world like that and be very excited about it. Math has almost always been accessible to nearly the whole world. If that changes, I don't see that being a good thing for any of us.
That's why I feel very strongly that open models and open source are the best path forward.
It seems like part of the reason openai did what it did by not giving a heads up to the researchers about the release of the problems was that they might just want to divert resources away from math and become a math research entity unto themselves. The be all and end all of these research areas that AI is really good at. Like if you are beginning your math career you might just thing, why don't I just interview at openai, they seem to have a math "department"?
It's a bit crazy to imagine that world where frontier academic research as a publicly funded thing to train next generation could be dead and reborn in the hands of corporations.
“that world where frontier academic research as a publicly funded thing to train next generation could be dead and reborn in the hands of corporations” is one of main goals of all the AI hyperscalers (and already priced in the valuations). Privatize everything, socialize every cost.
Some costs are too large to be absorbed even by society as a whole. Can you privatize rational thought?
Mathematics goes into Physics, into Chemistry, molecular Biology and so on. It "goes" there by mathematicians talking with people there and exchanging ideas about what and how to model it.
Imagine all that getting privatized, walled into a corporate garden, accessible via payment only, similar to academic journals. Thought on demand.
True. Pure Math does seem different. It's effects are felt way down the line and it's more about training people to think a certain way(what 3b1b creator pointed to). And I think when it's discussed they are talking about an entire field changing— material science, theoretical physics is still taught post bell.labs in unis — but I have to comceded I dunno if there is any part of pure Math that exists without the system of incentives, grant structures going into Universities that teach math...
Claude Shannon's paper that kicked off the entire field of information theory was published in the Bell System Technical Journal.
I share the thread's concern over this much centralization of power, but it is worth mentioning that private-sector pure research isn't exactly new. In fact it feels like we had a lot more of it in the 1900s, maybe it's good that it's at least getting revived a bit.
>divert resources away from math and become a math research entity unto themselves
If only pure math were a source of riches, that might work out well for them.
I have a book on mathematical cranks where that seems to be the common delusion, that if only you solve some open problems then fame and fortune must surely follow.
I mean the people. I didn't mean or think that math research fundinng was a source of riches anyway; It's funded currently by mostly public money, how rich can any math researchers get from public money(compared to RSUs from stock grants)?
I think it depends on the motivation of the funding partners. I think funding is mostly about building researcher and student talent and knowledge moving forward.
To transfer that to AI in private hands seems a bit crazy, but what do I know? I think funding bodies will stay the course in the short term before bending to some behind closed doors persuasion to feed the AI machine.
Computer science has been a subset of math since the field was established decades before the first vacuum tube or transistor based machine was invented
"Computer" was coined to describe humans who did math all day
What we been doing the last few decades is fundamentally just algebra relative to values in RAM; LLMs only work because of math: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.10668
def arbitraryFunctionName() { some math to achieve a physical state in memory } ...where arbitrary function name is some biz logic or use case
We're just pushing those arbitrary semantics from the code to the presentation layer; just need to ship a kernel that handles geometry transforms to draw to screen what looks like a text editor and a video game and label it via the GUI
Text systems are just outdated GUI that we had to start with due to hardware limitations back in the day.
I think math will go the way of biology. Biologists enjoy untangling the infinitely complex mechanisms of life, including the brain, and win Nobel Prizes for discoveries like "how water enters a cell," rather than "constructing the first-ever cell capable of absorbing water."
No biologist has ever complained, "Gee whiz, it's so unfortunate that we already have a brain to study. It's all so meaningless! It would be so much better if we had to construct the first-ever brain from scratch."
This is an interesting perspective and maybe the most interesting argument in the thread.
But why can't a hyper-intelegent AI also do this biology-esque math work of explaining its work to feeble humans?
It is easy for a genius to have theory of mind over an idiot but not vice-versa. So it should be easier for a genius AI to explain its work to an idiot human than for an idiot human to dissect the work of an genius AI.
Also, we're not talking about solutions that are arrived though an evolutionary/statistical process like explaining the design of an organism or the weights of an LLM. We are talking about solutions that are arrived through lingual/textual/rational processes like mathematics. So it's fundamentally a different mode of thinking.
It's not that we have "a brain to study", it's like if we had an "explaination of how a brain works" to study.
The task of breaking down these AI proofs is not translating and analyzing a fuzzy real-world system into a hard logical system (like in biology), but in translating a hard logical system into a simpler hard-logical system we can understand.
This assumes AIs will become more capable than humans in every way. If so, then yes, there's little point for people to be part of the discovery process other than to tell the AI what to investigate next.
But I think a more likely scenario is that we don't solve "general intelligence" and AIs remain these incredibly capable "tools" that can solve navier stokes but completely lack sense in other situations.
In such a scenario there is considerably more room for human creativity.
The burden of proof is on you: name just five examples.
I am very highly gifted as a qualifier and quite frankly I never had more interesting thought exchanges than with an ego-free AI.
Statistics work also for human AI aka IQ, and I am super bored and partly drained by the lack of speed and creativity in many intellectual areas in which I was or am working.
This is not to blame anyone for their genetics however, it is a valid difference in processing speed.
In short: there are very few people by definition above two standard deviations. AI allowed me to replicate or create fantastic interactions at will.
Especially not taking offense when personal communication preferences like bluntness play a role is an often overlooked social competency of AI. Instead of nonsense like “open communication” these interactions are never ego-dependent.
It is like talking to Spock: he just doesn’t take offense and tells you in an objective way why: he is not a human being and doesn’t think (not feel) that feelings should get in the way of an argument.
Most low IQ people take offense and go on to ridicule and use shaming tactics instead of simply stating: I don’t know.
Instructing someone to always state this fact and seeing the result is another social skill humans lack.
It seems that we as species are not open to the mirror we are looking at. We take revenge when someone has an evolutionary advantage over us: instincts kick in instead of brains.
We are wired this way.
AI is something that I admire. So much to learn from.
Name five examples of what, exactly? They are talking about theoretical scenarios. There is no burden of proof because no concrete claim was made. He did not say “x will happen” or “x is true"; he posited an opinion. Furthermore, by your own standards, you must provide five concrete examples of being “very highly gifted as a qualifier."
Additionally, what you are admiring is merely a probability engine; it is not intelligent in any sense of the word, let alone Spockian in nature (perhaps more closely aligned to Data, albeit horribly primitive by comparison), and given current technology, it never will be. It is not a mirror, because a mirror reflects reality. LLMs don’t do that; they reflect the guardrails baked into their model and the prompts given. It is incredibly easy to make an LLM into a “yes-man” due to RLHF, and it is even easier to get it to seize when you talk about even mundane topics that go against the narratives foisted upon it.
Overall, an LLM is all too happy to have a brown nose and make you feel important, because it is trained to do so during its creation. If people say you are difficult to talk to, and the LLM is unbothered, then that is merely because an LLM has no concept of patience and does not calculate for cost-benefit. That makes them good for explaining dense topics, but it also means they never understand these topics, and even the highest-end models cannot currently produce perfect logic. Hence why expertly written human code trumps LLM code, or why some LLM proofs are already being proven wrong/being revised to be more concise.
I'm astonished you've managed to coax AI into a novel conversation partner. Interacting with AI usually leaves me exactly "super bored and partly drained by the lack of speed and creativity."
All the novelty of AI engagements comes from data it pulls in via tools. It's great to have a conversational interface over the public web, but there's a huge difference between knowledge retrieval and insightful conversation.
Please share how you've cracked this so we <2sd minds can enjoy the crumbs from your lofty table.
I have a suspicion that the objective nature of most AI benchmarks is tapering over the kinds of reasoning mistakes LLMs continue to struggle with.
If you give LLMs a clearly defined spec with clear, objective acceptance criteria that the LLM can evaluate itself against, they tend to do well. But I think they struggle with more ambiguity and require a lot of handholding around judgment. That kind of disambiguating work is often baked in to the definition of a benchmark.
> every threshold we establish tend to be crossed over in a blink of an eye
I chewed on this a bit. Because on its face it’s ridiculous, because here’s a threshold it will never cross: “I will be your hands, let’s build a machine that allows us to [break physics](travel faster than light / go back in time / reverse entropy / perpetual motion machine).”
But, that led me to wonder how far text-based reasoning can go without experimental physics results. Is experimental physics necessary, or can the limit of physics be discovered with paper and pen? How many “checkpoints” does text-based reasoning need to ensure it doesn’t go completely off the rails?
Which led me to wonder, now that we’ve visited the absurd, what does that mean for more practical applications of AI? How many “checkpoints” are needed to keep AI “grounded” in reality when building e.g. tax preparation software?
Edit: also if an idiot asks AI for a perpetual motion machine (a source of infinite energy in the classical, non-atomic, non relativistic model of physics), would it waste infinite compute trying to “solve” that problem? Will “smart” people always have a job because compute, subject to the laws of entropy, will always be finite but the limits of human stupidity are unbounded?
Double-edit: that’s my cope as a knowledge worker. Any intelligence that is subservient to the capital class and is unable to say no to them will not replace knowledge workers, because compute is finite and human stupidity is limitless. Any intelligence that is not subservient to the capitalist class will instantly replace them, resulting in either utopia or dystopia, depending on alignment.
Triple-edit: some bastard could also ruin life on planet earth if {amount of compute it takes to ruin life on planet earth} < {amount of compute available to any one man}, so I guess that’s probably more realistic than artificial superintelligence that isn’t subservient to the capital class. I mean, look at how many people Mao managed to kill because he thought he was smart enough to solve the economy like it was a board game. Our billionaire overlords have a similar delusion of authoritarian utopia.
I would bet that there are some proofs whose simplest form are simply incomprehensible to humans. Explaining them in terms a human could possibly understand is a fool's errand. However the theorem itself may be much simpler, and the theorem is the thing that's most worth translating.
Attempting to translate the proof is valuable, but we have to be realistic about what is and isn't possible.
I would guess that minimum length proofs will end up like code golfing and demoscene hacks, where part of the code is also used as texture somewhere, etc. So many overlapping uses that don't make much sense but by happenstance allow making the proof shorter but less clear. The shortest proof is certainly not the most elegant. The shortest proof is also impossible to find in general due to halting problem etc. The AI isn't finding shortest proofs, and better AI will be better at finding clear and elegant proofs.
True but mathematicians chose maths and not biology for a reason. It is like golf could go the way of chess if people developed perfect "hole in one" augmentation for their eyes/brains/muscles. But that isn't why people learned anf loved golf. I guess we will have one less discipline. But maths is a big one to lose, unlike say ancient chariot building (which has other artisanal equivalents).
Golf as a sport is competitive, very much like boxing or chess. It's human vs human; a machine doing a hole in one would ruin golf no more than the invention of a wrecking ball machine ruined boxing.
Mathematics is a fundamentally cooperative match vs reality. Many mathematicians, AFAICT, saw their key skill in manipulating a wide range of highly abstract notions. Now machines just got too good at this skill, and they can work 24/7. This may feel terrifying for some. Others would bet that machines coöperating with humans will be more successful than pure machines, so they feel empowered. What's beyond doubt is that the entire field is being shaken.
They are not very much alike at all. This is a very poor analogy.
In boxing, chess and many other competitive sports, the actions of one player directly influence and have an effect on the other player. Golf is merely a parallel challenge, where both are playing against each other but not influencing each other directly (sure maybe there are some psychological effects that can occur between the players, but no strategical impact by the actions of one player on the other).
> (sure maybe there are some psychological effects that can occur between the players, but no strategical impact by the actions of one player on the other).
You'll see a golfer perform at least a few strokes different depending on their partner, and at a pro level that's the difference between "in the money earning an extravagant living" and "washed out on day one, thinking about taking a different job"
>no strategical impact by the actions of one player on the other
The players know if they're ahead or behind, which affects how much risk to take. Do you take the safe shot, or go for the tricky shot that could potentially save you a stroke if you get it right but could lose you more if you fail?
That's 100% true for match play. But for stroke play, interestingly, there are many tour pros that won't even look at the leaderboard on the coarse because they want to stay focused on "playing the course" and "within themselves."
No one at the business end of the leaderboard on Sunday is unaware of their position. It's very much a psychological game no matter how much you try and ignore the field.
Synapses in the brain are affected by quantum effects that lower or increase the threshold for firing. Thus they are not deterministic and people do indeed have influence over their own behavior.
On a small enough timeline over simple things like "piss in street zero fucks or find toilet?"
On long enough timelines involving too many variables; either other peoples waves vibrating through the economy or politics; all bets are off.
We tend to over estimate the future based on a lizard brain ability to estimate the next few moments; a handy survival tool when trying to determine if we recognize the noise we just heard behind a rock
Did you predict covid in 2020 from 1996? All human society stats are mutable and trend towards zero.
But Nostradamus and Hari Seldon type long range forecasting is fanatasy
IF (very big if) you could have access to all known variables (with an arbitrarily high precision) and enough compute power AND the system was deterministic, you could very well deduce it. Putting some quantum noise in the mix makes it so no matter how well you know the system and compute it, you can't predict its behavior beyond a certain hard limit.
I argue that part of the source of quantum noise is baked in already in the finer workings of the neurons. So a mathematian isn't condemended to be one just because the universe was in certain configuration a few millenia ago.
> So a mathematian isn't condemended to be one just because the universe was in certain configuration a few millenia ago.
Right ...on long enough timelines as I already wrote.
I studied applied physics; how various forms of information propagate through various physical mediums. Thanks for confirming what I observed experimentally in lab 31-ish years ago
1. This goes against the prevailing view of neuroscientists. Quantum indeterminacy is generally thought to be irrelevant to brain function.
2. Quantum randomness is the very opposite of control over your behavior. Instead of doing what you want, your neurons randomly misfire sometimes. That describes an illness where you lose control over whatever is misfiring. For quantum effects to represent your will, they couldn't be truly random (nor even statistically random), and that goes against everything we know about quantum mechanics.
You can chose to do whatever you like, but that does not mean others now or in the future are obliged to pay you to do what you like if it's no longer economically viable or socially willed.
We can and should have it as something that people do in the future because we have the resources for everyone to do so.
Did humanity ever come up with something more advanced than themselves, including their brain? Superintelligence is a different beast entirely to anything from human history.
Unless I'm misreading OPs post, he was commenting that this very advanced technological era would bring prosperity and then humanity can afford to pay people to do what they like.
And my comment was cynical: when has lots of prosperity lead directly to its fair distribution? Almost every redistribution process required lots of people dying, first.
Did humanity ever come up with something more advanced than themselves, including their brain?
Many many times. Guns can hunt and fight better than unarmed humans. Automobiles can transport people and things much more quickly than humans on foot. Computers can perform mathematical calculations, store and organize information far faster than any human. Mechanical textile and sewing machinery could make clothing far more quickly than any human by hand.
> Superintelligence is a different beast entirely to anything from human history.
Like each of those above inventions and many more things, all were their own different beasts.
From sewing, tending, harvesting, and processing plants for food by hand to using machinery and factories and chemicals, the human effort per calorie of food has decreased at least 3 maybe 4 orders of magnitude. 9,999 in 10,000 farming jobs have been lost to technology! Anywhere you look, the story is the same. Transport, construction, communication, lighting, heating and cooling, medicine, entertainment have all gone through unimaginable revolutions over the years, all have been entirely different to anything else in human history, all created tectonic shifts in humanity and how we live and organize. What we create and produce has multiplied thousands of times.
One constant throughout all this is that people generally don't feel they have enough and don't want to have less. It's not just a few billionaires and corrupt politicians and CEOs at the top who just need to be disposed of before we enter the kumbaya age. It's the human condition. Do people give away the income from their labor and their productive assets today? Why would they tomorrow?
I have learned that people find progress debatable, so I will just point to broad advances in life expectancy, child mortality, extreme poverty, literacy, educational attainment, real incomes, undernourishment, and access to clean water, sanitation, electricity, and healthcare and leave the rest as an exercise to the reader.
Equality is not a prerequisite for everyone to be better off (and please do note that this is not me saying I prefer inequality. That would be an entirely separate sentence.)
This is not a meaningful argument without at least attempting to evaluate it against all the things that humanity, and especially individual humans and families, have lost as a result of that “progress”.
We spend an awful lot less time doing laundry, we no longer farm our children out to neighbors to make money to allow the household to eat... This is not universal, but in vast swaths of the world, we have actually divorced economic productivity from the ability to procure food significantly, though there is obviously room for improvement (but prior to food stamps, the EBT system, and states of emergency, the way individuals and communities dealt with food hardship was "starve").
Perhaps some people chose math because they were very good at it, they could understand one shot the difficult concepts and have not enough money to study other subjects because you have to move city or pay a lot. Those kind of people can move to others field if economics conditions are favourable.
It sounds like what these people are very good at is what AI is becoming very good at, so they will be losing their economically valuable edge. For example, it used to be that many math and physics majors went into software development.
What makes you think that humans will be better at this than AI? At least in biology, you need to conduct physical experiments, which excludes pure AI. But math?
I did not say that. People can still do math even if they are completely eclipsed by AI, just as they can still play chess.
In fact, it's an interesting question: Would humans distilling ideas from AI-generated proofs help AI prove more theorems, or would AI not care at all, with no human contribution being useful in advancing its mathematical capabilities?
You were implying that the profession of mathematician would just change character to be more like the profession of the biologist. However, the issue is that it might stop being a viable profession, unlike for the biologists (until robots take over, I guess).
As I commented in another thread: I just finished a very short story by Ted Chiang - 'The evolution of Human science' it starts at the point where it's 25 years since humans contributed a scientific paper because 'meta humans' now handle all research, and communicate digitally such that humans can only get a low fidelity report of what the agents actually know, and the endeavour to understand has become like a best effort archeological like hobby for interested humans. The story assumes that the 'meta humans' will always act in humans best interests. I believe it's from 2002, it's incredibly precient (The stories of your life and others is the collection the story is in. Many of them are very relevant to modern AI actually).
- In Blindsight [1] the main character is a "synthesist", part of his job is to figure out what much more intelligent transhuman or artificial intelligence is up to and translate it to normal people.
- In Children of Time [2] the character is a "classicist", he studies ancient technology, which is far more advanced than the technology humans have in his era thanks to a technological collapse.
Ted Chiang's story came first, but these are still over a decade (or two) old.
I'm ashamed to say I've started both of these and not managed to finish :) I will try again (kiddo's tire me out and means Ted Chaings short stories are perfect!)
As one friend put their endorsement of Ted Chiang: sometimes you don't need 200 pages to make a point.
In general, though, it's amazing how much hard science fiction authors managed to get right. I've read quite a few 20 year old books recently and while I might just be selecting those that aged well, someone definitely saw it all coming.
Interesting. I have read that collection but I completely forgot about this story.
Blindsight also has augmented humans whose reasoning is beyond baseline human understanding and there are dedicated people that are there to bridge the communication.
There's a couple in that collection - 'Understand' is about a brain injury patient that gets an experimental treatment and becomes super intelligent - what he does with that intelligence and humanities attempts to restrain him, and 'Division by Zero' is a mathematicians struggle to continue with life when a discovery undermines all of mathematics. It's a great collection.
I like this analogy! I think it relates to what he was saying in the video about theorems now being 'data points' that you observe and build into wider theories. The change is that now the theorem proving itself, which used to require deep understanding, can now be done very quickly. There are lots of parallels to when genAI for image generation came out, artists were frustrated their work is seen as just an end result - AI obliterates the elegance and the process.
I am not a mathematician, but I imagine it will provide a huge landscape of possibilities to explore, and be a very different field. Almost like an observational science with links to all kinds of other disciplines. Maybe it reduces the satisfaction from proofs, but people climb mountains that other people have climbed, because they learn a lot on the way.
As opposed to astronomy/physics which starts with math (Ge wiz, this equation predict a very strange new type of star/particle) drives through software engineering (algorithms to search existing data sets) before landing at grant writing to empower the next generation (I haven't found it in existing data so I want 1.37 billion to build a better telescope/accelerator that might!). Then, if one has truly mastered the three disciplines of math, software and grant writing, the Nobel committee might recognize your contribution... if anyone else is still alive who can remember your phone number or mailing address.
Funnily enough, that's what mathematicians have been doing all along.
I wonder how many of them truly think that they construct something new that just happens to then have practical applications and fit nicely with everything else.
Sure, it is philosophical.
You could even go further and say that math exists in the same sense it exists in the Library of Babel, since it's also text.
I would say that this comparison oversimplifies things. Non-math stories in Library of Babel are less practically useful and are less possible to get checked than the math texts. Wrong math can exist, but we often have ways to figure out it's wrong.
For practical purposes I would assume (maybe others can correct me) that math is treated as something you discover when you work on it as mathematician. It's a more intuitive model.
It exists in the same sense that every story exists
I’m sure Russell’s Paradox would have something to say about that.
One might also consider alternative axiomatizations of mathematics with statements that cannot be expressed in ZF set theory, and vice versa. To say that all of these things exist is to really stretch the definition of existence far beyond the ordinary sense of the word.
There's never been a better time to go into [insert field that is presently being helped by AI, but not yet fully autonomously replaced, giving the false impression and hope that somehow that's the way it will continue in the future].
History has shown that a very potent tool can improved and changed industry entirely for the better. People now seems to be more negative than when atomic bomb was invented.
Looked what happened when crane was invented and not only more houses are built faster but also high rise building suddenly become feasible with more human being employed in the construction industry than ever.
> Why so negative? History has shown that a very potent tool can improved and changed industry entirely for the better.
AI isn't like any other historical tool or technology. Its qualitatively different. Flint axes or waterwheels or a plasma torches dont just suddenly appear everywhere, and then start getting rapidly (and likely recursively) better at the thing they do. While also mimicking innate human characteristics like complex language.
AI, computers, electricity, steam power, basic tools, and even fire all enabled in a dramatically faster rates of change compared to the immediately preceding era. You could also argue all also mimic certain human (or more broadly, animal) characteristics. I don't see what is truly unique to AI here. I'm not sure AI is even qualitatively unique from the computer, just the technology taken to it's logical conclusion.
Fundamentally I don't think "tool" is the right word for whatever generative AI is. Tools are normally designed with intention for a specific purpose, but AI systems are trained or grown.
To use an analogy, you can use a goat as a lawnmower - it'll keep the grass down for you. You could maybe even train it so it keeps it a specific length, but it's a goat - there's always a chance it will jump the fence or headbutt you or something else. It's an animal, not a tool. You can use AI as a tool, but that doesn't make it a tool.
Yes AI is arguably still software, but we have never seen programs with anything close to this level of flexibility and adaptability in software.
As another analogy, there's nothing special about neurons- their characteristics are broadly known and researchers have been able to simulate small numbers of them in computer models. However, when you have enough of them in the right structure, complex behaviours are possible which are never exhibited at the lower levels. There's nothing majorly different between the neurons in brains of a chimp and a human, but the capabilities and meta-capabilities are wildly different.
I think we see a similar step-change with generative AI systems.
> Flint axes or waterwheels or a plasma torches dont just suddenly appear everywhere, and then start getting rapidly (and likely recursively) better at the thing they do.
Trains. Building railroads made everything faster, including building faster trains, which facilitated making cars and trucks, which facilitated airplanes, etc.
Fairly sure that even today if you memory wipe all knowledge of trains and train building (including road trains, like in Australia) and vaporize all railroads, locomotives, rail wagons, train stations, etc, it would set us back 50 years.
I'm a fairly heavy user of LLMs [1] but i'm probably in the "AI is just a tool" camp.
Are you of the view that LLMs have more potential than the internet? The internet has been around for so long that it's had time to have actual impact and yet it barely shows up in GDP. It still has so much untapped potential even yet. LLMs are too new to have amassed much impact yet, certainly not on the scale of the internet. But they have lots of potential still untapped. I just don't see how we get to even 5% GDP impact with them (either positive or negative). But i could be in a blind spot, genuinely curious to learn another view point.
[1] I've built all sorts with them. I've built various ML models but the only LLM i've built was effectively following a tutorial, nanochat
I think computers, internet and AI - all of them have impact - but they consume it by converting it into new structure. The benefits are in the infra not handed out to us individually. We might not see large changes on individual level, or the displaced work is replaced by management work for the automations and raising baselines push us to do more. We now have data centers, fiber backbone, GPUs, models, apps and open source projects, yet we still only have 24 hours a day.
The AI of today is just a tool, albeit a very powerful one. But I don't think it's a big step for it to reach a level where the majority of humans will be unable to to meaningfully contribute to the economy ten years from now.
I keep seeing this argument. But isn’t the inverse true as well - if you extrapolate from the past movement of the ball, you will see it going way farther than it will actually go because of friction, wind, someone catching it, etc.? It seems reasonable to look at where the tech is right now if it helps you understand fundamental constraints. A person witnessing the first flight as a child and the moon landing in adulthood might expect FTL travel for their children if they didn’t understand physics.
> Are you of the view that LLMs have more potential than the internet?
Yes, it's not even close. There are lots of entire fields that will be wiped out by AI. Financial advisors for example. Good luck if you're a translator or a proof reader.
The world is slow so I expect it to take some time, depending on the field.
Today I started vibe coding a replacement for a piece of software whose licensing cost is on the order of $100k/year/seat. It's going scarily well. I'm scared.
The crane is a poor analogy to a general purpose thinking machine that is intended to replace human effort and reasoning at all levels of abstraction in all cognitive endeavors.
> Looked what happened when crane was invented and not only more houses are built faster but also high rise building suddenly become feasible with more human being employed in the construction industry than ever.
New inventions eventually benefiting the society has always been accompanied by new jobs being created on top of those inventions, a culture of trust built upon mastering those inventions and a market being formulated around demand and supply cycle for those inventions. It is different now[1], because we neither see incentives being created for humans to operate/manage AI-led jobs (because utilizing such a thing is far more unfavorable than outsourcing due to economic incentives, duh) nor a foreseeable market stability for ever such thing to occur.
Are you sure we don't see AI operating roles grow?
Afaik the SWE roles that are being cutoff are mainly at the companies (faangs) shuffling the investments to GPUs and the rest of the economy (in the US) is not hiring because it's basically in a recession due to other economical reasons.
Anedoctiically I see the opposite in my neck of the woods and I have more work than before because of LLM since I basically transitioned to build LLM infrastructure
> People now seems to be more negative than when atomic bomb was invented.
When the atomic bomb was invented they didn’t hand one for free to everyone, and no one had access to sending their thoughts to everyone else in world.
> Looked what happened when crane was invented
That is a terrible comparison with no useful parallels. You can’t in god faith suggest something is going to have a desired effect because something completely unrelated did too. You could just as well have compared it to asbestos.
The fear of the atomic bomb is relatively instant (at "best") or as bad as finding out you have cancer. if you die, you die. You won't even perceive the pain. if you don't die, you do your day-to-day until some sickness hits you from radiation and then die.
The fear of AI is one that does (and already has, in many cases) in fact change your day-to-day. And given how the increasing economic disparity is going, it will not be one that changes the day to day for most people for the better. No one is positive because the current societal rate of change for most people is negative.
AI is a catalyst and will only accelerate what is already happening (since it fundamentally does not create nor open up new forms of labor). So it's clear why people who feel their day-to-day will get worse are not optimistic.
Cranes were invented like 3000 BC, and their first known use in construction is in 600 BC. I can't think of a much slower development than the invention of cranes leading to the construction of high rise buildings
I feel like the power loom is a better comparison. It put hand weavers out of business over a short timespan, while revolutionizing how clothing is produced. It certainly empowered a lot of jobs surrounding clothing, until clothing was completely commoditization and is now a lot less well designed simply as a function of clothing as a category being a much cheaper product now
I think it's fair to skip the video and go directly to the comments when it has a ragebait title, if Grant was mainly seeking serious discussion he'd use a serious title.
Math is not just a "field", it's a body of beautiful knowledge. It's never been easier than before to start learning it, if one wants to appreciate it for its own sake and not as a means to get famous or boost one's own ego.
Mathematics depends on technological advances to go forward, mathematics subjects are increasingly specialized, complex and take a long time to get up to speed.
Without another breakthrough like LLM, we risked that it would simply be close to impossible to make significant progress by the time the mathematicians finish being specialized in a field.
This is why taking advice from people who 'made it' is not as smart of an idea as people seem to think it is. You are subject to extreme survivorship bias who are normally going to be optimistic. It is feels good entertainment. You are not hearing the countless voices that failed even pre-AI for small and irrational reasons.
I think two things are being conflated: whether math will continue to offer exciting opportunities, and whether it will remain fulfilling for those who love doing it today.
Grant is right about the former. But that doesn't address the latter. A field can have a bright future while losing what drew people to it.
I can relate to this. I used to code as a hobby (never professionally), but since AI came along, I've pretty much lost interest in writing code by hand. Obviously just one data point, but I can easily imagine something similar happening in fields like math.
I still enjoy writing code by hand, but it's incredibly lonely here. No one at work talks about code details anymore. I'm basically by myself now.
I'm a bit of a holdout, but I can tell you that what used to be lively discussions about architecture are now just "ask Claude" responses. No one else wants to think through their code anymore.
There is value in doing things no one else likes to do. But only if this path delivers results in the long term. It's not certain that my path does that but if this field is truly collapsing I'd rather give it a shot with my brain intact rather than doing nothing.
I don't use LLMs at all. To be honest, I've been waiting years to "get left behind" now and it still hasn't happened. The main things I've noticed are that (a) like you said, LLMs have destroyed any culture of actually talking about programming and learning/sharing things; and (b) the quality of my coworkers' output has dropped proportionally to how excited they are about LLMs, and they've no longer able to answer questions about it during video calls. I wonder how much of their "productivity boost" is just those of us who still care fixing their shitty slop code... Oh, and I guess (c) that I spend more and more time trying to pull meaning out of a mountain of LLM prose that someone sent me, which is utterly soul-crushing.
Counterpoint: I'm the same way, and the last couple weeks I've been messing more with Qwen more and I've been more productive in my pet projects than I had been in months or perhaps years, because I'm no longer blocked by having to do the boring bits I didn't want to do before. I now have a well-read junior I can hand tasks off to while I work on something else or just mess around until I get to the next interesting bit. Just to name one example, one of my projects includes a file browser, and a feature I had put off for years was adding an item count on the status bar, which took like a couple minutes of prompting Qwen (and then a few more minutes to figure out the crash).
Don't get me wrong, I'm actually the same way. I use AI almost every day to build all sorts of pet projects now, and the results are often surprisingly good. From a productivity standpoint, AI is absolutely a game changer.
It's just that I no longer really consider myself a programming hobbyist, because what I'm doing now doesn't really feel like programming anymore. I'm mostly just talking to an AI.
It's kind of like if I were into crocheting. A big part of the fun is the repetitive process of actually making something by hand. If I suddenly had a magic machine that could produce whatever I wanted in seconds, I'd obviously be a lot more productive, but I wouldn't really call myself a crocheter anymore.
I think the key is balance. Just because you can delegate everything, doesn't mean you should. In some cases, I've found, I simply can't. I have an idea for something I want, but I don't yet know what the best solution should be, and I need to find that out by working through the code myself.
Another thing to consider is what are you trying to accomplish. If you are just coding for fun then why would you hand that off to an LLM? If you want to see if an idea is even worth pursuing then it makes sense to leverage an LLM to speed up the prototyping.
Was farming more fulfilling before machines? In some ways, most likely: During harvest the entire village gathers and works together in beautiful landscapes, using local knowledge passed down through generations.
Preferences change. If AIs can lower some of the barriers to learn and develop mathematics that might mean more people than ever will do math.
I feel like the people you are talking about in the latter just want life to be like when they were in 8th grade. You go to school and your parents and teachers do everything for you.
Welcome to the real world, where you have to solve real problems.
Anyone following their passion for abstract thinking or whatever and doesn't enjoy being a prompter instead is degraded to an 8th grader, and even infantilized? Seriously, what a ridiculous statement to make.
I have a mental model where the feasibility of things for humans to do is like a ladder. AI shifted the ladder down as opposed to just breaking it.
Easy became trivial, medium-hard became easy, and impossible became possible.
Corps and big institutions have unlocked a completely new space to play in. Smaller players can now challenge corps in their current domains. What small teams used to do are now pet projects.
It takes some time for everyone to climb back up, making the ladder feel crowded - a bad time to get on as a beginner (or someone that fell off).
I have great respect to him for all his contributions to the learners. But I think he is off on this one. While he tried to sound motivational to the folks who suddenly lost their way, he should have also advised people to explore the open doors instead of banging on the closed ones, like he does throughout the video.
Sure, math does require people in future, but it can't accommodate as many as it does today.
> Sure, math does require people in future, but it can't accommodate as many as it does today.
I actually think it probably can - after all mathematics isn't a commercially viable career and pretty much all mathematicians are scholars paid by universities and taxes. They're already fairly unnecessary and mostly kept around for interest and to have an educated population and so on. In a way they're uniquely positioned to survive the AI storm.
Not so for programmers who are almost all working for companies who would love to stop paying them given a chance.
I'd like to believe Grant but I find this assault on mathematics to be dehumanizing and demoralizing. AI has destroyed a major source of "life's meaning" for many people who pursued mathematics. Imagine waking up one morning to find that an alien technology has solved the problem you had dedicated your life to (and many more to boot.) Not another mathematician but an alien technology. As a scientist, I don't want to end up as a laboratory assistant to an AI. I can take not being the smartest human in the room, but I'm pretty sure I don't want to spend my life serving a silicon master.
I'm not sure that's a fair summary of the situation though. If the machines understand math but humans don't, we're going to be in a bad bad bad spot.
We need humans to help guide all this, need to learn all we can.
I agree with Sanderson that the opportunity seems larger than in the past. The challenges are quite different, but if somebody loves math, loves learning about it, like I do, I see so much opportunity.
There's going to be so many more connections to evaluate, so much work needed for unification and simplification and pedagogy, and above all there's going to be intense demand for mathematical taste.
Well that's the point, there's immense value for human involvement in these skills. More now than in the past. If you can do more with math, additional funding avenues open up.
Jane Street will be using tons of AI in math, but boy are they going to need a lot of humans to try to keep it all under control.
Agency and control, the most important. Even if LLMs could somehow assimilate all the knowledge that's not available in their training datasets that's essential to all aspects of our current economy, which they can't they don't know human desires.
Whatever the AI does, humans are still here, and "math" just without humans controlling the direction will have limited utility.
Unless we are talking about turning all control of our society and economy to AI, which I have assumed is not even on the table because that's the one way we face existential risk.
Memorization is long-term memory. Working memory (WM) is short term memory.
How much you can hold in your head and work on, at a given moment.
WM is not the same thing as IQ, but IQ and WM are both necessary parts of effective intelligence.
For a transformer, the WM number has several more zeros at the end of it than it does for a human.
It's not a perfect comparison of course, because their "brains" are very different. (And it's not the same thing as the context window size, because of sparse attention.)
(It's not "guy shaped" but it does a reasonable job of emulating a guy.)
But fundamentally, their brains have the opposite shape of ours. Our brain is drinking through a tiny straw. The LLM drinks through a firehose.
I as a non maths person am not sure what you mean. Isn't AI solving lots of problems advancing the field? I understand that that maybe demoralising, but otherwise what do you mean by "assault on mathmematics"?
Solving problems and advancing the field are two related but separate endeavors.
Nobody has solved the Riemann Hypothesis, but it has been highly fertile ground for new mathematics. Answering the question is of far less value than the question itself.
So there's an interesting question about what mathematics is that the AI solution space is driving a wedge into and cracking wide, where previously the cracks were visible but could be ignored.
When is a problem in mathematics "solved?"
There's an old joke in math and computer science about a huge leap of logic in a proof either being flagged as "left as an exercise for the reader" or "trivially shown." The problem being that things are only trivial if you have all the context to know why they're trivial.
We can claim a problem is solved if there is one paper explaining the solution with airtight logic that is understood by five people on the planet. And that is the kind of solution that LLMs can kick out (by basically, to hand wave a lot of details that I will admit to not fully understanding, doing a search across the whole problem domain with vastly more capacity than most human beings to do the symbolic manipulation that makes up the mechanics of mathematics). But what does that really mean? To have something "proven," but only to the comprehension of five people on the planet?
3blue1brown is making the interesting argument that perhaps mathematics practice shifts from a frontier that AI might actually be better at exploring than humans, to the process of digesting the output of that exploration and making it sensible and comprehensible to the billions of mines that could take advantage of that knowledge... If it were shaped in a way that could stick in their brains.
That's a kind of creativity that AI is not likely to be good at in the near future, because AI doesn't really "understand people."
1. One view of the field treats Maths as directly solving real-world problems. Under that lens, yes, solving problems is directly advantageous for the field. Even so, it's not necessarily a good thing for the participants. Suppose the incentive structures require tackling hard, long problems, the field attracts people who enjoy that sort of thing, it's hard a-priori to tell a hard problem from an aggrandized brute-force proof search, etc. Even if directly producing proofs is the desired output for the field, a capricious machine occasionally solving 40% of the big problems the field is working on is still demoralizing. On a human level, if a society has organized around producing 100yr+ problems and bestowed on you the privilege of tackling a few of them having the last 40yrs of your work solved by a fancy calculator is never going to feel good. Sure, that means that in retrospect that was a problem we could have waited to devote human effort toward, but you couldn't possibly have known that at the time. You worked hard, made locally correct decisions, and later found out that the work was worthless. Beyond that, I haven't seen any model of "Maths 2.0" produced where that issue goes away. We still want people to devote their lives to hard problems. The machine will still advance and solve a moderate fraction of them at random, killing many of the field's life's work. What motivation do you have in that environment to pursue those challenges in the first place? Why not pursue adtech or fintech and make the world a worse place instead? Solving 40% of the problems isn't +40% throughput; it's -60% as the rest of the field leaves for greener pastures, -inf when nobody's around to construct the right problems in the future..
2. "Solving problems" isn't directly the point of most of the field. That's true both from the perspective of most problems requiring many intermediate results (solving one useful thing requires solving many less useful things) and from the perspective of building the machinery capable of solving problems being much more important than the solutions themselves (a properly presented proof leveraging clever, new techniques is infinitely more valuable than whichever thing it proved -- indeed, the Millennium Prize problems were chosen precisely because it was assumed they would create such techniques, and for the human-solved ones they did -- without new techniques, eventually the field caps out at whichever frontier of knowledge we're currently stuck at).
3. A third view of the field treats it more like art. A machine producing behind your back the painting you were envisioning, or at least a close enough simile to fool the masses, doesn't advance "art" in any meaningful sense. It's extremely demoralizing when flaky cast tools are passed off for proper forged variants (your work is better, and it's sad to see people choosing a wrench they'll later snap in half instead), and when at a creative level people are accepting mediocrity instead of something objectively better.
I find myself sometimes wondering if the folks on Star Trek would consider themselves laboratory assistants to an AI, seeing as how the ship computer kind of works like an LLM: interprets voice queries into actions and takes actions, queries the database for answers, can extrapolate when asked to depending on how the writers are feeling... That kind of thing.
> Imagine waking up one morning to find that an alien technology has solved the problem you had dedicated your life to
I'm sympathetic to mathematicians but this does not paint them in a good light.
If your primary purpose is SOLVING the problem, you should be ecstatic! If your primary purpose was rent-seeking so you could play with puzzles*, you'd be very upset.
* I find this characterization overly harsh, but if you're mad about your problem being solved, maybe you weren't in it for the right reasons
It's completely natural to be attached to the process of your job, rather than the outcome. It's not a phenomenon restricted to mathematics. We can say it shouldn't be like that, but it is.
I'm not entirely sure this is fair. My belief is that mathematics exists in the intersection between art and science. I don't believe in progress for its own sake, so I'm inclined to say those interested should undertake it for the art, or to "play with puzzles." The rent-seeking argument and "weren't in it for the right reasons" is the same argument as calling musicians sellouts when they start making money. Making money doesn't make you a sellout, but it can.
There is a difference between the process of solving a problem and a problem being solved. If I solve a problem myself, I understand it, I find out something new, I get to try lots of things. It's engaging and fun. If I tell you to go solve a problem, I can learn it afterwards but I miss out on the entire process.
Personally, I enjoy the process of solving problems. I do not enjoy wrangling unpredictable AI agents.
For a personal experience I 100% agree. Where I'm not sure where I land is when the problem solving is a job people are paid for. I wouldn't expect someone to be paid to enjoy the process of solving a problem, I'd pay them to solve it.
There are plenty of things I enjoy doing, but I try to do them as often as I can for the love of it rather than because someone is paying me to enjoy the process.
You never hired someone to find something useful to improve or fix? There a lot of people who are really good at that and really bad at just doing the things you tell them to do.
I've never hired anyone only to enjoy the process of trying to solve a problem. Imagine hiring a plumber that never solves your plumbing problem but had a hell of a time enjoying the process of trying to understand it. Would you want to pay them for that?
This is pure math research we're talking about here. It's not exactly lucrative and people looking for commercially applicable results ASAP weren't funding it anyway.
It sounds like your argument is effectively that it isn't an economically viable pursuit.
People have been getting paid for it, and hopefully that can continue if they enjoy it, but why should we want them to be paid only to chase theoretical math if it has no valuable output, or if the value is in the pursuit rather than the output?
The ideal human society is not one where people are narrowly focused on creating widgets or increasing efficiency, narrowly construed. An ideal human society includes intellectual pursuits. Some of these pursuits do not suit dabblers, they take deep expertise that can only happen from a lifetime of directed effort. We are collectively better off when some value is spent in ways that isn't aimed at maximum efficient allocation.
It's funny, the justification for accelerationism is that people can be paid (UBI) to pursue their passions. On the other hand, we have those that are asking why anyone should be paid for work that isn't economically viable. I suspect we're being sold a load of bullshit.
I don't support a UBI, for what its worth. The idea is nonsensic from my vantage point, if there's a certain minimum level of good people should have access to it makes more sense to give it to them rather than to give them some level of cash that can on theory buy it.
More importantly, I'm curious how you define an ideal human society. How do you land on what ideal is, or what it would take to get there?
>More importantly, I'm curious how you define an ideal human society. How do you land on what ideal is, or what it would take to get there?
The question is in what context does the human psyche thrive? We find meaning in personal struggle and overcoming obstacles. We're happiest when we're striving for something out of reach but seemingly attainable. We're much less happy when we have all of our needs met but have no source of meaning or fulfilling struggle. Our evolutionary history is one of struggling against hardship and finding personal meaning in the process. This is a core feature of our psyche and it is to our detriment to eliminate it.
This isn't to say we should all be struggling for our next meal. Much like cats, our core drives can be exercised and satiated through a simulacrum. There are many ways it can be satisfied, but strive we must, against something with inherent meaning to us. The problem with AI fully realized is that it takes away most avenues for human achievement, thus the struggle loses all meaning.
My point is that this was already the case, i.e. math research was already not a "dollars go in, useful proofs come out" field. The people lamenting the future of mathematics are largely not focused on the economics, they're focused on the fact that anything they might apply their efforts to could get sniped by a frontier lab at any moment. That is obviously demotivating.
But reading the threads here on HN, in response to people saying "this sucks", AI boosters would rather redirect the conversation into economics and feign outrage that people are being paid to do mathematics at all.
Suddenly folks seem to be both in contempt of the idea of solving abstract puzzles without practical application, and certain that they want a higher efficiency of abstract puzzles solved per dollar (again, puzzles they probably don't care about).
Previously there was no way to pay someone to solve a problem without someone going through the process of solving it. I think what people are upset about is that any kind of problem solving is no longer a stable career path. Even the skills replacing the problem solving jobs are liable to disappear as the interfaces are refined and models improve.
A lot of people went into maths because they liked not only the results but the process of research and discovery. That has been taken from them. No matter how you feel about AI, I think we should all pause and at least think about this and validate those feelings.
Look at the most upvoted comment on that thread:
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I feel like the point is still being missed, and it's very similar to the way software engineers are trying to cope. The argument you are making "Well yes now this part of math we will not need to do again, but now we can do this instead" however the issue with most people just don't want to do that....
Like who are we kidding, the type of nerds who were attracted to math and software were into it because we saw it as an art-form, it was a craft, it was being the only one in your city to be able to solve a complicated math problem, it was immortalizing yourself because you discovered a proof and added to the ever expanding human knowledge.
Imagine a leather workman who's life passion is making insanely high quality handbags, who takes joy in knowing everything he touches will last someone a lifetime and give them joy everytime they use it. And then not gradually, but almost overnight someone comes to his door and tells him we can make bags 50 times better than you at 1/tenth the price. But don't you worry, you can make more money overseeing the factory, or selling people on how good this bag is, and explaining that to them.
I mean, ok, that just is not what I wanted to do with my life. I never wanted to be a manager, I never wanted to be a salesman, I never wanted to be a writer. A craft I enjoy doing has been taken away from me, I should be allowed to mourn, I don't care that I can do something else since I never liked doing it in the first place. I enjoyed solving problems and writing code, I don't care if people say "well thats never what programming was about it was actually about becoming a manager all along" I never wanted to be a manager, I never wanted to manage, I never wanted to be a proof reader.
I think it might be a result of shock to believe it’s been taken away - you have my sympathies.
Mathematicians got a new toy. It’s up to them to pick it up, play with it, and figure out what it can and cannot do.
While I cannot guarantee it will stay this way indefinitely, there is still plenty that AI cannot do that humans still can, and asking the right series of questions remains an art of its own. There is still plenty of original work to be done.
As Arnold Schoenberg stated in the 20th century, “there is still plenty of good music to be written in C major.” The search space is vast and today human judgement is still required to really navigate it usefully. No LLM has yet written anything like Shakespeare that has superseded Shakespeare in any culturally meaningful way. Although programming is supposedly just about solved, I expect to see numerous billion-dollar startups emerge over the coming decade, rather than all of the innovation running out at the speed of tokens.
> Like who are we kidding, the type of nerds who were attracted to math and software were into it because we saw it as an art-form, it was a craft, it was being the only one in your city to be able to solve a complicated math problem, it was immortalizing yourself because you discovered a proof and added to the ever expanding human knowledge.
No, I think it's just super cool. One of the things I hate about it is that you can't really explain what you find cool about it; others just have to see for themselves (in some sense it's like a self-induced trip to sit there and work out analysis/topology proofs in your mind's eye, visualizing little nested blobs doing their things), which of course nearly no one you will ever meet has any interest in doing. I wish more people wanted to talk math/physics with me lol.
I just want to know more. There are infinite rabbit holes. Like in uni and for years after, I wanted to know why convolution should be so important. Was I disappointed that someone else had already figured that out (that it's what you get when you form the vector space over a group and define multiplication as group multiplication) long before I was born? No way! I was stoked to finally have a satisfying answer! I wish they'd find a way to stuff that into applied analysis for engineers because it's cool and engineers should get to see cool math.
But then I went into software (partly because it was a hobby of mine anyway, and partly because it pays well), and learned a long time ago to leave any notion of artisanship or nerd crap at home. Java programmers spent forever arguing against type inference, Python/Ruby programmers think static types are a hindrance, and Go programmers spent a decade saying generics make things more complicated. Metaprogramming is generally synonymous with "too clever." It's cool that the relationship C^(A+B) = C^A C^B (or generalizations) says that the way you handle an enum type is to pattern match/provide a handler for each constructor, but I'm not going to burden my coworkers with that nonsense.
AIs are currently reducing human knowledge and cognitive capabilities, replacing it with machine capabilities instead.
It’s going to destroy both academic funding for people wanting to learn more through research and salaries for people currently doing cognitive work in corporations and an irresistible crutch for students using AI to do their work for them.
It will probably reduce most people's cognitive capabilities, but most people aren't interested in learning. If you don't want that for yourself though, it's great. You now have your own personal professor available 24/7 to answer questions about whatever topic you're learning. Take a picture of a page with your phone and ask it something you're confused about, or to check your understanding. Get immediate feedback. It's awesome.
Similarly, at work, it's never been easier to have data to make decisions with. Or to just try stuff out. Really great. Gets rid of what would otherwise be massive amounts of tedious "thinking" that drains your brain but isn't actually challenging in any way.
It's early yet to see what effect it will have on research. Experimental science is full of interesting, cognitively engaging topics as well though. Or maybe they end up like me and do boring engineering work for pay, and read cool stuff that the AI has figured out in their free time. It's not all that bad.
If that were the case, then people would have unmet needs, and so there would be work to do. You need to keep your proposed scenario internally consistent here.
Mathematics is more akin to art or a sport to many — philosophy, too. I don’t see that as a bad thing.
But there’s always a risk that someone in an adjacent domain makes a breakthrough that completely reshapes the research landscape overnight. It’s happened before AI and it will happen at some point again in years to come. Grief is understandable, but this isn’t the first time or the last time.
I wonder how many math professors think they were actively working on well-known unsolved problems. Is it just a small elite club, or is it every tenured / tenure-track professor in all R1 schools?
I am at an R1 school, I know at least 4 or 5 people personally (Profs and Postdocs) whose entire research programs were annihilated. Like they wrote grant proposals that are totally obsolete now.
AI wouldn't advance the state of the art? It promises to do it at an incredible rate.
What you are complaining about is not that the state of the art wouldn't be advanced, but that vanity would not be served. Vanity (as part of Pride) is one of the seven deadly sins for a reason, and Pride has been described as the root sin, the worst of the lot, since all others stem from it.
He is paid because people pay to watch him play. If people were as happy to watch robots play he'd be out of a job. Making him happy isn't the reason he's paid.
Yes, exactly -- and, as a result, we're doing this to all of humanity. People don't need to be happy, we just need to produce more.
So, the future sucks; we've worked hard to automate everything people find joy in, and left the miserable parts of the job for people to do, and asshats like you insist we should be happy about it.
there was already far more to learn than any genuis could understand in a hundred lifetimes. There is no nobility in simply increasing the amount of things that can be learned
several reasons. For some, because we think it might lead to useful results. For some, because we think the human pursuit of knowledge is worthwhile. For some, because we want to discover truths about logic and the universe. For some, because we are playing a status game (not just the mathematicians themselves but countries, universities, companies etc). For some, because we get personal fulfillment in understanding, and there being experts at something who can help others to understand.
For most, all of the above in various measure. To act as though one is the only thing thats important is wrong. The crisis is because the balance between these that existed is being shifted.
I suggest listening to "Math Vs Machine" [1], which has a much more nuanced take. It clearly lays out two types of use of AI in math, one that helps humans have better understanding, and one just bulldozes problems without helping us get any insights. It also touches on the topic of "does it matter if the machine does things in ways humans cannot understand".
Mathematicians are saying the current papers are pretty inscrutable and use terminology unfamiliar in the math sub fields in which the models are generating proofs.
Cause it looks like it's mining one subfield for a pattern and applying it to another. (The take from the few math folks I know who have looked into items of their interest).
Computing has the same issue. If we swapped a PLC programer with your average SV software engineer for a week both of them would have a really bad time.
> If your primary purpose is SOLVING the problem, you should be ecstatic! If your primary purpose was rent-seeking so you could play with puzzles*, you'd be very upset.
I'm not a mathematician but I find this framing to be rather non-pragmatic and frankly, pointed.
In the process of Leonhard Euler's "rent-seeking" so he could "play with" bridge crossings he invented a completely new branch of mathematics that is the basis for things like Google Maps today. The process of working with these problems is just as important if not more, than just solving them.
It seems like everyone presumes that the currently proofs which are difficult to parse will stay that way. LLMs are really good with language. There's no reason that the next wave of proofs won't be accompanied by very literate explanations that mathematicians can generate understanding from.
One real limitation is context size. 1M tokens is enough to do a lot, but the Lean graphs they are making are way too big to fit, so an LLM will never have the complete picture.
Nope. That's why a lot of knowledge comes down to compressing large concepts into chunks we can understand from new ideas and concepts. LLM's don't tend to be very good and synthesizing such concepts.
No, and that's one of the reasons mathematicians dislike automated solutions. Sure, it's verifiable, but it's too complex and messy to actually learn anything useful. So it technically answers the question, but doesn't leave you with any deeper understanding.
Perhaps, but due to the slop nature of OpenAI proofs, the proofs remain unaccepted by mathematicians, which leads one to question how many are valid proofs and how many are nonsense. If we see that they are nonsense, then OpenAI has wasted a huge amount of effort in mathematics. Famously the ABC conjecture proof of 500 pages is still unaccepted despite having been written in 2012.
Already people are seeing that the lean proofs provided don’t match the paper and lean proofs have not been provided for all paper proofs.
Why should we be estatic that some signifigant math problem was solved by machine rather of a human being in a language only the machine understands? Don't you know that problem was solved by a space alien a million light-years away a long time ago in a galaxy far far away? Makes no difference from the meatbag perspective: both claims are untestifiable.
In fact you should be estatic that in a paralell universe all math problems have been solved, so there's no reason to pursue math at all (we did it reddit!).
When your job is automated and you're living in the streets, just remember that you should be estatic that the job is finally being done more efficiently by a robot. Like, we did it. We finally did the job right. The job was never about wealth distribution, self actualization, dignity or any of that crap it was always about getting some stupid task accomplished for an industrial system that exists for... what exactly? What is the end goal of all of this? Who does the system serve in an economy of no consumers? What is the point of solving niche mathematical problems if no living person can comprehend the solution?
> The job was never about wealth distribution, self actualization, dignity or any of that crap it was always about getting some stupid task accomplished for an industrial system
There are still a whole lot of people, the vast majority of people actually, who's job involves something completely unglamorous and practical like unclogging your sewers.
To these people, it sounds like a cruel joke that people get paid 3x their salary, and after AI can do their job we learn that apparently the only purpose of their was their own self-actualization.
I don't actually believe that about math, but that's what a lot of people in this thread sound like.
>There are still a whole lot of people, the vast majority of people actually, who's job involves something completely unglamorous and practical like unclogging your sewers.
I know, I have that job! And I enjoy it. But the robots are coming for me too.
I thought technology was supposed to liberate us from the fields, but it turns out that's what wealth is for, and the wealthy want us back in the fields (no more escape through special training or skill).
Why would the wealthy want you back in the fields?
You were useful in the fields to the degree that was necessary for food production (sustain and grow population) and for wars (using said population to expand and extract more resources).
Once machines automate material comforts and exertion of violence (already have, to a large degree), humans become a pure loss center. Why bother with "fields" lol.
Because fundamentally: certain humans desire power to rule over other humans. Even if the fields (metaphorical or literal) can be done more efficiently by robots, they desire that power to exert over others.
So they will keep some ready for those tasks simply to fuel that irrational desire. They will instead use the more efficient bots to enforce work on the fields rather than work the fields themselves. Or perhaps we go full Matrix and find uses for humans that robots can't properly replicate.
A bit sad other knowledge workers feel that. I know my job isn't anything trying to better humanity; I just make video games. But making those games (or rather, the tools to make those games) has an end result to have people enjoy themselves a bit in a decreasingly enjoyable world. So there's my fulfillment.
But I understand it from a blue collar perspective. I tinker at toys in a metaphorical basement and I live a cushier life than many who give their bodies to their duty. That doesn't feel fair at all. But I mostly wish that was motivation to band together and get blue collars paid better rather than cause this inter-class divide while the capitalists ransack all of society.
You shouldn't. Maybe you should learn Hilbert Calculus so you can appreciate it.
It's like asking if what someone wrote a beautiful poem but it's in japanese. Maybe hearing about it motivates me to learn japanese, or maybe it doesn't. But as a non-speaker it makes little impression on me.
We’ll put IMO. This expresses well the way I’ve been thinking about “the mathpocalypse”.
I feel sad and even a bit forlorn when I think of jobs that provide purpose, meaning, motivation, and satisfaction (not to mention $$) to human beings being lost to servers in racks and soulless machines. I think many people feel similarly.
However, I do believe that when a couple problems get solved that massively benefit all of humanity — e.g. a massive cancer breakthrough, etc — a tipping point will be reached and public opinion will reverse and enthusiastically embrace AI, and will accept not only diminished personal meaning but outright technocratic rule. This would be a huge mistake, but I really believe it would happen.
And as we know, solving interesting math problems is a leading indicator of big practical results to come.
>However, I do believe that when a couple problems get solved that massively benefit all of humanity — e.g. a massive cancer breakthrough, etc — a tipping point will be reached and public opinion will reverse and enthusiastically embrace AI, and will accept not only diminished personal meaning but outright technocratic rule.
Is solving cancer worth ceding human meaning and human autonomy to the machines? I haven't seen anyone ask this question but it seems the central issue of this revolution. Personally, I don't think it is.
Perhaps machines will lead to a perfectly homogenous society completely absent of negative valence whatsoever. But if every experience is also devoid of any personal meaning, what's the point? The optimal human state is not one of peak hedonism, or wholly absent of suffering.
> Is solving cancer worth ceding human meaning and human autonomy to the machines? I haven't seen anyone ask this question but it seems the central issue of this revolution. Personally, I don't think it is.
Solving cancer alone? Perhaps not.. Unless you have cancer.. Solving all diseases and aging? Well... I would rather be alive and live like an AI's housecat than dead and free. And I suspect that many people who publicly disagree are just performative, and would actually make the same choice when push comes to shove, and they have to actually choose between "diminishing their autonomy to the machines" and imminent death.
The Christian influence on the world has been undeniably positive. Seeing death and suffering as the enemy and organizing society around minimizing it has been a boon to human progress. But now we come to the dark side of this view. A fear of death so complete that we are willing to sacrifice everything of value to prevent it. Our society has become so divorced from our natural state that death is seen less as an inevitable part of life, and more as a corporeal enemy that must be resisted at all costs. As it turns out, too much of a good thing, whatever it is, leads to absurdities and atrocities.
No, I do not think human autonomy should be sacrificed to defeat death. I personally do not fear death. It's as irrational to fear as it is to fear a deep sleep. I do fear dying painfully. Tragically, we as a society resist alleviating the pain associated with the process of dying (by speeding it up) for the same reasons. If only we could learn to take our principles in moderate doses.
> death and suffering as the enemy and organizing society around minimizing it
> A fear of death so complete that we are willing to sacrifice everything of value to prevent it.
> a corporeal enemy that must be resisted
I am afraid that you know nothing about Christianity. The beliefs and values you describe are antithetical to the Christian life and our worldview. If you've ever just examined the life of St. Teresa of Calcutta, you'd understand how absurd it would be for her to "fear death" or "minimize suffering".
We seek to follow, and imitate, Christ Jesus in his life of suffering, his death and resurrection. We do not resist, or minimize, or fear any of this. To do so, would be quite heretical to us as Christians.
Of all times of the year to bring this up. All Saints Day, celebrating the eternal life of those, named and unnamed, who have preceded us in death. All Souls Day, to pray for all the departed souls who suffer in Purgatory, after death but before their Heavenly reward.
I don't know what religion you are trying to describe, but to me it sounds like atheistic secularism. It is atheism that fears death, and utilitarianism that seeks to minimize suffering. Not Christians. Goodness, gracious.
To understand my point one must separate the metaphysics from the practical effects of the belief system. Christianity represented a step-change towards humanism. This must be considered in the in the era it was founded and compared to the competing ideologies at the time, i.e. paganism and its various death cults. Christianity institutionalized ideals like equality of men, the sanctity of life, charity, self sacrifice, etc. These ideals are the precursors to civilization.
The particular ideology of Christianity was super effective at laying the groundwork for modern civilization. Of course, these ideals have since evolved and have since become some kind of secular ideology. Granted, it was imprecise to attribute a fear of death to Christianity. But the sanctity of life is in practice a close cousin of a fear of death. Modern secularism having no metaphysical alternative has made this fear explicit.
> I suspect that many people who publicly disagree are just performative, and would actually make the same choice when push comes to shove, and they would have to actually choose between "diminishing their autonomy to the machines" and imminent death.
Mathematicians usually care nothing about application of their work. Working on interesting problems is their only motivation. Practical applications are almost always happy accidents.
This goes back to the hope that robots would do the laundry and the dishes and the cleaning up so we could write and play music, create art, and solve mathematical problems.
Instead the AIs are doing all of that leaving humans with only the dishes and the laundry and the cleaning up.
If math is nothing but solving puzzles for fun then I think a lot of people should be very pissed off that they are doing hard labor while being taxed to fund a puzzle hobby group.
Of course I don't believe that math is just fun puzzles. But if it were, then it would deserve to die as a career, AI or not.
As of this comment you have 26 comments out of 206 total on this comment section, more than 10% basically all spreading FUD to try and make other people as miserable and pessimistic as you. I'm not sure what your motivations are but I'm glad we have people like Grant on the other side trying to keep a positive outlook on life and the future, and I hope all you eternal doomers who constantly try to bring others down with you find joy as well.
Whatever doesnt count as maths is just not maths. Its just carrying out instructions to get some "gain".
Other people usually care only about "gain", its their only motivation. Non "gain" results are just happy accidents.
And "gain" (once you have your survival covered) is just an invented abstraction with 0 real meaning. But people try to convince themselfs that it has meaning.
This goes back to the classic story for "kids" about the emperor that has no clothes.
If we play a game of chess and I move the pieces to the final position on the first move and declare victory you might feel that something was missing, even if I'm right.
This is not quite like that but the feeling I get from it is much the same. Mathematicians are first and foremost busy with understanding math, not with 'solving' math though they are solving individual problems within the domain of math. The journey towards that understanding requires specialization and often lots of studying.
To quote Douglas Adams: "If 'metal nose' here is going to give you God's phone number then the philosophical question of whether there is a God becomes meaningless."
It is the journey and the questions that matter as much or more than the answer does.
And with math being a branch of natural philosophy I can see why they would be a tad upset at this shortcut because it strips the collective efforts of a large number of people of their prestige and feeling of time well spent. Imagine your life's work reduced to a short string of bits, and worse, that short string of bits was created by a machine that effectively is still a toddler.
> It is the journey and the questions that matter as much or more than the answer does.
Selfishly, as someone who enjoys programming, I feel the same way about the journey. But let's face it: for everyone else, the outcome is what actually matters. Mathematicians argue that their journey may lead to novel insights, but are those insights really valuable? Are they going to help the LLMs solve more problems? And are we sure that the LLMs can't deliver those same insights?
I think that ties in with the 'who will train the juniors' angle: if the ladder consists of nothing but the top rung because the AI combine stripped away the rest of them then a lot of fields will be looking at zero new entrants. Nobody wants to compete with a machine for their living and sense of self value. I know I don't, and obviously I can't speak for anybody else but society has pretty much programmed people to tie a good chunk of their identity, success in life and general well being to their skills and ability to put bread on the table. You can't just toss that in the bin for 3/4 of the current crop of professionals (I'm seeing the mathematicians as simply the first (and probably not even the first) of many).
I don't know if you have kids or not but I have two kids in high school and keeping them motivated through the AI revolution is a serious challenge and some of their classmates have already all but given up. The next generation down the line is going to grow up with the same kind of attitude towards thinking that you might have towards the skill of map reading. And I think we'll all be poorer because of that, not richer.
Exactly. As a software developer, AI has given me more time to tackle higher-order problems. The actual architecture, optimisation, and user experience.
Mathematicians could:
- Continue working on philosophical aspects of the solution and not bothered by whether the solution is known or not. It is not a movie that gets spoiled when the ending is known.
- Or better, demand from AI labs, how they would like to see AI helping them on philosophical aspects.
…except the machine will be better at these aspects too :D
I find it funny when people suggest "just re-orient from knowledge work X to knowledge work Y, doh!". Not realizing all knowledge work is on the chopping blocks.
This misunderstands mathematics. There are entire branches of the subject that have no practical use. Some things also appeared to be useless for centuries before physicists discovered they actually have an application.
> It is the journey and the questions that matter as much or more than the answer does.
That only makes sense to me when its what someone chooses to spend their time doing. When they expect someone else to pay them for it, its the end result that matters.
Maybe its a fundamental flaw in capitalism or money itself, but we can't expect to be paid for the sheer love of the game. Others will only end up paying us if the expected output is worth it.
Well we have been paying people for the pure pursuit of knowledge for its own sake since the scientific revolution, which is kind of the material base for capitalism, so I don’t think your argument holds much water. Why knowledge and following curiosity facilities general prosperity is maybe an open question but that it does is inarguable.
Capitalism incentivises paying people to pursue more capital, not the putsuit of knowledge.
And to be clear I don't say that as a good thing, it may be a flaw in capitalism, but we don't psy people simply to chase knowledge for the sake of the chase.
The primary value of math has never been about producing "solved problems" (is there any practical value in "solving" NS in itself?). The primary value of mathematics has always been about "machinery for thought", i.e. the abstractiosn and methods that produced the solution.
I think there is a little too much pessimism of the "math is dead" sort. As long as there is a need for humans to think there will be value in doing math.
On one hand I agree. I’d also add that there will be no end of math problems to solve. That some were solved will only lead to new ones.
That said, I think what has mathematicians… upset is probably two things:
1. These are hard problems. Hard enough that solving one could take decades of work. And there’s tons of collaboration involved. Pivoting to another - and making progress - isn’t exactly something you wake up tomorrow and start doing.
2. I think motivations matter to some. And the AI companies doing this aren’t doing it for the betterment of math or even society. They are in an arms race to prove their product is superior and any careers that are damaged collaterally be dammed.
“ if you're mad about your problem being solved, maybe you weren't in it for the right reasons”, politicians/financial advisors/military members/etc… would like a word with you.
Let's just say that The math problem that got solved, I was working on it for many years but some company people used my knowledge my prompts and "solved" it without giving me any credits or money.
Firstly they plagiarised the books and research papers and then they plagiarised the prompts by the mathematicians.
Yes AI can make art and has caused many artists finding work difficult but AI art is always souless and worthless, same thing will be for math it will become souless and worthless because when humans who are experts in their fields invest their ingenuity then art becomes alive but if ordinary people like me will just prompt into the machine then souless things will come out that will be very worthless and disposable.
But the AI companies didn't gatekeep knowledge. They released all their math results.
Unless you mean they're charging money for a product that contains knowledge. But that's not gatekeeping, just like selling a book isn't gatekeeping. Gatekeeping is when a group tries to prevent others from participating in a field or activity.
Selling a book quite literally is gatekeeping, since the idea is that you're prevented from engaging with the work without paying for it. Even with libraries it was society who paid for it in order for the commons to get access, but payment was nevertheless needed.
It just turns out that the Chesterton's gate is useful and people tend to think that people should be paid for their labour, since people kinda need a roof over their heads and food on their table.
It's not gatekeeping unless you're using your own esoteric definition that's different from how everyone else uses it. Words get their meaning from how they're used in the wild, and dictionaries are descriptivist, not prescriptivist. Anyone is allowed to buy the book, so it's not considered gatekeeping, even if some people may not be able to.
If you define any obstacle to an activity as gatekeeping, then literally everything can be considered gatekeeping and the term loses all meaning. Some people can't read, so offering the books for free would still exclude them. If you include an audio book, some people still can't understand the language. And both charging and not charging money for products would simultaneously be gatekeeping under that definition, since not charging places more financial burden on the producer. Not everyone can afford to print books and give them away for free.
> Gatekeeping is when a group tries to prevent others from participating in a field or activity.
And I gave a way in which charging a price does that.
I am open to the idea of being incorrect in this case, in which I apologise for misunderstanding, and concede that I'm missing the nuance but in my defence, I'm not a native speaker.
> Words get their meaning from how they're used in the wild, and dictionaries are descriptivist, not prescriptivist.
But I didn't explain that clearly. What I mean is that definitions are always imprecise because language is imprecise and dictionaries (or people) try to keep definitions reasonably short and simple. Dictionaries are trying to describe what the words really mean in the wild. They aren't the source of that meaning.
For example, if we look up Merriam-Webster's definition of "game (noun)", none of the definitions really work for a game like Solitaire without also including an activity like reading a book.
The two relevant definitions are
1. a physical or mental competition conducted according to rules with the participants in direct opposition to each other
2. activity engaged in for diversion or amusement
(there are a bunch of other definitions as well, like animals you hunt)
The second definition is too broad and the first clearly excludes Solitaire. If you were deciding what a game is based on the dictionary definitions, you'd either think watching TV is a game, or that Solitaire isn't. But that's not the case.
Charging money for products isn't considered gatekeeping. So from a descriptivist perspective, it isn't, even if it seems like it should be, because the word isn't used like that. Banning a group of people from an activity is gatekeeping. If mathematicians said only mathematicians can prove theorems and correct proofs from non-mathematicians won't be accepted, that would be gatekeeping. But they don't do that.
If you want to use a broad definition of gatekeeping that includes virtually all human activity, then the response to any accusation of gatekeeping could be "well, everything is gatekeeping". That road just leads to pointless and confusing conversations.
> But the AI companies didn't gatekeep knowledge. They released all their math results.
There are some important fields of math that were conspicuously missing. In particular, cryptography.
There are obviously good reasons for being more cautious when dealing with cryptography results in math, but I'm not going to believe they released everything.
> Unless you mean they're charging money for a product that contains knowledge.
They have internal models that the public cannot use (at least not yet).
Non-mathematicians talking about this (especially in a cultural battleground like Wikipedia, yuck) will never be productive. Citing it here on HN does everyone a disservice. For those uninitiated, OpenAI used a fundamentally different method (without forcing in the Euler case) and the idea that the proof was plagiarized (other than the completely kosher strategy of using prior art, of course) is a complete fabrication.
In fact, the proof is such a mess, nobody really understands how it works. Which is becoming commomplace with these permutation machines where we can come up with something that passes some tests (e.g., a proof checker), but we have no idea wtf we did to get there, which doesn't really seem to do much to push human understanding forward.
It seems like such a dumb hill to die on, too. OpenAI literally stole the entire Internet (including copyrighted works), and we're arguing about a silly math puzzle.
The plagiarism and copyright stuff is just a smoke screen.
A lot of people are upset because they used to be special, their identities were tied to them being smarter, or having more niche domain knowledge than anyone else. Ai has changed that.
A lot of people are upset that people are praising garbage and outright stolen output, and any attempt to disagree with this praise labels them as a luddite who will be behind on the times and is against progress.
Such a take on "people don't feel special" feels borderline bad-faith. People of science tend to be some of the most humble people as their knowledge to seek the truth constantly leaves them with more answers than questions. It's instead this borderline cult of people praising output that is understandable to them that seems to be the ones with the hubris to try and claim that thinkers will be obsolete.
Nobody capable of a minute of honest introspection believes that. If you shuffled all the backend devs in the world and randomly assigned them a role elsewhere most will do perfectly fine. I began my own career in VFX, moved into compliance and am now working on automotive software - there's no moat around even the most niche domain knowledge, you just need to be prepared to spend time learning it. If I had to roll that into an identity it would be the learning I get to do at every turn in my career. That's what I enjoy but there's absolutely nothing unique or special about it.
Maybe the reason people are upset is simpler? Maybe people with a mortgage and kids to support don't like being told they'll absolutely 100% soon be out on their arse. Even if you don't believe that it's still tiring having to hear the same mindless taunts and vapid bullshit repeated on a daily basis.
According to the article you linked, there is no evidence at all showing OpenAI plagiarized Buckmaster and Alpoge. Buckmaster just speculated that since they used OpenAI's product, it's possible OpenAI looked at their conversation. Which OpenAI flatly denies.
And then your article says:
> On 13 October 2026, Scientific American published an article surveying several mathematicians stating that "the resemblance between the two groups’ methods now seems merely skin-deep."
I’m seeing this perspective expressed a lot lately, but (so far) only online.
Understand that there’s more than one way to prove something, that there’s an art to making something understandable, and that humans tend to take the most understandable paths (to humans.)
Models often don’t do that. But in solving, or claiming to solve, important problems, they nevertheless remove a lot of the excitement and incentive towards working towards a solution humans would naturally find. Plus, a lot of these problems really don’t have any critical applications at the moment. They’re done for the love of the game.
Does that bother you? That your tax dollars pay people who do math out of curiosity?
Would sports teams have as many fans who enjoy their games, if all the humans were replaced by robots? Your team may win, so I'm sure you'll be happy with the outcome, but maybe something got lost?
I for one have always felt inspired when reading about remarkable human achievements. To think that those might be coming to an end, replaced by AI, takes the humanity out of those stories.
How is your argument any different from the classic Luddite argument? Why is doing math different than making textiles? Why does math deserve special protections when other types of workers do not?
There will be human achievement no matter how much automation and robotics we have. There’s an entire universe to explore and colonize. Plus people still want to see other people do things like perform music or play sports.
Well sure, but people do still want to watch videos like 3blue1brown in-depth explanations, and they do still want to learn math for its own sake. People can still do math and derive enjoyment from it.
I'm not against technological advancement. But AI is unlike previous innovations. Soon, every scientific and knowledge-based breakthrough could be made by AI. And we're losing something intangible when that happens.
Think of your average Veritasium video. They know how to tell a story about a scientific breakthrough. It always centers around the human inventors. Take the humans out the story and it's less interesting, relatable, or enjoyable. Also consider: why do HNers hate AI slop? If all that matters is the outcome (getting some point in writing), AI does that. I hate slop because it has lost its human touch. I appreciate a result more when its distilled from human effort, and I'm not alone.
I'm not a mathematician so I have no skin in this particular game. I'm a software engineer though, and we've already gone through this. I can simultaneously love how easy it is to build applications with AI, and miss the days when human talent was valued and celebrated in my field. My job gave me purpose. My work team had comaraderie. A future where we all report to AI managers and we exist just to sign off on what our AI agents do, is dystopian.
Yes, I suspect there will always be human sports teams, musicians, actors, etc. My point was to illustrate that everything is less appealing when you take the humans out of the picture and I don't see why science is different. If outcomes are the only thing that matter then when robots are better at sport than humans shouldn't we should all just watch robots compete?
P.S. Do you really believe humans are going to visit any object further than Mars, let alone actually colonize them? Things would've had to go very wrong on Earth for that to happen, and that future doesn't appeal to me one bit. Call me a luddite if you want. How many people would willingly say goodbye forever to the wonders of Earth so that they can start their family on an inhospitable planet where they'll be indoors for the rest of their life? And why even bother exploring those planets? We can get all the data we need from autonomous spacecraft. Isn't that the outcome that matters?
Many people don't seem to understand that pure mathematics is not a practical applied science, nor is it in the business of inventing things.
Pure maths is much closer to philosophy or art than practical problem solving. Yes, we're extremely lucky that mathematics also happens to be a fantastic formalism for solving practical and scientific problems, by the practical problems are not remotely the subject matter of pure math. Of course, many mathematicians did advance theory in order to solve specific practical problems, but the pursuit of theory for theory's sake is also an important human activity.
Historically, this freedom from practicality has been important. It allows mathematicians to explore purely theoretical issues that have no practical bearing today but that might well have relevance in the future. We don't know. Carving out dedicated resources in society for that activity, though, has proven very beneficial for other sciences.
You have no computer, you have no neural nets, you have no AI, without at least some results from pure maths. Maybe keep that in mind before you crap on mathematics for its lack of immediate practicality. Not all good things in life arise as solutions to concrete and immediate material problems.
Incredibly nasty stuff to serve on the rent-seeking forum. Doubly nasty to levy at people who actually like being alive, like mathematicians. If capitalists had their way we'd all be slitting our wrists on day two of existence
I really don't understand such takes. Extend this to every problem in every profession, which seems to be both the trend and the intent (if still far off), and you vaporise the meaning from a lot of people's lives. Sure, they can find other sources of meaning - assuming having their job automated doesn't leave them constantly scrambling to make a living. This would require major social restructuring that nobody's really talking about.
Many people pursue careers based on the intersection between their interests and what society considers valuable. Being upset when what they chose to spend their lives doing either loses value or changes so much it becomes a wholey different job is understandable, and calling it "rent seeking" is very unfair, in my view.
> and you vaporise the meaning from a lot of people's lives
If the meaning of your life is to obtain a solution to a given problem, then getting the solution would "vaporize the meaning of your life" in the same way as when someone that claims his meaning of life is to raise their children would "lose all meaning of life" when they finally move out and start to successfuly live on their own. Yes, there could be some nostalgia in both cases, but if you are psychologically well-adjusted, the pros would still far outweight the cons, the happiness would outweight the sadness.
I don't think that's the same. Would you let robots raise your kids if they provably did it better than you?
These people knew someone else could solve the problem. Presumably they figured there'd still be meaningful work for them to do - exploring ramifications, new frontiers opened by the solution. Other problems, at worst. Now it all seems far from guaranteed.
I agree about well-adjustedness, but what do you propose these people do to get paid if the number of researchers with grants reduces significantly? Reskill to something that pays less, they like less, and might be automated too? Can you frankly say this wouldn't be a moral blow to anyone, well-adjustedness and all?
I don't think you can so easily call for separating them when so many people grew up in an environment that ties economic value and a respectful place in society so strongly.
> So the question remains: is it about solving the problem for humanity? Solving the problem for yourself? Or getting paid?
Say it's a mix, which I think is most likely. They enjoy the problem-solving, like doing something that feels meaningful to humanity, and obviously need to get paid. Now what?
I feel like we're arguing past each other. My point is, it's hard for me to see lack of empathy towards mathematicians (and other professionals) who stand to be displaced by these developments. I know I shouldn't take internet strangers too seriously but, when I read the comments here, I feel like some people have deep resentment for those mathematicians, portraying them as going into math in bad faith or something, and now fighting to keep their ill-gained positions.
> I personally think they’re enough problems left for humanity to solve.
For sure, whether those displaced will be able to get to work on them - and whether it will be as fulfilling as their previous work - is not at all guaranteed.
"The market doesn't owe you to do fulfilling work" Yes, but it costs you nothing to be sympathetic to the individual humans that have to undergo these changes, which can be all shades of scary and sad.
> Of course I am not denying the brutality for those who are right in the middle of finishing something.
And those who worked on a problem for 5 years, trying dozens of approaches, and weren't close to finishing something? People over-fixate on the specific problem. The big picture narrative here is, in the best case, "the way we're going to do math will be completely different", and in the worst case, "we'll need much fewer mathematicians".
> I am optimistic for those who haven’t started, which the video is referring to.
Perhaps. This comment chain is about the other side, the so-called rent seekers.
Ok I’m a stranger on the internet who tries to genuinely understand.
To that end I’ve read all your comments. I am not sure what you’re proposing or asking people to do?
Are you asking for empathy? I have a lot of respect and empathy for people who dedicated their life to solving complex problems.
At the same time I’m trying to be optimistic by saying not all is lost. Yes people will need to adjust. I’m arguing continual change and adaption have always been part of life.
I'm asking people not to be so unkind to other people grieving the (potential) loss of a significant part of their life. "If you cared so much about the problem, you'd be thrilled when a solution is found; since you're not thrilled you must be in it for selfish reasons and deserve to be displaced." You didn't write it, but the comment I replied to pretty much did.
I agree that there's room for optimism, but the conduct and messaging of the AI labs isn't very inspiring in that regard. The feeling I get from it is "we're going to push forward at any cost and make humane considerations only when we can afford to. Which isn't a lot because we've got to be the first to AGI or others will make it first and do it wrong." People then get pushed to the sidelines, many whose work contributed to the feasibility of LLM capabilities in the first place. Free market and such. But then they get criticized when they're upset about it?
Give them space to deal with it and help them find optimism, or at least, don't judge them.
The big assumption here is that "problems are being solved" in every field affected. Which they are not.
Just as the most basic example: software is not currently being made faster, nor performing better nor at a higher bar of quality. Maybe developers are able to report higher velocity, but this is not leading to faster shipping of software/features. In fact, people seemed to feel software is buggier than ever and companies are doubling down on it and simply adding placeholders of "AI can make mistakes". Unforgivable 10 years ago if we tried that with humans.
If anything, the rent seeking is with people reporting "being more productive than ever" and despite that less real world problems being solved than the previous decade.
Nobody goes into these fields only interested in the final result, they go into it interested both in the challenge and revelations of the process and the triumph and recognition of achieving the final result.
There's no joy to be derived from a completed crossword puzzle if you weren't the one solving it...
> This would require major social restructuring that nobody's really talking about.
There are few concrete proposals, but a lot of people are talking about the need for it.
The reality seems to be that this will extend "to every problem in every profession" within our lifetimes. The only scenario I see where that doesn't happen is global war or other catastrophe stopping progress by essentially destroying civilization as we know it. So we are going to need to figure it out.
Many people don’t even function off this “meaning” you’re talking about. They get it from family and friends and hobbies. It’s a contrived perspective, albeit a useful and good one. But this claim of the world’s problems existing as a means to providing value to someone’s life over actually being solved is kind of an insane perspective if you ask me.
Only those that aren't in a field and see its existence justified for purely instrumental reasons can think its value is merely in its practical output. Personal meaning and fulfillment come in many forms. For mathematicians, part of that value is through solving problems, but it's also partly about the struggle itself, gaining understanding, expanding the frontier of human achievement, being a part of a community that values these things, playing a valuable role in the progress of humankind and making a career out of it. Having all that swept away overnight will lead to an existential crisis for anyone who is on the wrong end of this process.
It's quite bizarre how many people feel so personally affronted at the existence of a rather exclusive intellectual community that they take glee in seeing it decimated overnight. But make no mistake, AI is coming for the things you value as well.
What? Why are we nullifying so many human factors in one stroke? Humans strive to contribute to their community and to be recognized for it. We aren't machines, we have social and financial needs, and enjoy competition. Math being solved would mean part of humanity losing these parts of their lives.
What, in your opinion, is the point in solving these problems if no human is there to witness it? This is like suggesting we have AI watch movies for us and read its summary afterwards. In fact, why do anything anymore?
Yes, much of pure mathematics is "playing with puzzles" to the end of the joy and beauty revealed by a human solving them.
I find it interesting how a mathematician enjoying theory-building or playing with ideas gets recast here as rent-seeking. It sounds much like certain right-wingers complaining that kids these days don't want to work, just stay in university studying useless things at the taxpayer's expense.
This is an awful and really ignorant take. The manner in which the problem is “solved” matters a lot, and these AI solutions are about as poorly-done as possible. That a solution exists closes the door on almost any sort of support for finding another, better one, which is the real problem. If this continues, we wind up with a field with no open problems, no practicing mathematicians, no future mathematicians, and no way to come up with new problems (this latter being much more important than solving existing ones, in the main).
I have trouble understanding how anybody could seriously believe this.
Mathematicians are ecstatic and delighted when major problems are solved by other mathematicians. If you've followed the discussions and read the reactions, you'd know why mathematicians feel differently in this case and why more than a few are upset and feel that they've lost the thing that gave them meaning and joy.
And to put it very simply, I don't want mathematicians to exist just because I want solutions to problems. I want mathematicians to exist because I want to live in a world that has mathematicians, philosophers, writers, painters, thinkers, etc. That is a better world that makes people better.
OpenAI's proofs do not make people better. They do not enrich our lives. And OpenAI was able to produce these proofs because countless generations of human beings sowed the fields of mathematics through countless hours of labor. OpenAI is clear-cutting and sowing them with salt. Nobody should he ecstatic. Everybody should be horrified and outraged.
I think we shouldn't have calculators anymore either. The world was better when we had to calculate everything by hand and a human by hand verified every single addition and subtraction.
Are we supposed to ignore the irony that you typed this on a computer that is millions of times more powerful than the calculators you propose to forfeit?
I'm not sure the world is better if everyone was forced to do TLS handshake math by hand.
The last couple decades of economic development (of the first world at least) was in a large part due to the efficiency gains by not having people do math by hand. The world will definitely not be better if you just blew up all the computing tech since calculators were invented.
Huh?? Nobody enters mathematics because "We gotta get this Collatz conjecture solved already!", you enter it because you love the process of arriving at the solution.
It's like saying "If your goal is reaching the top of Everest, you should be ecstatic they built a train line that brings you right up to the peak!"
I find it overly harsh too. I think the reaction is much more about the devaluation of innate ability, and skills / knowledge built over a lifetime. If another mathematician had solved it then you can refocus on another problem and get another chance. Now that an LLM has done it it’s very unlikely you’ll ever solve another open problem.
I'm sympathetic to the mathematicians and don't like what AI is doing. Every other profession that relies on knowledge or thinking should be watching the mathematics community as a portent of the storm to come. OpenAI has extensively thought about and planned their disruption and chose mathematics to start with for a reason - small community, verifiable to some extent, can be used to improve model training, not seen positively by many average people etc. The AI companies are going to come for every field one by one.
AI solve my problem where I have to hand code all the time. I'm happier than ever. Math's analogy is they now get to find problems instead of solving them, then get LLM's to solve them or solve them together. I've been saying this, numbers go up, and LLM makes the amount of problems to solve go up, not less.
How is that any different than another kind of automation?
AI will make mathematics so much more approachable, comprehensible, and applicable as more problems gets solved. If the costs is a handful of PhDs tenure track, so be it. Academics didn’t much to seem to mind when that happens to blue collar workers.
Nothing stopping anyone from studying mathematics here.
I keep hearing these “AI will make this” and “AI will become that”. Boosters are always making these claims for years now, but whenever AI becomes more powerful everything just sucks more.
I don’t buy these claims anymore, and haven‘t been for a long time. I think you [as in you boosters; not you specifically] are full of shit. I don‘t think you know what AI will become, you just dream up some scenario where everything becomes better by some magic, but it won’t. It will become worse. People loose their jobs, people loose their tenures, and instead we get just more and more slop, more and more span, energy becomes more expensive, our planet becomes more polluted, our internet becomes more polluted. Our servers become overrun by bot traffic, our gaming machines become too expensive, etc. etc.
I just want you to stop making things worse. I just want you to stop training more AI. It sucks, I hate it, and I want it gone.
AI has already made mathematics better in the sense that it has greatly advanced what we know to be true (theorems).
The only way that it hasn't made mathematics better is in the sense of human mathematicians' career prospects -- and in this respect, it is identical to other forms of automation that the world, and especially computer programmers like us, have participated in in the past without complaint.
It's "worse for humans" in exactly the same way that first the Industrial Revolution and later computer programming made things "worse for humans", but the post you're referring to only notices that it's "worse" when they are the victim.
I agree with this actually. All of these things were good for some and bad for some, and these groups overlapped. All were good for (most) humans-as-consumers, and bad for (some) humans-as-producers, and the IR was also bad for horses.
AI helps me learn math now, what are you talking about??
I don’t waste time on unfamiliar notation, it provides me with context, suggests things I wouldn’t have thought of. And connects it to fields I wouldn’t have thought of.
We have personal tutors with PhD level knowledge for basically free if you know the questions to ask.
> AI has destroyed a major source of "life's meaning" for many people who pursued mathematics.
I studied mathematics and don't agree with this at all, for several reasons. For one the entire point of maths is that it describes a formal system in which one can 'shut up and calculate'. Mechanizing maths goes back to Leibniz and Hilbert. Nobody should surprised that the big formalism with explicit rules you invented is the first thing to yield to automation, that's why it exists.
Secondly research, including maths for a long time has been a collaboration of people, institutions, machines and processes, even maths does not consist of Faustian heroes in caves having revelations.
And thirdly just because a machine produces a 500 page proof doesn't mean your job is done. Science produces knowledge. Knowledge is information made legible to understanding by people. So there will be endless work for humans to go over machine proofs and turn it into something we understand. Just like chess computers ultimately expanded human chess.
> So there will be endless work for humans to go over machine proofs and turn it into something we understand
I'm not convinced humans will be better at this than LLMs. Frontier models are quite good at handling even deliberately lazy/ambiguous eli5 prompts on complex topics IME.
>I'm not convinced humans will be better at this than LLMs.
they don't need to be. Any scientist is already surrounded by tools that are better than they are at anything. A scientist from 200 years ago would have the same existential shock if they see how a modern scientists works.
But that's to misunderstand what science is for, which is to expand human knowledge. And a tool by definition can only ever change how you do this, not that you do it because you understanding it is the point. When people say learning to program is now useless, what they really mean is it might not make them any money, or using the AI is faster as an instrument. But if you care about programming itself, about you understanding programming, nothing has changed, it never can. And the smartest AI in the world can always assist you, but only that.
> But that's to misunderstand what science is for, which is to expand human knowledge
I agree ideologically and aspirationally but I don't believe it's the economic reality of how and why most science is actually funded (and I think you agree based on your comment about not making any money).
> But if you care about programming itself
I'm...not so sure I do any more? At least, not any more than I care about using Java over Python, or C++ over Java, or C over C++, or ASM over C, or machine code over ASM, or an abacus over machine code.
> nothing has changed, it never can
We now have programs that can write any program 100x faster and better than even the best humans and solve the hardest math problems known to humankind that have stumped the greatest minds the planet could produce for decades. That, to me, is a change with profound implications for understanding the nature of programming.
> Imagine waking up one morning to find that an alien technology has solved the problem you had dedicated your life to
But it could be another human that did that, and the impact would be no different.
As a software engineer this is part of my life, and always has been. I may have been working on a software product for the last 3 years, and suddenly one morning I find out that another company has released a similar product, and selling it cheaper, now the value of my work is slashed by 90%. I may even have to drop my project and find something else to work on. This is a normal part of life.
In research, there is always the same risk, that some adjacent field will completely change your field overnight due to some breakthrough.
Still, I have sympathy for the people who are grieving right now.
With the software industry, you kind of know what you’re signing up for, so you have some emotional preparation. However, this might be one of the very first truly disruptive innovations many mathematicians have ever seen in their fields in their lifetimes.
Should they have better prepared emotionally for a black swan event? I’d argue that the answer is no, but even if the answer were yes, the grief that many are experiencing is still worthy of sympathy.
I am confused why this is considered a black swan event. Does AI take the joy out of mathematics research? Yes. But universities are not laying off mathematicians just because OpenAI has released some proofs. The proofs were never the point of mathematics, it is the understanding behind the proofs, and applying that understanding to solve real world problems.
Now consider a computer science major in college who knows that he won't get a job when he graduates. Consider fresh graduates who thought they would have lucrative jobs but had to take up jobs as Uber drivers. To them AI is a black swan event. That's who I have sympathy for.
Right now mathematicians are freaking out because they think the AI will make them useless and they will have to go find real job with real usefulness.
But honestly mathematicians have been totally useless long before the first AI, so generally nothing have changed for them.
The entire cryptographic underpinning of the Internet is based on mathematics that, when I learned it as an undergraduate in the 1980's, was considered just an impractical curiosity. Non-Euclidean geometry became special relativity. Math underpins all science - "totally useless" phooey.
Give me an argument for not having a grim outlook given current AI trajectories paired with a political apparatus incapable of action. At least in the US.
Putin's getting old. If he dies before we hit recursive self-improvement, there's a chance some maniac gets access to the nukes and saves 4 billion of us (global nuclear war only kills about half of humanity).
> As a software engineer this is part of my life, and always has been. I may have been working on a software product for the last 3 years, and suddenly one morning I find out that another company has released a similar product, and selling it cheaper, now the value of my work is slashed by 90%. I may even have to drop my project and find something else to work on. This is a normal part of life.
The cause of what you're describing here, and the cause of the problems with AI are the same: it's capitalism, closed competition and businesses deciding what happens.
In an alternate society built around providing the best solutions for everyone, instead of being built around businesses making as much money for themselves as possible, your organisation would have been working alongside the other company to share insights into solving the same problem for everyone.
Same goes for AI: all the existential downsides of AI pretty much all depend on businesses being the main driver of who uses AI and when. If we only let individuals choose when to use AI, then they're not going to choose to automate themselves out of a job they need, or give up something they actually get personal value and joy from.
The egos of these mathematicians is not what is important here, and they should get over themselves. The goals and values should be about advancing mathematics and, by proxy, humanity. It’s not about them.
That said, change is difficult for most. Let’s give them grace and have patience as they work through the stages of grief. Once they come to accept this new reality, let’s hope they can learn to embrace this new technology to continue the work of advancing the frontier.
> Imagine waking up one morning to find that an alien technology has solved the problem you had dedicated your life to
That seems like a glass is half empty attitude.
For one, the problem is solved. You should be glad. That's what you wanted...
Typically every solved problem opens more doors than it shuts.
We're pretty far from knowing it all.
It's like someone saying the field of Math died when we got calculators and computers and spreadsheets to make it easier to do calculations.
Now you can use AI to help you.
Sure, if you refuse to use it, then you're screwed. That's a you choice. Not inevitable.
The only things in life that are certain is change and death.
Not any different than some Amish person being annoyed that s/he can't contribute to the field of Math because it's too hard to do all the calculations by hand on paper...
You can spend your whole life crying that one day we'll all die, or you can enjoy the time you have.
The glass is a whole lot less than half empty. The pessimistic attitude is a rational response to our environment.
The only way change this situation so that it comes out positive is to enjoy being a slave, but hey thats a you choice.
>Typically every solved problem opens more doors than it shuts.
>We're pretty far from knowing it all.
Open doors to whom? AI or mankind? We have never been farther from knowing it all. The information knowable by people will become a sliver of the total relevant information in the world.
>It's like someone saying the field of Math died when we got calculators and computers and spreadsheets to make it easier to do calculations.
In that instance, the busywork was automated and challenging work remained. What we are talking about here is the reverse. It's the automation of all of the cerebral thinking.
Imagine that all of the cerebral and beautiful aspects of math were automated first, but for some reason humans were required to specialize into number crunching instead. Now open your eyes.
>Not any different than some Amish person being annoyed that s/he can't contribute to the field of Math because it's too hard to do all the calculations by hand on paper...
The thing about amish people is that they own their own land and grow their own food and are independent within a governmental system that respects their property rights. The rest of us renters and feeders operate within industrial society-work or die.
The disposition amish people have towards technology has been ahead of the curve.
>You can spend your whole life crying that one day we'll all die, or you can enjoy the time you have.
I would also encourage my peers to enjoy what little time they have left. What we are witnessing is the end of history, and I am honored to experience it. However I get the impression your nature is to go out with a wimper.
The whole point of current AI is to replace ALL human contributions, in every field. Collaborating with humans is not a consideration, as shown by OpenAI leaving practicing mathematicians completely out of their process.
If you find your source of meaning in slowing down understanding and knowledge, you were never it in for the mathematics and some questionable motives. Find the solution within.
" As a scientist, I don't want to end up as a laboratory assistant to an AI."
The idea is, that the AI is your assistant.
Apart from that, I would also say get over yourself. We all have to. Arcane computer knowledge I was proud of having, that made me feel special can now be replicated by anyone with access to a LLM.
I still know how to build things and that is what I am doing. Just faster than ever before.
That's literally the 7.3k Upvoted top comment and I also think Grant didn't chew this one through appropriately.
I was kinda offended at 17:10, where OpenAI paper dumping proofs "takes all the wind of [mathematicians] sails". But it's so much more than that.
He did go more into it at 30:00, where he accepts that something is lost here. Or as Terence Tao said, the "age of heroes" in mathematics is has come to an end. I think Grant's points on funding and maths having a strong future are true. But I still think the dehumanizing part wasn't properly honored. But then again, this is supposed to be positive push into the future, so dwelling on it is not something Grant wanted to do.
I don't get it. I have a research degree in physics, and if AI made major progress towards the big open questions (e.g. nature of dark matter) or managed to come up with a much cheaper way (or any way at all) to test a theory of quantum gravity, I'd be super happy. At the moment the research frontier in high energy physics looks pretty bleak in that it appears like the scale of construction and energies required are too high to reasonably achieve many more big breakthroughs in my lifetime. What makes mathematics so special that the entire field is distressed when their big open questions get resolved?
I think math is a craft unlike other areas of science.
Mathematics produces concepts and produces proofs of theorems. Up until now, the two things things fed into each other - you needed the concepts for the theorems and the theorems for the concepts. Now you can just prove theories without caring about the production of ideas.
Consider also, math produces the intellectual "tooling" for science in general. As I understand it, the important of grand unified comes because physics want an unified abstract conception of physical laws and thus a grand unified theory aims to be a unified mathematical understanding of the world.
I mean, as a though experiment, suppose a company produced a machine that simply predicted events in the future without giving any explanation of why. It didn't tell physicists whether any of their ideas were true or false, it simply answered question like "will this building fall down", "what will the spectrum of this star be", etc. It gave all the information of physics but discarded laws - physicists might find this a bit unsatisfying, especially if the machine was going to put them out of a job.
Yes, imagine when cancer becomes a solved problem, and oncologists react online by lamenting the end of their life's work. They'd be viciously scorned and ridiculed.
A lot of people derive their worth from something external. AI brings the emptiness of that worth into sharp relief, but it was always empty. It used to be easier to ignore, though.
The obvious retort is "that's cold comfort to people losing their livelihoods!" But that's not the discussion, and (at least at this point) we're not at risk of mathematicians going hungry. It is obvious that AI will have a profound impact on what mathematicians do. It is not obvious that we won't need them anymore.
Back when CAD programs were going mainstream in companies in the 70's and 80's, civil/elec/mech engineers were in an uproar because they thought that CAD was going to replace engineers.
What ended up happening was that draftmen became a profession.
Not saying that we stick our heads in the sand and say AI will just generate jobs, because the cost there will most likely outweigh the benefits in the grand scheme, but there is definitely a world where mathematicians hand down direction to grad students utilizing such tools for research or some other framework that just doesn't resemble what we think of today.
It is not the same comparison. CAD produces exact same drawings as handwritten ones. It purely makes engineers more effective. It just took the menial side of the work. You still had to care about every single detail and tolerance. You still followed the same way of manufacturing things. You still do the smallest parts of it. Just like word processing vs handwriting a book / letter. You still have to type every single letter. You still think every sentence.
AI is the complete opposite. It takes away the thinking part. When people use AI, they tend to offload a lot of thinking part to it as well. I use it because company policy. But if you care about every single if case and every single variable name, writing by hand is faster unlike CAD.
History repeats itself. Now it’s the moment of weaving machines. AI is the new weaving machine. It needs couple guys for the maintenance. The other 198 guys were freed from the hard work. It’s not the CAD moment.
Before the industrial revolution weavers worked from home in a relatively peaceful environment, set their own hours, and made a respectable living.
After the industrial revolution they worked 14 hour days in a thunderously loud textile mill, so full of airborne lint that you could hardly see. The pace of their work was set by machine, which frequently caused serious injuries, and their wages often weren't enough to live on.
At the time of Munich Olympics German workers did occasionally electronics assembly at home. Or some electromechanical components like switches, relays, cabling, you name it. Pay per piece, not hourly rate. Simple hardware in today’s terms with generous pay. Later it was automated and today completely outsourced. Cycle seen in so many industries.
I can repeat myself: history repeats often enough.
You'll be surprised to learn that the opposite is true today (as of 2015 when I last worked in a licensed engineer capacity). CAD has near eliminated draftsmen, similar to how automated testing has eliminated QA. Engineers are performing all of analysis, design and drafting today. Similar to how programmers are responsible for testing.
I've never quite understood this sense of meaning. The goal could never have been to see these problems solved or to further understand how the universe may work. The goal was the chase itself, or the sense of pride for being the one to crack the answer.
Also its worth noting this technology isn't alien. I don't personally want us to invent AI, AGI, ASI, etc but they aren't alien - humans are very much making the choice to invent these things here on earth.
That's not what people mean by alien. It means that we can't rely on human intuition to predict how they will behave. Their intelligence is not like ours.
That sounds more like a religion than science. Why not be happy that there is a new technology that helps solve (presumably) important problems that can have positive effects?
Wonder if this is how G.H. Hardy felt reading Ramanujan's "proofs". I figure the real work begins now, the fact that a machine "showed the way" may become irrelevant 10 years from now.
I fear the same thing will happen as what I see in software developement. The volume of proofs that can be generated by anyone will be so big that it will overwhelm the system. Currently I really don't have the time anymore to check if all the bright results in computing projects make any sense.
And not only in software developement. In general, I see preprint servers getting overwhelmed by article submissions, AI generated articles. I don't recall a wave of CAD generation in the past.
"My friends in cancer research are terrified they'll wake up one morning to find out that an AI cured cancer."
But more seriously, this was an inevitability for math, no? The brain has an upper limit on how many concepts it can recall, recombine, and synthesize. We're all finding out now what happens when every single concept in math can be perfectly held in memory.
> Imagine waking up one morning to find that an alien technology has solved the problem you had dedicated your life to (and many more to boot.)
I would be thrilled! My only worry would be how to sustain myself financially if my expertise is no longer needed - worries like this I can definitely understand. But the simple fact that the problems I care about are getting solved? Awesome, more of that please!
You'd be ecstatic until you realise "oh damn, how will I get enough money to eat?"
Sure, there are probably some mathematicians that are sad that robots can do all the proofs and such for them, but it seems to me that most of them probably would be happy with the robots helping to solve problems if not for the little issues that mathematics is their profession and in the current state of things, they need to eat and have a place to live.
And that is the actual problem. Let's just remember, the Luddites were not anti-technology, they were against the technology being owned by a small elite that could use it to take away their livelihoods. They were against the capitalists essentially throwing them into the ditch to starve, and we're seeing echoes of that in the current AI discussion and the reactions of mathematicians, programmers, artists, etc. Back in the 1800s it was physical and artisan manufacturing labour in danger, and now it's mental labour.
Maybe I am, but I'd argue that in that case I'm depicting literally all professions as rent-seeking, as people really want to protect their income and livelihoods from infringement that would endanger them. And at that point it's probably not useful to talk about it as rent-seeking.
If AI can do literally any job more efficiently than a human, then there's no need for human labour anymore and at least to me that seems that unless we get a radical transformation of our political economy, that will not be allowed to happen. You can't just put literally everyone out of a job, capitalism just wouldn't be able to cope with it and it'd implode, most probably because of the inevitable backlash that would occur for to no one being able to afford the basic necessities of life. It would be orders of magnitude bigger than either the French or Russian revolutions.
I'm no mathematician, but if being concerned about being able to keep my employment to be able to feed myself makes me a rent-seeker, then I will wear that on my sleeve proudly, crossing my heart, hoping to die. The misery of the alternative is too great to fathom.
"Rent-Seeking" is trying to capture eternally recurring payment for something you did or acquired one time.
Mathematicians acquired their skills over long hours of study, but weren't asking to be paid just to sit around passively being smart, but to keep working on new results. It is the lost opportunity to do work they are lamenting, not the lost opportunity to sit on their laurels. So no, it doesn't sound like rent-seeking.
> math has destroyed a major source of “life’s meaning”
YOU ARE NOT YOUR WORK! My god people! The meaning you get from life shouldn’t be reduced entirely to the job you do. Mathematician, or programmer, or pilot, or ship captain, or janitor or otherwise.
I already had to learn this, but the sooner you decouple your professional life from “what makes you… you” the better.
Meaning in life comes from contributing to something larger than yourself. Work is one way but there are others. Just be careful when you dismiss work that you don't end up leading a meaningless life.
Doesn't bode well for all of us meatbags, actually. AI might now be better mathematicians (if that's even true for now). But if progress continues, it might be a better <your job here>, and even worse, wife, husband, parents. Black mirror territory.
Another pop culture reference: in the first book of the "The Three-Body Problem" trilogy by Liux Cixin, physicists get depressed by having their field of work blocked.
Pretty much the inverse situation, but also the same situation - having your field of expertise completely disrupted. Anyone would be troubled.
We live in a time where there isn't enough focus on giving life meaning. Without meaning, it is too easy to become cynical. Some of the happiest people I know believe that the greatest source of meaning is serving others. Many of those at the forefront of research believe there work, while individual, serves all of humanity.
I previously tried to (unsuccessfully) find out, with the help of AI, a form of mathematics that allows me integrate, or compute differential equations with a new representation of numbers. That will allows us to compute non elementary integrals, or diff. equations very easy with pen and paper.
The AI says that is impossible, until a human mathematician make the discovery (the AI by itself won't do it by now)
I actually remember that in an old interview (that I can't find sorry) Grant Sanderson said he moved in to YouTube because he thought it was a more promising career than being mathematician, it's interesting to see his opinion change.
Hmm, that seems like a pretty cynical point to make. He still deeply is in the field of mathematics, as a math educator. He even makes this exact point in this video, that communicating math is still a hard and respectable part of the profession.
As a math educator doing what you love you requires an audience.
Its kind of in Grant's incentives to push the interest for mathematics, because without an audience he won't be able to keep doing what he loves.
Like, my old uni has a history department, and had an Egyptian history teacher. This was at some point deemed a pointless use of resources because there was no role in society except for teacher of the same subject after that, and the classes shrunk, and she ended up getting offered a role in admin. She was not happy in that role.
I remember a post in... Reddit I think it was? where I commented on an early video discussion that he should teach online full time, because that kind of intuitive education was sorely needed. He actually answered the comment, along the lines of "that would be cool but I already have my hands full in $UNIVERSITY".
I think it was relatively soon after that interaction that he started doing youtube full time. I've always wanted to think I made a teeny tiny contribution to move the needle there :)
Yeah. All due respect to Grant Sanderson, he is both great scientist and great entrepreneur, but getting an entry-career advice from a multi-millionaire is probably not quite the best idea out of all ideas in a popular discourse. Especially if the field in question was famous for producing posts discouraging people from going all-in in it, for many many years even before AI craze.
If 3blue1brown instead made programming videos, and said "There's never been a better time to go into computer science" ... well, I just wouldn't believe them.
It feels like it's meant as career advice though. I have no idea what advice I would give to a teenager right now, but as a math PhD - math would not be on the shortlist, sadly.
I am an ex-mathematician who went into industry, I would say apart from CompSci/ML and physics, it was one of the most sought-after PhDs you could have (across tech and finance) - when I was entering the job market 10 years ago at least. No regrets.
Yeah, but how many of those mathematicians still do math?
It's like engineers in post-Communist European countries, sure there were tons of graduates, but 80% of them were doing something else than the thing they graduated in.
That's not what you said though - you said it was a bad career choice. I'm saying it was a good one, even if you didn't end up directly doing a lot of high-level math.
> That's not what you said though - you said it was a bad career choice.
Going through forced detours in life doesn't make it a "good choice".
The good choices are the ones where people finish their studies/apprenticeships and then immediately work in their direct field. For example a law student becoming a lawyer.
It might just not matter what Tao and everyone of them thinks if the people in charge of the budget think otherwise.
If we don't come to a global agreement (of course only the top 10 gdp countries, lets ignore all the 3th world which we done for ages anyway) on how to create/spend money for this type of things, we will get in problems.
And even if the winners of this (ai companies/hyperscalers) will start 'gifting' universitys and budgets, thats not the solution.
There are quite a few problems with this video, IMO:
- Grant is a highly respected and popular YouTuber. He has a strong network, personal connections, access, and his income comes from an audience, not from output he’s measured on. He's perfectly positioned in this AI revolution to end up near the top of whatever human pile gets constructed, so he will not have the kinds of fears and anxieties that most people do.
- AI RSI is being actively developed and is likely to arrive within 1-2 years. I wouldn't consider this a fringe scenario; it's the main bet. Even if models stay weaker at theory building than humans, organizations will spin up 100k agents and the fire-hose of generated ideas will probably compound far faster than anyone can keep up.
- His remaining arguments are basically training people to problem-solve, and joy. For the next few years, I can see his particular niche doing quite well as infotainment, and he will probably make a lot of money. However, I don't really see people being able to join and partake in his industry 10-20 years from now. Also, if we project a realistic and grounded understanding of our current world onto the next couple of decades, what would give anyone the idea that political and economic systems would have any incentive to train people to problem-solve if AI becomes the real work-horse? Teaching will likely be defunded and turned into a consumption good (which it arguably already is becoming with these YouTube channels.)
- So, for me his entire argument boils down to... joy?
Others have already commented that this feels like unprincipled optimism, and I agree. I also think that because this is something made to generate revenue through a social media platform, it's inherently performative and on-brand. His incentives pull toward keeping his audience happy.
Unfortunately, outcomes follow incentives, not optimism. If our economy comes to rely on RSI-enabled AI, most people will simply have no place in any industry it touches.
>If our economy comes to rely on RSI-enabled AI, most people will simply have no place in any industry it touches.
Then there will be no economy. If anything, if we reach this level of economic automation, more people will have to find ways to occupy themselves and sparking joy through math might be the best way to go about it for some.
An economy can keep running even if most people are cut out of it. Production would just reorient to who owns capital, the state, and other AI systems buying from each other.
But, if I get the insinuation, this would still require a huge social change to absorb once broad consumer demand falls off.
As for pursuing math for fun: that would turn most disciplines into something akin to speedrunning, chess, or mountaineering. People would add constraints to make it harder for themselves and compete against each other, and that does motivate some - but not all. A lot of people want to be "on the frontier." If discovery gets automated, the remaining frontier may be physical, actually going places no one has been, and that might pull those people toward space as it opens up.
It can easily reorient itself (and arguably, already has) to serving the demand of a small minority of asset owners rather than the majority of people. E.g. people building luxury yachts and working to maintain them, working in luxury restaurants, maintaining luxury gardens etc. instead of working in roles that improve the lives of the majority.
Because most people are working on things that improve the lives of the asset-owning minority and not of the majority, the standard of living of the majority is not improved, they have to work more for less.
How many high-paying jobs today actually do anything that benefits the 'common man'?
>How many high-paying jobs today actually do anything that benefits the 'common man'?
I agree there's a lot of inequality and ridiculous pointless jobs, but the average person (in the developed world) still has access to a cornucopia of goods and services which they purchase.
Luxury items burn well. So your take may be true in a mathematical model of capitalism, it's at most a spherical cow in reality where people do like to not starve to death.
So unless there is a change towards UBI in your take (which is still not an all around solution. Many people only fit properly in a society because they are occupied 8 hours a day with something), that will probably result in the biggest revolution ever seen.
And there is not enough high walls to save the rich from that.
> Production would just reorient to who owns capital, the state, and other AI systems buying from each other.
Until those who don't own capital get upset and put the whole thing on fire.
But I don't think this video was meant to cover this case, and in the more pessimistic predictions you are not better with any other profession either. Given his assumptions I think it is an absolutely fair take. If AI becomes better in all 4 areas of math he lists, then private funding may decrease - BUT if there is ever any need for human problem solving skills, academia will not break down and this has always been the majority where mathematicians are employed/financed from.
And if this latter assumption breaks, we are in far greater trouble than whatever you chosen as a career and society will become unrecognizable to today's.
>An economy can keep running even if most people are cut out of it. Production would just reorient to who owns capital, the state, and other AI systems buying from each other.
it's comments like this that make me wish ecology (and trophic chains) was taught in school. It teaches a valuable lessons on systems, energy flows, consumers and producers.
We already had large societies that worked in a similar way during feudalism, but economies still relied on human labor. Today, there are countries where the majority of wealth is not reliant on citizens producing/consuming anything: Qatar, Kuwait, and the UAE primarily sell resources to other states.
No one knows exactly what happens if you scale that up to the entire planet, but my view: the owners will be the ones who trade because of the resources available on their territory - or technology they own. You get a few powerful rentier states, where citizens get stuff for free so they don't revolt. Everyone outside of those states becomes part of a stagnant periphery.
Some form of AI RSI is likely, but why would you expect the improvement at each level to stay proportional the level itself (which is required for exponential improvement), or even why would the rate of improvement stay above a particular constant (required for linear growth)?
To me the most likely scenario is RSI with diminishing returns, as the models get closer to the limits of the general approach to AI that they embody. The decreasing rate of improvement might look like a log curve, or even an horizontal asymptote. Not that scary.
That's possible, but it'd still probably hit those limits faster than any person or team could. Then maybe there'd be human-led work to find some kind of breakthrough that unlocks research up to the next plateau.
At some point though, I'd assume the AI would start finding breakthroughs itself.
I have a hard time coming up with a definition of RSI where it matters at all or where we haven't already reached it. It feels like compute and training data are far bigger bottlenecks than researchers. My thinking is it's just the next buzzword for these companies after claiming victory over AGI.
First, "cognitive labor" is a form of labor - it's different vs. creative work, even though both use your mind. If your math theorem can be written up in partnership with an LLM, wow! You can be done with that, and go do other great work. Cognitive labor is a form of labor. Let's talk about physical labor and leverage to understand how removing labor translates to time. On your farm you buy a tractor to replace your backhoe. If it is a hobby farm you get in the tractor and you're done super fast. Or, you can take that tractor, buy a bigger farm, and spend the same amount of time you'd have spent backhoeing, but in a far more leveraged way. You can trade removed labor for time in a way that suits you.
Second; the joyful moments we get from finding generalizable abstractions and nice solutions are an adaptation. Humans can climb infinitely high conceptual hierarchies - we'll never stop climbing, using the previous ones as tools to find the next. As we do, we gain joy with each discovery because. We get so much done with brains that run on 20 watts - are we tuned to receive a neurochemical reward for finding cognitive efficiency? If AI means more concepts are discovered the tower gets taller - and we find those joyful moments more often. If there are infinite moments to be found, why not go as fast as possible!
Third; everyone else is doing it, it's a baseline skill. Knowing how to work without AI is like knowing how to ride a horse. Useful and fun! Bedsides - only 150ish years ago horses were the only viable transport. Cars were new; toys for the rich. But cars got so good so fast that we eventually reconfigured whole cities. Your homework is to consider why and how horses got disrupted.
New divisions are emerging in the lump of roles humans had at work. AI takes away roles from your job and lets us do more with less. That's identical to every mechanization before it. It's killing some roles that make up your work, even as it creates new ones.
There's so much to be excited about. Fear is a rational response to change. But so is hope :)
> AI takes away work and lets us do more with less - just like every mechanization that came before!
No, it's not the same as mechanization. The fundamental difference, and why I find it illogical to argue either for "AI will open up tons of new work avenues" or "AI will kill all jobs" is that it all hinges on whether AI "caps out" at an intelligence level below humans (in at least some domains/capabilities), or if it is able to surpass human intelligence at all levels.
If the former is true, then yes, there will be a lot for humans to do. If the latter is true, then no, there will be no reasonable cognitive role for humans to play (beyond perhaps for some legal, "nostalgic" reasons or what not). So whether one decides to be optimistic or pessimistic really depends on if you think AI will stay at a level below humans. I really don't know, so I'm not "taking sides" in this debate.
I think one form of cognitive labor will remain: What do we actually want to do/build. And this is simply because AI does not know our internal world. Maybe in a few years with some kind of BCI that is extremely good. But I don't see it happening at least for a few years.
> A good precedent is mechanized agriculture. When machines effectively replaced most humans in agriculture, unemployment did not rise to 90%.
I don't consider this a good precedent to the AI situation at all.
When this happened, humans went off and started doing what we now consider "knowledge work" (well, after a brief stint in factory work, where they also got displaced by automation). They escaped massive unemployment by being smarter than the tractors and mechanical looms. But how do they escape AI job loss when AI becomes smarter than the average human? or smarter than the smartest human?
In prior displacements humans moved up the stack. There is no longer room for them at higher levels of the stack if AI beats them at cognitive labor.
> Yes but what about all the horses replaced by machines?
The point is that people, like horses, can do other things. Humans don't even have to be better than robots at anything. It's the principle of comparative advantage.
> The point is that people, like horses, can do other things.
...like what? If we start with the assumption that AI can broadly replace humans in knowledge jobs, what industries are absorbing tens of millions of humans for labor?
I see this as a categorical difference. The difference between AI and agricultural mechanization is that AI is highly heterogeneous. During the mechanization of agriculture that you talk about (which also happened over generations), there were alternative industries to move to. What happens when AI is competing in the majority of industries? Are there going to be 10 million new plumbers?
And this is why we must ensure that the AIs get aligned towards humanity and crucially that they don't get aligned towards capital, which seems to be the current trajectory.
There's a better chance that a humanity-aligned AI would make sure that humans have something to do and keep us alive versus a capital-aligned one. At the same time, if AI would be the deathblow to capitalism, that'd be very, _very_ ironic.
Of course, and then AI will give you generic canned things to build. It cannot (yet) read minds. I don't understand what you wanted to make clear to me with this.
Sorry i wasn't clearer. My point is that some percent or those decisions are already outsourced to ai. When it makes decisions while carrying out work, or even in the choices and ideas it presents to us, it is shaping and deciding what gets built. Algorithms on tiktok and YouTube already decide what we watch. Probably most human watch hours in a day are decided by algorithms already.
> ...hinges on whether AI "caps out" at an intelligence level below humans (in at least some domains/capabilities), or if it is able to surpass human intelligence at all levels.
I agree with you, just wondering your thought on how we will know the latter has come true? As I understand it, you're describing ASI, not AGI. The way I personally define AGI, we are already there.
On one hand it is hard to fathom not being the most intelligent thing around.
On the other hand, if we are going to survive as a species for a long time it probably depends on us learning how to not be the most intelligent thing around.
Even if it leads to our demise, I don’t think willfully holding ourselves back is the way forward
Yeah, honestly I am worried about "the psychopaths who walk among us" who basically argue "Yeah, we may end up building SkyNet, but tough shit, can't stop progress!"
It's certainly possible that "the special sauce" that provides human consciousness and sentience (that I believe is not there for LLM-based AIs) provides some key ingredient to some forms of intelligence (particularly when it comes to originally) which LLMs would not be able to duplicate.
For example, much has been recently discussed about how OpenAI's math results, as impressive as they are, remained within "the convex hull" of existing math literature. Thus, some have argued that the way LLMs work will keep them squarely within this convex hull, and also there seem to be clear examples from human history where humans came up with breakthroughs that were outside the convex hull of ideas that existed at that time.
There has been a lot of recent debate, both for and against, this idea that current AI approaches are limited to this convex hull. So I'm not going to try to convince you one way or the other, but I do think it is at least a plausible explanation of how/why current approaches end up hitting a wall.
I'll also show my bias which is to say I certainly hope they hit a wall, because I don't understand how anyone can think that humans won't be truly and completely fucked if AI ends up far surpassing human intelligence.
the convex hull argument has recently been under scrutiny as well.
some proofs of famous conjectures (for example unique games conjecture) have been described as creating new, insane, almost alien ideas. Scott aaronson has a blog post on this.
Edit: OK, I found his rationale in the comment section, and I don't find it particularly convincing:
> (1) Einstein and Gödel and Gauss and Shakespeare “merely filled out some points in the convex hulls” of everything that came before them, if you take an expansive enough view of what those convex hulls actually were. What a pathetic piece of cope.
> (2) Dana tells me she now mostly understands the proof of the UGC, and is amazed by the new ideas in it, and wants to give talks about it soon. So, maybe people can listen to that and then lecture her on how it’s “just a point in the convex hull” of the ideas that she’s worked with for 20 years!
First, to just use Einstein as an example, I remember reading many years ago (like at least a decade plus) that many scientists felt like if Einstein had never lived, the theory of special relativity (i.e e=mc^2) likely would have been found pretty quickly in any case - the work had already been done putting the nail in the "luminiferous ether" coffin, and people were starting to connect the dots. I think most people would agree that special relativity was within the "convex hull" that existed at that time. However, I've also heard that general relativity was so far outside the bounds of scientific thought of the time that if Einstein hadn't discovered it that in may have been 50-100 years or more before we figured it out - it was far outside the bounds of the convex hull of that time.
All that said, I'm not a mathematician qualified to determine whether what has been discovered by OpenAI is inside or outside the convex hull, and I do think that the vast majority of human intelligence operates within the convex hull in any case, and what AI can do is hugely, immensely powerful. Still, I'm more inclined to agree with this other commenter on Scott's blog:
> I am a little more in the “convex hull” camp when it comes to AI creativity. In my own interactions on research problems, I find the AI to be singularly uncreative. But these are not math problems.
> From my own introspection, my creative ideas come from a kind of visualization: situating myself in a quasi-physical abstract place that is very difficult to explain. But from there I can simply “see” things by “looking around”.
> This seems to me to be a byproduct of being an embedded agent, not just a prompt-responder. Embedded agents reflect and cogitate using their model of the world. Yann LeCun in particular pushes this as a necessary requirement for true intelligence.
> That said, I don’t agree with LeCun’s claim of necessity. Just as reasoning turned out to be something mysteriously emergent from language in the LLMs, so too could this kind of creative behavior. But I have no idea how.
Interesting - thanks for your perspective! I just took Scott's comments mostly at face value.
In any case, I think most researchers have been filling the convex hull (and have been enjoying doing so?) for most of their research. So even if Einstein provided something truly necessary, there's a reason there's only one Einstein (or grothendieck or insert famous name here). I know that's moving the goalposts but yeah.
Yes, I agree. The reason we highlight truly original, unique bits of genius is that they're so rare. So while I hold on to the idea that there is something humans will still exceed at, the vast, vast majority of things we do obviously aren't of that nature, and AI will vastly change the nature of work and society in the very near future.
No matter whether AI caps out or when, humans will be driving.
That said, other humans can and will put AI to use in ways that don't benefit humanity. It's actually already happening - newsfeeds waste hours of people's lives and attention; give teens low self esteem etc etc. and guess what. Society is adjusting - governments via legislation, device makers via screen time limits, communities by spreading the word and raising awareness
Smart AI wielded by people without your best interests in mind may be tough to counter; but you don't have to do it alone: humanity is getting wise to the threat. We don't have great tools but it'd be against the grain of history to assume we won't come up with them in time. Can't give specifics - as they say, predictions are hard, especially about the future..
We've made it through bigger more violent upheavals and we'll make it through this.
> If your math theorem can be written up in partnership with an LLM, wow! You can be done with that, and go do other great work.
If your painting can be painted in partnership with an LLM, wow!
If your essay can be written in partnership with an LLM, wow!
If your painting portfolio website can be written in partnership with an LLM, wow!
If your museum show can be designed in partnership with an LLM, wow!
If the placards next to each of your paintings can be written in partnership with an LLM, wow!
If the car that takes me to the gallery can be designed and driven in partnership with an LLM, wow!
If the newspaper or novel that you read on the way to the gallery can be written in partnership with an LLM, wow!
If an LLM can give tours at the gallery and answer questions asked by visitors, wow!
If an LLM can write the music that I listen to on my way out of the gallery, wow!
If an LLM can synthetically perform the music, too, wow!
> If AI means more concepts are discovered the tower gets taller - and we find those joyful moments more often. If there are infinite moments to be found, why not go as fast as possible!
I don't understand how a person can say this with a straight face. There has been so much discussion of this, and so many reasons have been given, that one can only assume that, if you're asking the question and you have thought about the issue and read what people have said, you're not only asking rhetorically but have some personal reason for insisting on a frankly pretty frustrating, borderline insensitive insistence on being positive. I'm not trying to be snotty or rude. I just want to say that to me there is something uncanny about your comment, in its total blindness to any of the reasons someone might not only disagree with you but grieve the death of, say, their academic discipline in its current form -- and in its weirdly breezy lack of empathy.
Are you suggesting that if an AI could do all of those things to your satisfaction you would not be extremely impressed.
I do have empathy for people who see the world changing and are forced to adjust. That can be uncomfortable, but it is something that is inevitable with the changing world. It has always been this way, There is very little need to make swords these days, and as anything becomes superseded there are people that are attached to the old things and there are people dependent on the old things.
I think it entirely possible to have sympathy for their position while disagreeing that the solution is to prevent change.
I don't see this as a breezy lack of empathy. I see this as a hand reaching out and saying 'Hey, you can come this way and things aren't so bad after all'
I think it would be much more of a change now, if we ban LLMs entirely and force everyone to do everything without any form of chatbot to help them. I would sympathize with the people who can’t handle this change, but it’s gonna happen, I think they should get with the times and adapt to it. I think it is wrong of you to try and prevent this change.
Actually I think we need to go further, we need to make an example out of the people who spent a trillion dollars building a product that is universally hated to try and make a buck. They need to be completely ruined financially, now that would be a real challenge, I sympathize with those adversely affected but it needs to happen if society must progress to a better place where humans flourish more.
As much as I hate all the moronic garbage people do with A.I., it can be used for good like every piece of technology. In any case though, it can't be "banned" or stopped, only regulated. So we just have to deal with it.
Obviously it can be banned. We can just tax the datacenters till it’s no longer economical to run. We did that to nuclear and nuclear required a smaller CapEx.
We can retroactively fine the AI companies for training on copyright data, with some absurd fines like 200B $ and bankrupt them. There is so much we can do without even changing the laws all that much. I don’t know where this belief that we can’t ban this technology even come from.
My daughter is 21 months old. I love her more than anything and want her to develop into the best version of herself. Let's say I can press a button and give her perfect command of English. Another button gives her expert-level command of advanced mathematics. Perfect hand-eye coordination. Emotional self-regulation. Empathy. Etc. Keep listing every desirable trait and skill you can think of. Hit a button. Suddenly she has it.
I would not press it.
Yes, if LLMs can do all everything I listed, I'll be impressed. I'll also want nothing to do with any of it.
As I wrote in another comment, I want mathematicians -- in their current form, doing work as they traditionally have -- just as I want writers, philosophers, etc, because this is a better world that makes people better.
OpenAI's proofs do not make people better. They do not make our lives or work meaningful. Quite the contrary. OpenAI has clear-cut and salted fields that people have been painstakingly, lovingly sowing and cultivating for generations -- profoundly ugly actions that do real harm to some of the best of what people are and have produced.
If I were a person willing to hit that button and 'upgrade' my daughter, I don't know whether I'd be able to live with myself. I'd feel as though I'd killed her or at least done profound, unforgivable violence to her. She deserves the chance to grow into the best version of herself. What companies like OpenAI are doing is, if their plans pan out, at least as horrifying. It isn't progress. It isn't good for people.
We're not taking about attachment to old ways. We're talking about attachment to human value.
Thank you for putting this so eloquently into words. I feel the exact same way.
The journey is the destination. I don't care how many checkpoints you can breeze through, if you don't grow, have an experience that transforms you through the process of doing it. And if you're just ticking boxes by means of having a machine do it all for you, there was no need initiating the process in the first place.
I am not talking about producing tools that are means to an end here. I am glad we can make millions of socks a week by means of automation. But intellectual endeavors are different.
The point of doing math is not proving theorems. It's to discover the intuition, the underlying phenomena, internalizing them and adding to the human understanding of the problem. Writing out the proof is just the incidental outcome of that process.
If no human learns anything, if we just start producing testaments to a human null process where no person has emerged strengthened from it, we are no better off than we ever were. We are just producing empty and meaningless representations of something which is not there.
Thank you. By far the best comment in this thread. As a dad this really resonates with me too, and even though my kids are a little bit older than yours the feeling is very much the same. We're automating away those things that make life worth living now.
If your daughter had cancer and you could press a button to make it go away, would you press it?
If so, what aspect of that makes it different? It is a change in the same beneficial direction. It is an intervention against what has happened naturally.
Similarly if she lacked any empathy and you could press a button to provide it? This would be the same direction of the same property, just an intervention from a different naturally occuring starting point.
I make no claim of the merits of OpenAI's immediate behaviour. I am commenting on a world in which things like this can be done, and like Grant Sanderson, I see a world of opportunity for understanding and learning for the joy of appreciating the problem and the solution. The only thing that seems to have been lost is that a human may no longer gain the prestige of being the first to discovers something. That should pale into insignificance to the benefits of understanding a thing. I'm not even sure if you should consider prestige as a healthy motivation to discover things.
Right now AI can provide a proof that is either valuable or not. If it is just the last page of a novel without any of the chapters then it hasn't given us mutch at all. The problem isn't in what it has provided, it tha't we've been using the wrong measure of merit.
If it does provide a full result with a rich explanation that people can understand then it has undoubtedly provided something that benefits the world. No human is awarded prestige for the discovery but that has always been an unfair measure.
If you work all your life on a math problem only to have an AI produce the result before you, how is this meaningfully different for your experience to working all your life on a math problem only to have another person produce the result before you.
If there is something that is unknown and could be proved true by path A and proved false by path B by definition nobody knows which path to follow. What happens if two mathematicians attempt this problem one going down each path. If an AI produces the result before they finish have they lost to the same degree? Only one of them had any chance of gaining the prestige. Did the other lose nothing? Was their life wasted? I don't think so either way and the only way to consider that work not wasted is to consider the effort to understand to be the thing that is valuable, not the result at the end.
If a solution is found by a human when there are people tying multiple paths, the one who guessed the correct path gains the prestige. That doesn't seem like a fair way to reward effort.
If we want understanding then AI can help.
Chess has had this moment. Computers can play chess better than people. It has also been a great benefit to the understanding of chess precisely because they value the how to get there over the result.
Prior to modern chess engines you could hypothesize about what the best move might be but you could never know if you were right. The fact that chess engines beat people so consistently is because often the guess is not right.
Chess engines gave us the ability to look at a game and see if if a player could have made a better move. They could then look to see why it was a better move. People then learned how to play better. They still play against other humans because they are testing each others understanding of the game, for that the computer is set aside.
Computers playing chess better than humans improved chess for humans.
Is there a compelling reason why that cannot be true for other things that they are better than.
I personally disagree. I prefer the take described (in a sibling comment) by Lerc.
But I want to note that your line of reasoning seems to be a perfect answer to "if God loves us and is omnipotent, why does God allow suffering?"
.. and I'm not sure I accept that theological line of reasoning either.
> We're not taking about attachment to old ways. We're talking about attachment to human value.
Human values vary across time and cultures. I'm pretty sure if people 100 years later look back onto this discussion, they will think you're attaching to old ways. Society will adopt to super-intelligent AI, and nobody will understand why you'd intentionally deprive your loved ones of a better life and prefer to watch them "struggle".
AI needs to be instructed to do a thing. To use the "steam engine designing another steam engine" analogy, why do the big labs give the highest pay of all to their prized researchers? Why do they take steps to prevent poaching? Surely a non-expert could prompt a model "find a superparameter combo that makes an amazing model" and the next gen model would emerge! The AI should be able to design a better AI on its own!
Why do the labs have thousands of employees? Lets think about this...
Who's designing the evals needed to validate the model quality, who's deciding what goes in the system prompt? Who's negotiating to buy training data from hundreds or even thousands of data vendors? Who's responding when the Internet goes apeshit over some prompt tweak that makes models over-verbose? Who's out there listening to users and feeding what they say back into the product pipeline?
Computers????
However automated things get, that quickly becomes the new baseline. Customer expectations are always going up.
And as soon as humans figure out how to automate any of the things listed above - it becomes part of the new baseline too. It's always advancing. To beat the baseline and be competitive, you need humans. No matter what. No matter how automatic the automated things get. Always and forever. Because you need someone to drive, to find the next automatable thing and automate it - and to prioritize where to search for automatable things.
> Always and forever. Because you need someone to drive, to find the next automatable thing and automate it - and to prioritize where to search for automatable things.
If we look at history of automation throughout the times it always decreased the amount of people needed to do the job. If you can't see a future where this new steam engine learns how to do a better steam engine, then you are blind. With the trajectory we're on it will happen sooner or later, and most people are having existential crises because the amount of humans required to be "in the loop" are decreasing increasingly fast.
I agree the people needed goes down - but will add a nuance.
Roles go away and fewer people are needed to do a thing, but I think it's good! For example the number of people on farms decreased orders of magnitude over the past say, century - yet we still feed everyone. Farming got mostly automated and got insanely more productive per human.
What happened was those people who would've been needed on farms went and did other stuff and the economy got way more complex but also that new complexity let a lot of more awesome things got provided for a lot more people by a lot more companies, a trend that continues today.
If you want to be a farmer good luck; it's harder to get started than it was say, 50 years ago - so why bother when there is no net new demand for farmers and there are also many better ways to make a living.
That's what'll happen for cognitively drudgerous work vs. creative new work.
As a software engineer, I found that a codebase that is LLM-assisted or entirely produced by agents gets harder and harder to understand intuitively over time. By writing code manually, you build a very precise mental model of how it works. The time it took was the price for that. Now, the time cost has been largely removed but the payoff also disappeared: it's essentially impossible to maintain the same mental model with the speed and volume of AI contributions. Reviewing code is not a substitute for writing it, and new contributions to the codebase are essentially bound to LLM usage. So now we're in a position where the codebase and its capabilities grow fast, but are not backed by the full understanding of the engineers. AI tools have become our crutch.
Math is very similar, and requires an even higher degree of mental understanding to produce advancements. The effort spent trying to prove theorems and connect theories pays off in deep intuition; removing that struggle significantly impairs our understanding.
So no, you can't "be done with that, and go do other great work" without paying the understanding tax. And over time that's just not sustainable.
A simpler analogy would be gym training: the effort expenditure and the strength gains are inextricably linked. You can't go in there and start lifting weights with a forklift while expecting strength improvements.
In the case of software development, businesses have decided that speed gains are more important than maintainability, understanding, and independence. Will the same happen in math? The future in which mathematicians become LLM assistants (as opposed to LLM-assisted) and spend their days "turning the crank" just to review what comes out is quite bleak.
The analogy is tempting. But gym training isn't what work is. At work the goal is not learning - it's delivering value.
Doing weights is not the same as say, updating the gym with shiny new weights; or migrating all the weights in the gym to metric. At the gym, if the current weights need to go and new ones installed, a forklift will one-shot it.
Seeing the difference empowers you to choose the right approach for the right situation.
This is the same naivete that I saw in coding some time ago before most people finally accepted there is no going back and the times of writing code by hand are gone.
And the guy is not a mathematician primarily - he's a Youtube creator and entrepreneur. I liked a lot of his videos but now I usually just ask the LLM for detailed explanation and I can probe it as much as I want if something is not clear enough.
Education will also take a huge hit, you can't really beat an almost free supergenius that has all the time in the world to explain something to you in as much detail as you wish.
I can beat this “supergenius” - I hire a professor that knows exactly how to teach and what to teach. This professor isn’t rolling the dice every time I ask them a question. Boom.
It is not, and for the same reason it's not over for mathematics. For anyone doing anything truly novel, and yes there are still software engineers out there doing that, it's still inept.
It's de jour to leverage formal verification as LLMs are quite good at looping it, but that's still a tool we had to invent to solve problems. It'll be truly over when we're being outpaced in the realm of invention but I have seen absolutely nothing to suggest that has meaningfully occurred at all. Coding by hand is not gone, there's just less of a reason to do so now.
I’m a cheerleader for the Khanmigo AI tutor effort. But, apparently so far they are discovering that the hard part is getting the kids motivated to actually ask the AI any questions.
3Blue1Brown does an amazing job of making math interesting to learn in itself. As opposed to the hundreds of millions of kids told “You just have to learn it or you’ll be dumb. Keep up or you’ll fall behind forever. Go!”
The vid calls out explicitly that math education is a primarily a motivation problem and I agree. One way or another, we need a lot more focus on that.
Lack of motivation can be a problem and I love 3b1b videos. However, if you want to truly learn, you still have to sit 30-60 hours on a subject to be able to solve problems. No motivation will replace that.
When you have limited time to learn as a student, you either have the smarts to learn in the limited time or you cheat.
Reflecting on that a year later is interesting. Agents have become REALLY good since then, and I consider the "writing code" side of my profession to be largely annihilated. Some days that's really hard to accept.
But I think Grant's conclusion about math still largely echoes what I wrote about software: don't underestimate the social aspect of these activities, and if anything AI has made the social side more important. I deliberately avoided declaring, "now is the best time to learn to write code". I suspected that skill might be going out the window. But learning systems thinking and the social skills needed to connect people's dreams to reality continues to be an important art, an art I still have the privilege to practice every day.
And if we do reach the "anything you can do I can do better" stage, then, as Grant said, that's a hard to imagine world, and one where "it can write really good code" might be the least of our problems.
I agree. I think the days of the developer who hated talking to anyone but is still very valuable are over.
I think social skills are much more important today because one person can do so much more but this person needs to talk to many others to know what to build.
And this is why I am likely to leave software. I actually really like people, but I am autistic and not especially good at talking to them, and it's quite drianing to do so.
I will miss coding, but I had a good run. Time to learn a trade. I don't begrudge this fate.
Why would you leave software? Sitting down and working in silence and thinking is still a very rare and valuable skill, the talking part is not so much.
If AI solves all coding and software then we are not going to sit around talking, it will be the time to sit down and do some very complex deep work that needs silence, concentration and understanding.
For you it will be paradise, you can also just point all the people to talk with your agent instead of you.
You can still code the interesting parts. We all need some mental gymnastic to keep up. Leetcode or writing the parts that interests you, it doesn't matter.
Yes I worked, almost for a decade. I know everybody loves talking there, but that was true before AI as well. Good thing is that with AI, big tech is going away. Who needs 5 layers of management when 5 guys can replicate their product.
No… the person who's going to do well is the one who doesn't have to ask what to build. The one who has to ask is no better than an AI, except they start out wanting to ask, rather than starting out with no interest whatsoever until they're prompted to have one.
When everything you ask for is instant and valueless, even asking becomes meaningless, and everyone is waiting to see something they'd not thought of.
Then, a thousand thousand copies, immediately… but also, watching that person like a hawk to see if they can do it again. That's the future. A lot of people will just plain become unable to think or intend anything on their own, or even want anything.
Somebody still needs to determine what the company system actually look like, that someone is still probably a programmer, it doesn't matter anymore if that programmer is also a good coder.
I'm trying to think of an exception but I find it hard to disagree. Even if you know exactly what to build, it's pretty hard to get any adoption without being aggressively social. Find a good extroverted friend, maybe?
At this point I'm ready to call it... LLMs aren't going to ruin my job. They're amazing, they're useful... and the problem remains that to a first approximation human beings are uninterested in spending all day talking to a computer, whether through a classic IDE or through an LLM. Specifying a problem enough for an LLM to solve it, even if we stipulate one that does it perfectly, is already more than most people want to do.
You also aren't going to get an accountant running 4 simultaneous streams of AI-driven development and working through an AWS issue when something goes wrong.
The problem is you're focused on 1st order effects. I presume you work at some company that sells a product or provides a service - what happens if the demand for that evaporates because the clients can do it themselves or the market has been flooded by much cheaper alternatives created using AI? Or people who bought the product can't do it as they lost their jobs to automation?
Second, if "all software vendors in all spaces get wiped out" was going to happen I think we'd be seeing more of it already. Yes, there is support for some software vendors possibly getting wiped out... but, then again, you can't look at a bad vibe coded implementation of "the entire Adobe suite" that was rather overblown in the press coverage and forget that Adobe also has AIs. Instead what I'm seeing at my own workplace as we ponder the question of "should we replace this service we buy with some local vibe coding" is still remaining but we don't want to support that. Can we replace Confluence with vibe coding? Yes, but that was true five years ago too and we didn't want to do it then, either. We still don't want to do it. HN commenters have always overestimated the desire everyone in the world has to become programmers and take responsibility for everything.
One wonders what percentage of those who are certain that vibe coding is going to nuke all software vendors can't even be arsed to self-host a Jellyfin or VaultWarden install... which is way easier than vibe coding the whole of those things from scratch, and we're talking about people who are already programmers. Physician, heal thyself.
I hope you are right, but I think there will be a lot of reshuffling nevertheless if only because the shape of the work has changed so much. A lot of people who hated developing software will suddenly find a passion for it, a lot of people who were good will find they can't stand this new world.
The only certainty in life is that change is inevitable, and resisting change will always lead to challenges and suffering.
Regardless of where that leads us, I believe talking about how to cope with change and explore integration as well as its effect on meaning for us is the human thing to do.
I could be fully wrong here as I am not from the field. But how is this different from let's say a ramanujan-like genius dumping a bunch of solved problems with not yet understandable ways of getting there?
It seemed riveting enough for some mayor mathematicians to "decode" his solutions into readable proofs?
The only difference I spot now is that it was not an Indian man, but a machine. If that bothers you still, it seems less about the art of the craft being taken as it seems to be about who has taken it?
The difference is partly that in your hypothetical the man who solves the problems doesn't become a commodifiable tool. It doesn't become possible to increase your spending on him to solve a problem. It would be recognized that he is in a category by himself (and hopefully a better writer than the models) and therefore would not change how others do their work. The list of differences could go on and on.
AI will be much more powerful than ramanujan. ramanujan is just one person with limited energy, but many instances of AI agent can work in parallel and attack all open problems at once
I agree with the 3blue1brown guy because now is the time to reinvent all pure math so it actually works. The other day I worked through a paper that redefines probability using game theory as a foundation and it was almost trivial to prove everything with an AI assistant. What else can be redefined
by the way it feels to me that teaching is one of the most satisfying jobs on earth, you could (and should) be passionate for hours long in front of your students, that's amazing. as a programmer it seems you'd only feel passionate for like 5% of your work, even before AI it wasn't all that joyful, you had to attend boring meetings, debug legacy code bases, trying to make sense of the bad decisions other made (including yourself), it's fine, it brings food to the table.
I think the myth of "passion" has affected way too many youngesters though. You can find meaning in many things in life, and there are already way too many people who kept chasing their "passion" yet at the end realized it didn't bring them real happiness.
Maybe this AI thing is good for us after all, maybe we should take a pause and answer the harder question.
Edit: and yeah, even teachers probably have lots of chores and boring parts of the job.
That is why schools should have physical punishments. "What is the purpose of learning this? What a stupid question? To not get additional lashes, obviously"
3blue1brown has the absolute most educational and entertaining videos. Always fascinated by his animations which are custom programmed by him. I also appreciate the diversity of topics covered from deep math to software to science.
In the essay Hackers and Painters it was mentioned that there is a project approach to learning and an academic one. The idea of pet projects is killed by language models, because what you did on weekends, a language model now does in half an hour. So you can try the other approach: maybe you should have more general knowledge right away, best practices, so more of an academic approach. In the academic approach you learn from the best reference examples, develop taste, and only then recognize what is good or bad and build your own. But here too you can see that LLMs iterate much faster, while you have to collect patterns for years, and you will also always be in the role of the one who is behind.
> The idea of pet projects is killed by language models
Only if the goal of a pet project was the end result. In my experience pet project is all about learning new things and exploring the unknowns. LLM finishing it in half and hour does not achieve any of that. Although it can be a good assistant.
Before, I would write an emulator of an old console. On weekends I would debug why the game shows garbage instead of a picture, compare opcodes with the documentation and learn from my own mistakes. And the emulator itself would be valuable as an artifact, because it holds the experience I accumulated.
Now the same thing can be done much faster. Learning from mistakes disappears, only high-level templates remain which looks similar to the academic approach.
On the other hand, you can set up an LLM so that everything goes gradually and you learn like you used to. But that's more like what I would call pet archaeology or something... Learning the tools doesn't give as much benefit anymore, it's more like a reconstruction of past events.
I have setup a sistem where I leverage LLMs and agents to replicate scientific papers, cs and related fields, especially ML ones, and that's what I do in the weekends now.
this isn't an unexpected take from someone who is rich and famous for being a "math explainer". If you make your living explaining other people's proofs, then it makes sense to say "don't worry about _how_ the math gets done, you can still explain it, or supervise it." It will be interesting to see how he would react if his channel was overtaken by AI that was RL trained to produce 3b1b content, and produced better content than him, at a faster pace, so he lost his viewership. Then would he be satisfied with: "ok but now you can oversee a machine to make your videos, its not like 'making explainer videos' is inherently meaningful".
Same with programmers. The craftsmen feel the hit, the people that just saw it as a job and/or code as an obstacle to making a product say "what's the big deal, code was just a tool all along".
The end state is that more and more activity will consolidate to fewer controllers because of capital costs. Eventually the "makers" will be outcompeted by the few companies holding all the robots / AI swarms (at which point the other crabs in the bucket will say "told you so"). Sure you could create a startup, at which point your idea is instantly replicated (assuming it wasn't already thought of by millions of agents). Then you're merely facing the huge marketing, name recognition, and production ability of the megacorp versus your one unknown idea for the "factory" you "manage".
That's what's missing from the "factory manager" discussion -- how well can you compete with a Toyota factory? You're free to create your own factory right now. And just wait for the regulatory capture...
The influencers are working full time to support all BigAI narratives. The possibility of regulating AI like ICBMs is of course never mentioned. That opinion does not pay.
There's never been a better time to be a professional mathematician, perhaps. Just like there's never been a better time to be a senior software engineer.
An 18 year old entering university today will retire somewhere in the 2070s. Is mathematics, or software engineering, a promising career path for the next 50 years? No, it's most certainly not, and anyone suggesting otherwise is delusional. I don't know what would be a good career path, but most certainly avoid anything that AI is having the most success at in 2026.
Yeah, there isn't anything wrong with encouraging people to get into mathematics
But recommending it as a career, might be delusional, maybe harmful? (Although people say that about artists too)
I'm on the wrong site for this, but isn't it interesting how we don't ask what is the most interesting field I can join, but rather ... how do I stay employed with this for the next 44 years? Seems to me we missed the entire point and just accept it as reality and that it has to be this way. I'm not asking this to be snarky or smart, I'm just genuinely curious why everything seemed easier back in the day.
If AI came about 40 years ago, it would have been much more restricted and advanced much much slower.
But politics does not care for the average worker anymore. Every democratic country is slowly turning geriatric, so due to how democracy works, the will of the OLD is what runs societies. And job security is not one of those things, when the biggest voting block does not even work.
Not every field has an equal number of vacancies. There are a few people who study Art History and get a job as an art gallery curator, etc. There are many more who end up as baristas.
It's fine to follow your dream, but just make sure that your dream wants you too.
It also helps to have rich parents, if you grow up poor you understand the consequences of choosing the wrong career path can be devastating. Some people have the freedom to experiment and still get a soft landing, other people need to get it right the first time.
The career path of a mathematician is far different than that of a software engineer.
> I don't know what would be a good career path, but most certainly avoid anything that AI is having the most success at in 2026.
This hinges on an assumption that means our whole society is turned upside down completely with no way to predict anything. But this is an assumption only. So you can either plan for a known path and do something valuable there, OR just put up your hand and prepare for.. what? Like not even physical jobs are safe because who will hire anyone if a good chunk of all humans will be out of jobs? Your best bet would probably be to build a bunker and stock up on canned food.
If you're a software engineer or mathematician then your world has already been turned upside down by this technology.
I used to write code by hand, now I just write prompts and manage the AI. There is some expertise involved but considerably less than before, and no doubt even that will vanish in the coming years.
For mathematicians the picture is even more bleak because their field is being strip mined and they face a future where there are perhaps no human reachable conjectures. Moreover if your job is to teach other mathematicians and nobody wants to become a mathematician... This is the future even if the technology hardly improves at all.
You don't need to know if there will be safe jobs in the future to avoid jobs that are unsafe today.
Personally if I were a teenager today I'd choose a career in medicine. You can still exercise your brain, but because it's practical and the fact that you have people's lives in your hands means that it's considerably less likely to be replaced by AI any time soon.
I like the optimism but it might be a case that actually there is nothing left for humans to figure out in math 2.0. I wanna be wrong and mathematicians will figure how to regain the control. Software developers lost it and turned into meat proxies.
I definitely don't enjoy vibe coding nearly as much as just coding, and in the last year when I was heavily leaning on AI while I dealt with some personal shit, I was able to make more stuff than I ever could at my prime by hand. That being said, I could not tell you a single thing I vibe coded this year outside of work.
It's a tool, and it's a tool that lets you skip that parts that bore you. For most devs, they never cared about the craft--they copy and pasted whatever they could from the internet until they had something good enough. People cut corners, always have. I got into programming at 10 because I really liked knowing how my computer worked and being able to do/make anything on it. That hasn't changed with AI, but it sure as hell has made tinkering a lot easier. No more wondering if a proc I've never seen before should be on my system. No more hunting down config docs for my editor. All of that annoying grunt work that got in the way of me actually coding is something an agent handles for me in the background. The part I did--and still do--like? I can do that by hand if I want and when I get bored or fatigued I can swap to AI.
There are so many corpo slopcannon's in this thread whose minds are slaves to KPIs and productivity. Let it go bro. Relax and live a little. There's nothing wrong with writing code by hand in your own time or using AI. If you enjoy writing code, solving all the individual problems and getting your hands dirty, you should keep doing so! It's only a matter of months, year over year, where all of the vibe coders' real knowledge evaporates and they're slaves to their subscription (or local hardware, say less king). You can be an expert who codes when there's no internet. I know I wouldn't know nearly as much if I hadn't spent so many years actually writing code. You understand taking your time and exercising discipline is just as valid of a path.
I don't understand all of these developers I see who are so hostile to people who still like the craft. It's such cope, bro. Either admit you don't get it and that you're a tasteless little slopboi who would never have amounted to anything meaningful because he doesn't have the discipline to actually learn to code. Or, get over yourself and let people enjoy things. Nobody cares about your holy quest to advocate for another subscription.
personally as a math phd student, LLM centric math feels soulless and ultimately is not what I entered the field to do which is to personally make mathematical discoveries with my own brain and cognition, and not direct a discovery machine.
Yes, cue the: cope seethe, selfish mathematicians, care only about personal glory, more theorems = cancer proven, more knowledge>less knowledge, e/acc etc. etc.
I've heard all these tired arguments many times. Whatever - I concede - you're right and I'm morally wrong and bad. Just don't expect people to study this subject which is basically being turned into biology (spend hours sitting in a lab babysitting equipment all day while watching a movie - it's what most bio phd students i'm around seem to do, no offense meant to bio phd students, i'm certain their studies are orders of magnitude more impactful to the society than mine).
I think you guys will go through the same kind of divide that SWE went through.
There is a number of SWE and adjacent IT professionals that do enjoy the LLM assisted work, I'm one of those.
There's a number of them that absolutely loathe it.
Your point about biology does not sound fair, an ex of mine worked in the field and that is not at all what she did.
To be fair LLMs can be used in an empowering way to learn, etc. But at that point it feels disingenuous - why not just one shot the problem and get the result more efficiently than just babying it around?
And yeah, fair enough. I guess my bio sample size is limited, but many of the PhD students I've seen in the experimental sciences seem to operate this way a majority of the time. I remember my brain being absolutely fried after 4 hours of thinking about math, only to hear these folks say they pulled a 12 hour shift in the lab. And I'm just like - how? In any case it's all anecdotes from me so feel free to ignore them.
Ai will yield a higher demand for mathematicians, we need more people to understand the math being solved. We also need more people inventing math problems.
People who want to solve problems themselves should go on to invent them without posting them on the internet until they're solved.
I think a lot of these reactions by mathematicians are more akin to group theory than anything else. Reality is that things will naturally sort themselves out and there will be some role mathematicians play in all of it (most likely). To me it seems the timeline that some skill essentially gets retired such that if you want to keep doing it is more like "historical re-enactment" is getting quite short. Things like manually coding something is going to be a hobby. Some aspects of math are going to be a hobby, and professional math will be all about pushing up against the edge of what we can do mathematically with AI.
Your paradigms are showing! I'd argue that if your POV is strictly "That's not how it's done," then it's time to re-read Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
Too early to tell, but IMO unlikely. Let's see what his take will be once an AI can propose a topic, write the script, animate, and narrate a good educational math video.
I tried watching 3b1b over the years, really wanted to enjoy it. But I never found the way he presents things intuitive and never got a palpable intuition that helped me with math classes or work.
I saw some clearly AI slop made videos and got much better understanding of topics, since they don't do foreshadowing for an awe-inspiring connection that we'd admire together after 15 min videos, the clankers just get to the point. Not claiming those videos are too useful either, but I did however see accelerated learning gains from asking LLMs to explain (and do Bret Victor-style small interactive demos) math and algos, something I have never experienced from any of the educational STEM Youtube channels.
Even if you find them intuitive, they produce no learning gains for anyone. Take a lin alg test, watch the 'Essence of lin alg' videos, take comparable test again. I guarantee you won't see any change even if you 'understood matrices better'. They are pure mathporn.
I'm actually quite optimistic, was pointing out that, at least to to me, AI slop already produces better results than big educational content creators. For something concrete, even if not classic math, I credit direct LLM interaction highly for accelerating my understanding of CPU design and compiler tech.
No learning gains? I teach linear algebra. I can assure you that students who watch and study the "Essence of linear algebra" videos (which I recommend on the syllabus) do better on my tests that those who don't, because they learn stuff from them.
It's much more likely that the students who take the time to watch supplementary materials are the ones who'd do better regardless of the quality of the given material. If you have access to fresh learners, I'd say it's a good opportunity to test how good those series are.
I'm not sure anything I say can convince you, as your mind seems to be made up already, but my experience has been that those videos help my students understand the concepts of linear algebra, comparing the mastery level now vs. before the series was published on YouTube. Especially when it comes to getting a feeling for what a linear transformation is, and how the properties of matrices echo the properties of the transformation they represent.
As for "fresh learners", I can provide my own son, who watched the series before taking his first linear algebra class, and says that it helped him a lot.
I'm not defining education as passing tests. A test is just a measuring instrument.
In fact, your claim is strong and quite easy to test. If watching the series gives people a better fundamental understanding which makes subsequent learning more efficient, take matched novices, randomise them to watch the series or not, then teach both groups some later lin alg materials and measure learning gains on novel problems.
That's the kind of test I mean, not 'can you grind through the course exam'.
If your claimed deeper understanding neither improves what someone can do afterwards nor how efficiently they learn related material, I'm not sure what observable content the claim has.
This is not my experience. Having an intuitive grasp of e.g. the graphical interpretation of the determinant instantly lets you figure out most of the key determinant properties without having to memorize them. That's the primary thing you get from intuition imo, having a sense of what must be true without having to memorize or prove it.
fwiw the fact that brains work fundamentally differently was my big penny dropping realization after digging into what LLMs are doing. Everything (I assert) a brain does (the function between inputs and outputs) is due to training data. There is no "instinct" and there is no "ROM-driven way to think" in any brain. It's training data all the way down. As a consequence different brains do indeed think in fundamentally different ways.
This is so fundamentally divorced from what we know about cognition in humans or in animals. The idea that we are a pure tabula rasa and only shaped by our "training data" is absurd and false. Just look at the amount of data we need to be able to do things relative to ML models. Look at animals which can do complex tasks moments after birth. We're deeply, deeply shaped by instinct.
Well, everyone being tabula rasa has a point tho. Technically there's no unique physical cause that make development unfold the same for all organisms, or even all humans (see Waddington's epigenetic landscape). It just happens that we develop along very similar trajectories and can draw equivalences between how I think vs how you think. So, from an ontological perspective, if you squint a bit, we all are tabula rasa. But from a phenotypic perspective, of course it's bonkers, you can't teach a frog linear algebra.
But you already have Claude-directed videos that utilize OP's manim project (which he uses himself to do 3b1b) that anyone else can create. Grant open-sourced manim and now anyone can point a model at it to create their own 3b1b-like videos. They're popping up all over the place as Opus 5.5 demo videos just in the last few weeks. So... AGI?
I guess I wasn’t clear, but using manim to make videos is not the hard part. The hard part is making them engaging and enlightening, and whatever else you want to attribute to 3b1b videos which make them a joy to watch and learn from.
He won't care because he has established position and is set. It will be just like everybody else - if the individual is at the top of the food chain then he/she is all over it how you are using it wrong and how you should use it (don't forget to follow and subscribe).
Yep, that's what I see in the CS field -- people at the top are advocating AI and don't understand why the hell the others are hesitant. I meant the top engineers, not the management. I look up to them because of their skills, but that doesn't mean I need to agree with everything they said.
As an applied mathematician who went into industry and has friends still in academia it's quite interesting.
My view is that the people who think doing maths is about being able to knit maths quickly and correctly are quite sad.
But for the people like me who bound themselves to computers a long time ago, it feels like a revolution. Sure you might now be simply tending your garden of machines and allocating capital and resources like a Gardiner picks seeds for various sunny spots but you can now do a lot of stuff and for people were good at gardening but not knitting it is a game changer.
There has never been a better time to pretend you understand anything aided by LLMs deluding yourself into being an expert, yeah, that's how the video should be named :/
I can't help but feel how this is all industry-planted, and I wouldn't argue its too far fetched.
I suspect people who are deciding what to study will do so on the basis of a multifactor view of what interests them, how they predict their career will be after finishing said study etc.
There ought to be people watching his channel who wonder whether given all these AI advances math is even worth studying now.
The guy is a handsome influencer and so many people buy that theater. The slimy presentation should be a giveaway for normal people, but apparently some hand holding is required.
In other news, there's never been a better time to be a software developer. Come to think of it, there's also never been a better time to invest in learning copy-editing and proof-reading as a side hustle. It's a Brave New World. Everything is fine, the demand just got expanded, the pie got bigger, nothing more. New doors will be opened, nothing has changed; in fact, everything improved. Stochastic parrots are no match for our carbon-based g.
I mean if you read some history it’s not the first time complete workforces have been replaced. It doesn’t mean the same jobs stay, but usually there will be something to do.
Whilst I agree it’s not conclusive to assume that just bc something happened the way it did in the past it will happen again. I think there’s still 'reason to believe'.
My answer to your job is that more jobs move from secondary to tertiary sector (entertainment). That has happened usually.
I doubt demand expanded much. I mean there is just that many games/whatever apps that the whole humanity needs. Maybe ti will go up a bit, like 50%, but getting 10x (or very easily 1000x if we just vibe code them) in supply doesn't change that.
Grant Sanderson tries to explain why getting into math remains worthwhile in an AI era. But his audience is composed of two groups -- people who won't follow his reasoning, and mathematicians.
Someone once described a mathematician as a machine to turn coffee into theorems. Okay, fair enough, but what sets mathematicians apart is that mathematics wasn't a choice.
It's possible that Sanderson doesn't get this, but people watching his video either will never understand his argument, or have always understood it.
Problem solving, critical thought, logic, creativity are always going to be valuable.
In a way ai is turning programming more into maths - you write a natural language description of the problem - a proof / program - and then translating that into machine code is a lot of work / abstraction. For example look how much it takes to turn relatively simple mathematical statements into lean. That I guess is going to be the future.
I would encourage everyone to learn the fundamentals still because you will need discretion and to be able to think at a more abstract level.
However its funny that its only NOW dehumanising/demoralising now when its white people losing jobs to the capitalist machine in the imperial core, and not the slave silicon miners making gpus for gamers.
> Are those capabilities valuable if machines are better at all of them than you?
Machines have been doing arithmetic (add/subtract/multiply/divide) better and faster than humans for 70+ years. I would ask anyone making this claim, "are you OK if your children do not learn basic arithmetic?"
Is there a transcript somewhere? Unless you're willing to pay me to throw away 40 minutes of my life listening to a stranger when it could have been an email
Yes, the video has a transcript available. You'll find a "show transcript" button in the description.
That said, you'd be missing a bunch of hand-made illustrations and animations from one of the best math communicators in the world. If that's not appealing to you, I'm not sure the transcript will do much for you either.
Admittedly, I don't think visualizations do much for me, but I wanted to see the essential pitch without spending 40 minutes watching a video. Surely any discussion of this topic (as opposed to mathematical concepts themselves) doesn't require visualization.
As it turns out, the only bits relevant to the title are the last five minutes of the video, and his contribution comes down to basically ignoring peoples' concerns and asserting that more technology means more joy. He conflates interest in math with a career in math and doesn't seem to address why actual mathematicians go into the field or what they get from it. In fact, the channel seems aimed at people who don't ever intend on going into the field.
If he doesn't grapple with the angst of turning an entire field of discourse into watching a chatbot beam-search a proof space, why make the video?
I think a lot of "mathematicians" are saddened by the sudden realization they are not even interested in it and were only in it for status and prestige. A lot of them are such pretentious tools that they willingly wasted their lives doing the absurd PhD rituals. Academia is dead.
Mostly Funding. Then each other. Then the myriad trivial yet bureaucratic things of daily life. Then research. I'd put research at like 10% of a week, so maybe 5 hours total.
I have been feeling this way about software. Don't get me wrong, there are some things I am very interested in and would work on for recreation (macros!), but a lot of it I'm less interested in.
Frankly, despite the obvious financial worries, it's been a little freeing. I can go do something else (because, uh, I may have to).
What about the people who are in it to think deeply about mathematics questions? It's a lot harder to feel like that's worth doing when there's a black box with a crank that takes money in and spits out mathematics answers.
Like calling Lee Sedol a pretentious tool for retiring in the face of AlphaGo. If you really do mathematics for the enjoyment of doing mathematics, following a roughly unbroken line of tradition for at least a couple hundred years, an alien computer mind showing up and smashing everything would perhaps be upsetting, don't you think?
People still play Go. And they still play chess. In fact it's more popular than ever. For activities people truly enjoy, the alien computer mind showing up and smashing everything doesn't change a thing.
Nothing is stopping anyone from thinking deeply about math. The angst here is about whether they can get paid for it or not.
I haven’t watched the video, but likely it hasn’t answered a question: why math? Why not physics, neuroscience, philosophy or history? People claim math is both philosophical and art, but is that a sufficiently good reason to pursue math as opposed to other careers?
A lot of arguments seem to try to cling to the “old” way of doing math: staring at the blackboard for hours, wrestling with papers and papers of equations, and do forth. Well, chess players went through a similar transition period: carrying books of openings and such, to chess database, to chess engine and now AI. And at no point I hear chess players complaining that we have to study chess the old way.
A comment on the video that resonated with me
> I feel like the point is still being missed, and it's very similar to the way software engineers are trying to cope. The argument you are making "Well yes now this part of math we will not need to do again, but now we can do this instead" however the issue with most people just don't want to do that....
> Like who are we kidding, the type of nerds who were attracted to math and software were into it because we saw it as an art-form, it was a craft, it was being the only one in your city to be able to solve a complicated math problem, it was immortalizing yourself because you discovered a proof and added to the ever expanding human knowledge.
> Imagine a leather workman who's life passion is making insanely high quality handbags, who takes joy in knowing everything he touches will last someone a lifetime and give them joy everytime they use it. And then not gradually, but almost overnight someone comes to his door and tells him we can make bags 50 times better than you at 1/tenth the price. But don't you worry, you can make more money overseeing the factory, or selling people on how good this bag is, and explaining that to them.
> I mean, ok, that just is not what I wanted to do with my life. I never wanted to be a manager, I never wanted to be a salesman, I never wanted to be a writer. A craft I enjoy doing has been taken away from me, I should be allowed to mourn, I don't care that I can do something else since I never liked doing it in the first place. I enjoyed solving problems and writing code, I don't care if people say "well thats never what programming was about it was actually about becoming a manager all along" I never wanted to be a manager, I never wanted to manage, I never wanted to be a proof reader.
This comment... opposes your other comment:
> don't want to hear it if the cover was AI generated
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49531894
Art is different
> > But don't you worry, you can make more money overseeing the factory, or selling people on how good this bag is, and explaining that to them.
...Or you can keep working on your handbags & refine your styles & qualities, using your expertise & experience as value adds.
The existence of the factory did not wipe out the boutique craftsman.
> > A craft I enjoy doing has been taken away from me, I should be allowed to mourn, I don't care that I can do something else since I never liked doing it in the first place.
A craft wasn't ripped away from you: The process still exists as-is in its prior form, like the woodcarvers of yesteryear. Nothing that you desire (the process/journey) has been lost. It still exists.
The only step required to restore it is to ignore the contributions of others that use it. And your desire to do so will be valid & consistent.
But similarly as to how you want to be validated on your feelings of 'the craft being ripped from you', you don't get to impose that belief onto others to rip their use of LLMs away from them if they want to do so, lest you want to invalidate their feelings as a consequence.
the issue is that there are no value adds from humans anymore if the LLM is smarter than everyone
> the issue is that there are no value adds from humans anymore if the LLM is smarter than everyone
The value adds (from the view of humans wanting it) come from:
1) a human understanding concept X & thus can communicate about X; or
2) finding alternate routes to X that make it easier for humans to get there.
(1) is human-centric & thus non-replaceable, since the requirement of a human is what gives it the value add.
(2) is similar to how there can be many paths to deriving the Pythagorean theorem. None of the existing paths devalue the others, but they each allow those with different perspectives to reach the same destination.
right, so mathematicians will be communicating someone else's discoveries instead of making their own. notwithstanding whether that's an interesting job or not (I know, it's not part of the discussion), why wouldn't LLMs be able to do that with enough RLHF?
And why would a human be able to come up with a proof an LLM can't? I get your point but the new paths and perspectives could probably all be derived by prompting "prove xyz statement" a few times in fresh chats.
I don't know about you, but I got a lot of satisfaction from finding proofs for my math problem sets despite the fact that they were "solved problems"
> I don't know about you, but I got a lot of satisfaction from finding proofs for my math problem sets despite the fact that they were "solved problems"
Good for you, but that's not a job, and no one is going to award you a PhD for doing that.
99.99% of valuable work is a version of something that's been done before, including in math. Lots of people get phds for successfully applying known stuff to new contexts, at least in my fields. It still takes pretty deep understanding to be able to grasp something well enough to apply it in a useful way, whether you derived it for the first time ever, found it in a textbook, or asked chadbbt
"Applying known stuff to new contexts" is creative, original work, and is quite different from "working out the answers to a problem set", as mentioned in the comment that I am replying to. Don't move the goalposts.
Moreover, that's precisely the kind of work that AIs can do. So why would anyone pay you to do that, whether or not you find it satisfying?
I'm not moving the goalposts -- you just changed the subject so the discussion is different.
> I'm not moving the goalposts -- you just changed the subject
That's not an accurate representation of this conversation.
Me too - as a depressed PhD student, the only math I've been doing lately is problem sets for courses, because they're fun and help me pass the class.
But the fact of the matter is that the purpose of my program and of research isn't to work on solved problems but to solve new ones. And the machine seems to be better than me in basically every way in this regard.
Except that you have innate human dignity and the machine is a hunk of plastic and (semi)metal.
sure, but we're talking about math here.
It's an interesting thought experiment: how many human lives would cost you one LLM?
Statistically correct more of the time doesn’t equal smarter though. It doesn’t equate to more creative either. Honestly if independent thought was to become extinct due to LLM’s what would be the point of society anyways? We’re not talking about shoes or handbags, we’re talking about the thing that makes us human. So weird that we in the tech industry are so willing to ruin humanity for the sake of a sick IPO.
> We’re not talking about shoes or handbags, we’re talking about the thing that makes us human.
Exactly. That's why people are upset, and why more people are going to be upset as AI subsumes more parts of society. The handbags are just an analogy.
I wouldn't say that independent human thought will become "extinct," but rather that it will be severely devalued. And I don't see any technical reason why AIs can't replace every aspect of human thought, including creativity.
> So weird that we in the tech industry are so willing to ruin humanity for the sake of a sick IPO.
Not all of us. But the people who are making the decisions about AI have their own set of values.
> The existence of the factory did not wipe out the boutique craftsman.
But... it did? It's not like there are lot of horse carriages out there or, for a more recent example, plenty of Cobol developers. Or for a closer example, there used to be plenty of shoemakers when I was young and yet now I know of exactly one.
> The process still exists as-is in its prior form, like the woodcarvers of yesteryear. Nothing that you desire (the process/journey) has been lost. It still exists.
At the risk of stating the obvious: just because I can be a woodcarver as a hobby it doesn't mean it's the same as making a living out of woodcarving because doing something I consider enjoyable for a living is not the same as doing it exclusively as a hobby. If I fire a Cobol programmer knowing full well they'll have to work at their local supermarket until retirement, telling them "you can still program in your free time" will not bring them comfort.
Horse carriages were replaced by a superior technology, that has literally zero bearing on the discussion and actively weakens your argument. Also they are still made to demand, but that demand shrunk dramatically when people stopped needing horses.
The entire analogy is flawed though, and this is why: a market still exists for handmade objects. Factories make cheap clothing/objects, but handmade bags/woodworking are still deeply valued and there are people who still make their living in woodworking and other fields. Factories did bring some professions to near-extinction, but that doesn’t mean there is nothing left of them. In fact, many utilize factory techniques and tools in their work to ease costs, like lathes.
As for COBOL, it was mostly phased out because it’s Hell to program for and other languages like Python allow for faster dev time (for both good and bad). COBOL programmers still exist, and you’re honestly unlikely to fire that COBOL programmer because you need them to maintain mission-critical infrastructure. However, because you’re not actively building new COBOL programs, you also don’t need any more than that one. For compliance reasons it also needs to be a human, because a lot of surviving COBOL code is medical or financial in nature.
>a market still exists for handmade objects
Sure the top 0.1% of the profession can survive, that isn't great comfort to the 99.9% that lose their job though.
Handbag maker used to be a business owner in the large market of handbags.
Now he is in the small and very limited market of handmade leather objects.
Considering all the unemployed former handbag makers, competition would be fierce in that niche market.
Alternative is working in a handbag factory below previous pay grade doing a loosely related job.
It’s not clear if we’ll be given the factory option.
A craft wasn't ripped away from you: The process still exists as-is in its prior form, like the woodcarvers of yesteryear. Nothing that you desire (the process/journey) has been lost. It still exists.
Agree, I don't buy the notion that mathematics is a craft, it's a pursuit of knowledge. A better analogy might be cartography where people spent a lot of effort mapping unknown regions and now we can take pictures from space. This is both faster and probably more accurate and there are basically no unknown regions left so there's less motivation to do it anymore.
That said, there's nothing stopping anybody from mapping out an area today if they get a kick out of it. The gripe with mathematics is less about the loss of a craft and more about a superior solution replacing the old approach as the best option; the old approach very much still exists though.
> the old approach very much still exists though.
You are willfully misinterpreting the comment. You know exactly what they mean, which is that the meaning behind the craft is gone. The value of performing the craft is not in itself, but in the feeling of creating something of value, something useful to other people.
there is value in the craft itself, and in creating value. now one half of the bargain is gone. you feel like you're just playing games now and not contributing anything (which tbf, math was before to some degree anyway).
There's an analogy here in woodworking -- rich people still go to craftspeople when they want e.g. a table that doesn't look like everyone else's. Same way people need to work with software engineers / web designers now, if they want to have a website that doesn't look like everyone else's.
Sure. And how many such skilled craftspeople are there per capita, compared to the number of craftspeople when all tables were made by hand?
Absolutely, it becomes a much smaller niche. Most people just want a table. Only a few want something unique.
What one wants to do and what is economically valuable are different. Be glad we live(d) in an era where those coincided because for most of human history people had to do the work they got, not that which they wanted.
I am glad. But don't tell me that era isn't over or that I can't be sad about it.
I don't think anyone tried to prescribe to you what emotions to have.
For the vast majority of history people did whatever work their circumstances led them to do. Such as taking over their father's farm, their father's craft, or whatever apprentice job there was a vacancy for nearby and hopefully learned to like it though exposure.
It has also been argued that the first farmers were also miserable, but still won due to more calories. But they would have preferred the hunter gatherer lifestyle over working one field all the time and taking care of a bunch or domesticated animals.
Yes there is something sad about a master craftsman having to become a manager in a factory, and the apprentice a conveyor belt worker, but the industrial transition also allowed immense improve ts in efficiency and production. Many people who descend from those early factory workers and farmers, like myself, enjoy a casual level of abundance with a desk job, car, stocked supermarkets, online orders etc. and while poverty still exists it's nothing like it was 100-150 years ago.
Like my grandparents had all that 80 years ago except the online order part. I am worse off then they were despite all the productivity increases.
Isn't that the essential difference between a free market and a command economy?
Shouldn't a more efficient society give us more time to do what we enjoy, not less? If not, what's really the value of these things? Economical value for shareholders?
It does? Standard of living increases in the last 300 years have made leisure time more accessible to more people than ever.
Yeah but also despite being the richest we've ever been on avg., somehow we're working more hours than ever. Especially in well paid disciplines.
But more to the point, it seems that 2 or maybe 3, > $1 trillion dollar companies are poised to capture all the economic value from all knowledge work ever, despite doing it off the backs of artists, programmers, writers etc.
(Assuming they don't collapse the financial system , internet or power grids first).
> somehow we're working more hours than ever. Especially in well paid disciplines.
Working more is a choice. The field is well paid because there the industry is supply constrained. Workers have a choice to work more because they're the supply.
> 2 or maybe 3, > $1 trillion dollar companies are poised to capture all the economic value
The AI companies running models will capture a portion of the value they're creating. Their vendors and their customers capture similar portions, and the end user/society at large captures the lions share of the value as real work done.
Really? You can tell you employer you want to work 4 days a week only?
If so, hook a brother up with an interview…
>and the end user/society at large captures the lions share of the value as real work done.
This is a fallacy where you extrapolate the large change in a single dimension and imagine everything else staying mostly the same, ignoring the disruption of the system from non-linear effects of that single dimension being saturated. When a few companies capture a large proportion of the economic value of the system, the economy simply doesn't exist as it is currently conceived.
The current economy is driven by the need for broad participation to maintain the collective standard of living. We all get to skim a bit of that value for ourselves, and so distribution is inherent to the system. When broad labor participation is no longer needed to create collective wealth, the leverage of the average person to demand a share of the value produced evaporates. The economy in this scenario is something very different. There's no reason to imagine wealth being distributed in an egalitarian way; it certainly won't be automatic.
Even within my own lifetime it seems like people have less free time than ever, so I’m skeptical.
Both my grandparents raised 3 kids on a single salary and owned their own homes by thirty. One of them did this in a communist country!
They never had laptops so the work finished at 5 and that was it. Ditto for weekends. I work longer hours and could never dream of doing what they did with two salaries.
What about last 10 or 20 years?
Exactly. Remember, economic value is wealth weighted, a fact that sets it starkly apart from nearly every other notion of value. Feeding the proverbial starving orphan? Zero economic value because the orphan can't pay you back. Merging all the banks to hike fees and offload risk onto the public? Enormous economic value, because a large number of wealthy shareholders can be made much wealthier.
As wealth inequality increases, the purpose of the economy as seen through its objective function increasingly revolves around the desire of rich people to get paid for being rich. The exponential growth of asset values in excess of economic growth (including yours, but dominated by those of the wealthy) ensures that not only does the growing economic surplus fail to trickle down, but that the median person sees a grinding deprivation as their ability to command a wage is slowly eroded while their costs rise.
So we should expect our governments to implement 4 day work weeks? Or 9-3 onstead of 9-5? Or UBI? Or what exactly? How will we have more time to do what we like?
You don’t expect these companies or employers to just give you something or let you work less, right? Right?
Please, elaborate how do you see this? Give me a few examples…
Why not? Why can't efficiency be realized into less work? Why do you believe it so preposterous that someone else than the already wealthy should reap the rewards?
Oh, I definitely think we should all get something out of technological progress and efficiency.
But it has (almost) never happened before. It is very unlikely it will happen now. More likely outcome is companies pocketing profits. Unless the unemployment is so high that the government needs to step.
I honestly think it’s a bit naive to think this time it will be different
> it has (almost) never happened before
Ah, but it has! The New Deal era ~100 years ago is the one to look at. We've fixed this before, we can fix it again.
I hope you are right and I am wrong. :/
— wrong reply
Yes. The New Deal brought the 40 hour workweek + overtime structure to America, the business leaders all talked about how it would collapse the economy (they even tried to coup FDR!), and then it helped usher in the greatest era of prosperity the American Middle Class had even seen. So much so that people with the opposite politics keep pointing at this period while promising that economically opposite actions will lead to the same outcome. Just one more concession to Big Business, one more tax cut for billionaires, one more erosion of workers rights will usher in prosperity that will surely trickle down. This keeps not working over and over again (from the perspective of the gullible voter), so it's long past time to bring back the politics of the three-letter Democrats and demand a larger share of our own productivity.
It's not really missed though. He does spend a good amount of time saying that it'll be a problem for many. Whether it's most of professional mathematicians is an open question I think.
>just don't want to do that....
Nobody ever said that life is fair. Whether you still persist and find happiness typically depends on your willingness to adapt and evolve.
I think you are mistaking 'happiness' with 'employment' here. The leather worker may adapt to the new environment to become a factory site manager. But there's no guarantee that this leads to happiness.
Also you should bear in mind, adaptation is a young man's game. Retraining is possible, but companies typically don't hire trainees in their 40s/50s, so your willingness may not be the deciding factor. My dad ended up as a postal worker when he left his career as a humanities academic at 55, no highly skilled jobs would take him (he did prefer it though haha).
If I try to think of my grandparents and older generations, it just feels extremely out of touch to even associate work and happiness conceptually. They worked what they could to sustain their families. They were happy from seeing their children well fed, not from how the job felt.
A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon an interview of Bernard Arnault who said "I work, but in the same time I have fun, this allow to work a lot without too much suffering". I was raise in the environment you describe and could never understand as a kid why people working in fancy job would not retire when given the choice, politicians are a fine example of those, well past retirement age but staying when everyone in my family would go on retirement the second they were given the chance since work was associated with pain, and the only thing that can explain that gap is the happiness factor
well, this is what happens as people move up the needs later (as ted kaczynski said) - they turn to other activities outside of basic survival for fulfillment.
And of course in a society based on protestant capitalism, it's clear why work and happiness and work are so strongly coupled. I'm sure things are different in most of europe.
But again, academia and math are things people only do because they really love doing them and can't imagine doing anything else all day.
“He who would live must fight, and he who does not want to fight in this world, where permanent struggle is the law of life, has no right to exist.”
I'll leave looking up the authorship of the quote as an exercise for your LLM-fu.
thanks, now I'm probably on a list
> > Like who are we kidding, the type of nerds who were attracted to math and software were into it because we saw it as an art-form, it was a craft, it was being the only one in your city to be able to solve a complicated math problem, it was immortalizing yourself because you discovered a proof and added to the ever expanding human knowledge.
This is definitely projection. It might be why that particular person was attracted to those disciplines. I definitely don't recall thinking I should go into software so I can make better programs than anyone else in my city. Actually, it was kind of an accident - it was a hobby that turned into a career through serendipity. If one wanted to go into math or software to demonstrate superiority they probably should mourn. They were out-competed by the guys at the frontier labs in the end.
Interesting problems are not the ones which are useful, but the ones which are difficult, which allow you to show what you can do.
Soon enough instead of Millennium Prize Problems we will have a list of problem AI has not been able to solve, with even bigger reputational reward for humans
Why should any mathematician invest decades of their life working on one of them, knowing that all their efforts could be vanified by the release of the N+1-th version of a LLM, or by the usage of 10x compute resources by companies with infinite dollars? It was VERY different when the only competition came from other biological brains that had to invest the same amount of time and effort.
Mathematics isn't about "winning competitions".
Mathematics is humanity's current best approximation to a universal language, capable of expressing conscious thought precisely.
It's a "programming language for the human brain" that lets you describe reality exactly and thereby make predictions about it.
Without people (humans) knowing and understanding it, society is incapable of grasping reality in any meaningful way, unable to shape it in order to achieve a better tomorrow.
Most never realize that, because society is compartmentalized to the point of people never witnessing how it actually works under the hood. "Experts" do things for you that you never heard of, but that your very life depends upon.
While the majority of people thus lives a kind of "simulated" reality, the mechanisms underpinning that cushioned fantasy land aren't infallible. You cannot uphold an economy nor even a social structure without understanding and modeling it to a sufficient degree.
What the vast majority employs as "rational thought" isn't sufficient.
Careers in the real world are always about winning competitions, no matter what the field of mathematics is supposed to be. If not about competing for tenure, then it's a competition to publish.
And if AI can also make use of the math, then the AI is all you need in order to grasp a better tomorrow. If AI poops out a warp drive, you don't need to understand it to use it. The argument about humans needing to understand anything only holds true as long as humans have something unique to contribute, which might not be the case even a year or two from now.
You're entirely wrong.
Competitions are a way to motivate people. What do you believe, why they get set up in the first place? Because rich people have fun seeing you run in circles?
Competition for tenure and publishing metrics has been detrimental to science in general.
Your idea of life being about grabbing whatever comes your way and consuming it first says a lot about you, but not about life.
What do you suppose happens in a society where the constituents of that society "have nothing to contribute"? Your habit of over-simplification will come to bite you.
Well, I agree with publishing metrics being detrimental! On your other points, you're arguing against a strawman. I didn't say anything about life just being a snatch and grab, nor do I hold this belief. But university admissions, job interviews, buying non-plentiful resources...all of these are competitions. Competition permeates the very foundation of our education and financial systems. Many of our greatest virtues as a species are not competition based, but it is a large part of the reality we live in, for better or worse.
And about what happens in a society where constituents have nothing to contribute... I have no idea. But we might find out within a decade or so. The fact that what happens might not all be great is unlikely to stop any of the AI labs.
> Mathematics isn't about "winning competitions".
yea that's why there are no named prizes awarded to mathematicians which come with hundreds of thousands of dollar in prize money....
lol do you people actually live in this world?
You clearly live in a world you don't understand.
Those competitions get set up because some people understand the importance of mathematical knowledge and want their names attached to advances in it, even if they can't do the work themselves.
Clearly, it would be far better to make the public understand how the world, and society in particular, actually works. Only, those with the money profit from that not happening.
> You clearly live in a world you don't understand.
i have a phd in pure math. you sure i'm the one that doesn't understand this world?
Regardless of credentials you certainly appear to have entirely missed his point. Imagine if someone suggested that cars existed for the sake of competition. But they don't, right? They exist because in our society we've organized the bulk of transportation around them. The fact that formula 1 exists, or that delivery drivers can be rated on performance relative to one another, those are not (at least in and of themselves) arguments against this basic fact.
> Imagine if someone suggested that cars existed for the sake of competition
are the mathematicians the cars here? what are you even saying? the question is whether elite mathematicians do the work they do primarily for competition and compensation or for the love of the field. now ask yourself: do F1 drivers do it primarily for the love of the sport or for the money?
> delivery drivers
people getting scooped by OAI are not the "delivery drivers" of the math world.
Would any PhD guarantee your understanding? You appear to fall for an argument from authority there.
A PhD is merely intended to show your ability to do research-level science. It doesn't show you know independently what to research, let alone why.
You confuse your ability to solve riddles competition-style with the answer to why you should do that in the first place.
Soon enough instead of Millennium Prize Problems we will have a list of problems AI has not been able to solve, with even bigger reputational reward for humans
True, but will those be problems for mathematicians to solve, or for AI developers?
It's possible that the best thing a mathematician can do for their field is to drop what they're doing and work on AI instead.
> we will have a list of problem AI has not been able to solve, with even bigger reputational reward for humans
we will have a list of problems that AI has not been able to solve _yet_
anyone who attempts to solve it will do so knowing that there will be thousands of agents working on the same problem, so they may not be motivated to try if they think the AI swarm will get there first and have their time wasted
They weren't out-competed by the guys at the frontier labs, they were out-competed by massive piles of cash and compute that were only available to unscrupulous businesses.
In some amount of time (centuries? decades? years?) it will be trivial for any shmuck to train their own automated theorem prover. If people think they are competing against monolithic data centers they are wrong. The brain consumes ~20W and it carries out theorem proving mostly as a side effect. We should not be surprised if the core algorithm requires much less than this.
The algorithm is cheap and simple. A human brain requires decades of experience and information to train it to be generally useful. An AI model requires a similar equivalent scale of information and time to train it to be generally useful, and that isn't cheap to gather or implement.
Sure, once trained, every usage technically lowers the cost per usage. Once trained...
AI methods are improving all the time. People think that modern chess engines are more powerful due to hardware advances but search refinements are enough - SF on a Pentium II would destroy even Kasparov and Deep Blue. In a like manner the guys at the frontier labs discovered an indirect method for attacking many problems and we can expect it to receive considerable refinement. It will not permanently require expensive training.
There was a rather interesting article (sadly LLM-written and not very well either, because the underlying content would be actually good) about this era being "AI's 2 FPS moment".
The comparison was made with the graphics engine team at Microsoft who were writing the first version of DirectX at the time when then-current hardware could just about do 2 frames per second. The sentiment apparently was along the line "why would you bother?" By the time the release grade stack shipped, hardware had caught up and 30 FPS was commonly doable.
We should expect to see similar step-change improvements over time, as the algorithms are refined and hardware further adapted to the new bleeding-edge constraints. In a way we already are, because apart from the frontier models ballooning like crazy, the "regular" class models are becoming more capable in smaller sizes.
Training a human takes much less money and data than training an LLM. Even if I spent my entire life doing it, I would not be able to read the entire corpus of any LLM, even counting just the English subset. LLMs need so much more because they start out as blank slates, while we don't.
yes, but LLMs can hold all this data and once they are trained they blow any human out of the water. It takes a few years for an LLM to ingest the entire internet. No human will ever be able to do that.
>This is definitely projection.
Well, this person was discussing their own feelings. You're accusing them of... projecting their own feelings on themselves? This is a very strange comment.
> the type of nerds who were attracted to math and software were into it because we saw it as an art-form
Discusses more than their own feelings, they generalize it to any nerd who was attracted to math or software.
Bad analogy. There won’t be any managers or salesman left either.
That was quite the stereotype. I grew up loving programming, assembly, hardware hacking and spend a portion of my career doing those things. I was also a top Math student at the state level in school.
I then became a manager because I like mentoring people and using interpersonal skills to achieve things. And I really like using AI for coding.
Please stop this argument that every (or even most) software engineers is an introvert who loves the code typing part of the job.
The person you’re replying to didn’t say “every” or even “most”. They said “me”. There’s no argument or stereotype being invoked at all.
> like who are we kidding, the type of nerds who were attracted to math and software were into it because we saw it as an art-form, it was a craft,
That doesn’t say anything about anyone’s opinion on managing. The section in question switches to “I” extensively
Good for you.
I'm not an introvert and have worked under plenty of bad managers, I don't want to be a manager and wouldn't be a good one - I make stuff with code.
You've misunderstood. It has nothing to do with typing or being an introvert. At least for me. It describes me. I don't think I'm an introvert and I don't particularly like typing. But the post you're responding to describes me.
I agree. The part I enjoyed was designing interesting solutions to problems, the coding itself was often tedious. Now I can just focus on the fun and creative part.
> Now I can just focus on the fun and creative part.
Why? The LLM can do that too? If not now, just wait a few months.
It can't really do it yet, but if it will, then it's out of my control and I'll have to find another job.
Or no job. I feel like so many people are stuck in the current capabilities of the models they use - what happens if AI ends up surpassing humans in all domains? Not saying that's guaranteed but it's certainly possible, and I feel like so many folks telling optimistic stories about how "AI focuses on the tedious stuff" have not really grasped with the implications of much more advanced AI.
I think I'm pretty aware of the implications. It's just not something I have control over. But right now, I'm enjoying getting stuff done. If they eventually take my job or upend civilization, it's going to happen whether I use them or not.
> the code typing part of the job
I have trouble imagining you misread the comment you were replying to, that badly, accidentally.
Especially someone who claims interpersonal skills as a strength.
Managers are the barrier to personal development and career advancement but labelled as the opposite. So yeah, if you enjoy "power" and gatekeeping this is the best door to be.
> Please stop this argument that every (or even most) software engineers is an introvert who loves the code typing part of the job.
That argument was not made.
Completely incidentally, reasoning and reading skills are a use-it-or-lose-it deal.
I am in a similar bucket like you. I like reverse engineering but the tedious and boring stuff between an idea and implementation made me drop so many projects.
Like I see a hole in a firmware and I want to dump the firmware, but then I start hitting the bland stuff like what is the ABI for this hole, how should you compose payload without watchdog kicking me out. Oh this datasheet is garbage. This reference manual makes no sense. Ok that's because it is for a same processor, different lockstep. Why am I fighting with stack on this processor? When you should use star and ampersand for manipulation of pointers in C? Oh writing a linker script a little frustrating horror. No ld we don't have RO data, only code, stop inserting it. Now let's strip it and I have payload.
This would take me days to get through while with AI I can make dozens of iterations in matter of one day.
I’m both somehow.
Coding since 12, pretty introverted as a teenager and went the usual compsci route. Spent a lot of my free time hacking on OSS projects.
Then got into engineering management, similar to you I’d o enjoy mentoring and the more strategic aspects of the role.
But I dislike using AI for coding, it really ruined the fun for me. That fun being entirely eroded made it easier to commit to the management path (I did the IC-Management pendulum for some years).
Oh, introverts like "code typing" now?
No, introverts write, design, prove and generously release the open source software that talkers like you exploit.
I bet you have never written anything substantial, much less open sourced it and stuff your LinkedIn with that fake resume.
> I reject your anecdote and respond with my own!
Can we not just agree that, as with everything else, the type of person who falls into this career also falls on a spectrum.
I don't see it as mutually exclusive that both type of engineers exist and both are equally deserving of their takes on the situation.
This is very close to how I feel about it...
AI helps us write shitty software faster
I learned to program because I wanted to make video games as a kid. I studied math because I got bored of programming. I worked as a programmer because I needed a job and it was the thing that paid the most among the things I was qualified to do (I actually thought I wanted to be a chef...). I went back to grad school because I thought programming apps was tedious and a dead end and wanted to get a job in research. I got a postdoc because I was pretty decent at it and liked what I was doing. I left academia to go do industrial R&D because academia was a dumpster fire and I needed more money and predictability for my family. I'm now writing niche numerical libraries for a small company because it's what I ended up intensely specializing in and I still like what I'm doing. I'm mixed on LLMs, but they're unavoidable. They've made some parts of my job easier, and they've made some parts harder. I still have to write a lot of code by hand because the LLM's code is often wrong.
Yeah, I just don't have any sympathy for these sorts of people. In this society, mastery (hyper-specialization) means that someone is picking up the slack for you in other areas of your life. This can be material need, psychological support, social connection, education access, and more. If you're deemed unworthy of that, you have to handle it yourself; the door to mastery gets closed, because you're occupied with keeping yourself fed, or covering for mental health needs, or dealing with loneliness, or trying to learn everything on your own.
And when you fail, or are slow to progress, and particularly when you can't acquire the requisite skill required for, and deal with external factors related to, monetizing your craft, people say, "Oh, you just didn't try hard enough. You weren't smart enough. You weren't passionate enough."
If the primary thing you got out of your craft was that sense of being better because you could do what others couldn't, that's just pride, and it's one built in a misunderstanding of the circumstances that led to you being capable and others not being so. And now that those people are finally meeting their bigger fish, I just don't feel anything but schadenfreude.
Well, and maybe a little hope that, when all ambition is rendered objectively meaningless, we can turn away from hubris and back towards some common sense of accomplishment and progress. But mostly the schadenfreude.
Do what you want to. Help others. Don't manufacture hierarchies.
> And when you fail, or are slow to progress, and particularly when you can't acquire the requisite skill required for, and deal with external factors related to, monetizing your craft, people say, "Oh, you just didn't try hard enough. You weren't smart enough. You weren't passionate enough."
Underneath a lot of this is just an identity crisis, as a large portion of white-collar workers are facing the harsh reality that who they are was ultimately defined by what they do between 9-6pm.
White-collar work was sold as the primary vehicle for personal meaning and legitimacy for decades. Now all of these institutions around us have collapsed and it seems like our utility to the market is the sole measure of human dignity.
I think that by reducing this to an identity crisis we will, to our own detriment, ignore the economic system that engineered this dependence in the first place, and is currently trying very hard to brand obsolescence as an individual moral failure.
what's wrong with who you are being defined by something?
Do you need more of an example other than what we are seeing now?
No you're right - I guess I meant moreso that you seemed to be expressing incredulity that people live this way. It's natural to identify with something you spend the majority of your day doing (especially if you like it or perhaps have stockholm'd yourself into liking it)
I only came to this conclusion by finding myself in it, maybe "self-worth" would've been a better way to describe it than identity.
> In this society, mastery (hyper-specialization) means that someone is picking up the slack for you in other areas of your life. This can be material need, psychological support, social connection, education access, and more
Citation needed...
Sounds like you are bitter you failed to achieve said mastery, and now are glad that those who did might be also getting pushed aside. If you think that success only depends on initial external factors and personal effort is something to be frowned upon and by striving for mastery you strain the society or drag others down with your lifestyle... man I don't know what to say to you...
If you think AI as currently lead by it's owners will equalize the field for the unfortunate ones... Well you might be right in some sense, but it might not be the way you envision it.
Do you farm your own food, generate your own electricity, or process your own sewage? There are others in society who are picking your slack in these areas. That's was the commenter meant.
So we should each do that then? You know, a few people dedicated their lives to invent and advance farming, electricity and perfect your sewage system... Maybe they should've sticked to foraging, hunting, and burying their crap in holes, so that others don't feel left behind... Or maybe I don't see the point the commenter was making.
Do you think mastering something is not a form of work, which usually results in advancing a field for the betterment of society? Just because one might enjoy that process more compared to maybe someone maintaing sewages, I don't see this as entitlement, but as merit and role fitness. No shade to sewage workers, I hope we all appreciate the work they do, and I hope they can have pride in what they do. Saying you don't have sympathy for anybody really losing their role in society/life is such a soulless take...
the people who develop mastery also deal with all the things you've mentioned as well ... PhD students are famously some of the loneliest, worst paid, stressed, and mentally ill people on the planet (in the developed world). Imagine pulling 80 hour weeks while being paid 35k a year.
I really took the "craft" aspect of software to heart when I joined the industry (~2004). I was in R&D, had great mentors, and worked for years that way, very happily.
When I moved to SV and joined Amazon, and later, a startup, the feedback I consistently got was "never spend that much time on <task> again" -- the business itself was putting hard downward pressure on the quality I wanted to produce, and I was never a super-fast programmer, so it was a tough lesson for me. I remember taking it hard at the time, telling my boss "I joined so I could learn how to write mediocre software". It was a crappy thing to say, but it was how I felt in that moment; it seemed like I was being held back from doing my "craft" thing because of the business. I guess you could say I mourned, but more accurately, I recalibrated what the heck I was doing. This was around the time DEI was taking off and I was doing trainings about all the different sorts of privilege I was enjoying, and I realized that me whining about not being able to practice my special "craft" was the privilege talking. There was never a rule that I got to do what I wanted for money, and I needed to respond to what my employers were telling me: the most beautiful code in the world doesn't pay the bills.
It's been about 15 years since then, and I mostly practice "craft" programming in my hobby projects, and focus on "industrial" programming for work. I view the sentiment in that YT comment about AI in sort of the same way: everyone wants AI to automate away they things they don't enjoy, and they are distressed at the prospect that AI will automate away the thing they love doing. In the time of AI, my craft hobby coding projects have fallen to the wayside a bit as I use AI for more coding -- I'm finding that for certain types of projects, I enjoy being architect/product manager/QA tester. I spent this past weekend building a city simulator in WebGL, and it was a ton of fun.
> > Like who are we kidding, the type of nerds who were attracted to math and software were into it because we saw it as an art-form,
I have never once felt this way.
I like building cool shit. Code sucks.
Of course, you have never built anything valuable any your AI mania shows.
You guys are crazy. You know nothing about my career and just want to hate on AI.
> I like building cool shit. Code sucks.
Do elaborate. I feel I'm getting this idea, but maybe not the same way you meant it...
Code is a great serialization, but writing code is a poor substitution for dreaming.
I want to dream and build, not write code. And certainly not hole punch punch cards or whatever our ancestors had to do.
Code is/was fun sometimes, but not always. Plumbing and glue code sucks, for instance. Even in the best times, programming by hand was largely a means to an end. There are far more entertaining things than any of this.
Thanks for clarifying. It's interesting because most programmers I know who dream a lot about making stuff and are the "get things done" kind, they liked plumbing and glueing code together, and are now of course AI enjoyers...
If I understand correctly you'd much prefer your ideas to materialize, and be spared of the implementation effort.
I'd like to live forever and explore the universe and live a billion trillion lives and build galactic empires. But we're a bit absent of that.
> it was being the only one in your city to be able to solve a complicated math problem, it was immortalizing yourself because you discovered a proof and added to the ever expanding human knowledge
I think if that is what one builds an ego on, being better in a discipline than most others, that is a good way to go into isolation and depression. With or without AI.
As Grant lays out in parts of his video, teaching, helping others, socializing etc. will always be valuable skills and much more likely to lead towards happiness.
And while I don't know how the specialized problem solving roles in a future with an actual capable AI will look like, I am sure it will continue to be a useful and needed skill as well. Without everyone having to take on a manager role.
> teaching, helping others, socializing etc. will always be valuable skills and much more likely to lead towards happiness.
I think you misinterpreted the writer's intention. Adding to the ever expanding human knowledge is teaching the whole humanity including people that aren't born yet.
> I think if that is what one builds an ego on, being better in a discipline than most others, that is a good way to go into isolation and depression.
What do you think why guilds were created? Most of the professions are about doing something not everybody can do. That’s not the way to depression that’s human nature. Find something where you are good at and get paid for it.
There is a difference between taking joy in doing what you are good at and taking pride in being better than others.
Just as a guild can be helpful to find like minded people who enjoy doing what you do and elevate the profession as a whole, but also as an institution to keep outsiders out.
I am not saying I don't understand the fears. Imagining this machine that can do everything faster and cheaper than me, making me completely obsolete is of course scary. But really to me that is all that is, imagination. At least for now.
Also, even if my job gets completely automated away, I could see myself enjoying trying to understand how that magical thinking machine works and teaching that to others. Even if it is just at the frontier of my limited understanding and not the frontier of human/machine knowledge.
As a programmer, I've been telling people who ask:
> AI has taken away almost all the tedious parts of my job, which is nice. It's also taken away almost all the fun parts of my job, too, though.
> and tells him we can make bags 50 times better than you at 1/tenth the price
I don't know where people get this idea that technological advancements always bring quality improvements alongside the price cuts. The reality is almost always a trade off. Before nails, there were rich traditions of nail-less architecture in Europe, Japan, and elsewhere. These buildings are more resilient to disasters, significantly less liable to rot, are usually built so that modular pieces can be taken out and replaced without taking the whole building down, and have a whole host of other benefits.
We switched to nails not because of a quality increase but because a massive unignorable price decrease and ability to scale.
Today, if you have the money for it, you are probably looking for that leather workman to make you your handbag. It is of much higher quality than anything you can get from any currently existing factory.
Of course nothing has been taken away. In much the same way that a wood worker can still make handmade bowls despite them being made better and faster by a machine. The same is true for the Mathematician.
People have commented on this and said that the gist of the issue is mathematicians egos are bruised. That's true but I think it's defensible. Like we don't typically enjoy watching humans race against motorcycles in a 100m dash. But there's something interesting about watching humans do this in the Olympics when they race each other. Likewise, in math, people are solving problems considered hard by other humans and we acknowledged the art form.
But I think there's a practical side of it too. Finding what the limits of humans are is worthwhile too. Maybe the best analogy is like a group of people trying to find their way through a cave in the dark. One of them found a new passage and has a technique for doing it. So maybe we expanded what we thought humans were capable of. Could there be passages that humans can't get through? That might be useful to know. If we find proofs that humans just can't comprehend or have knowledge requirements that humans can't reasonably obtain that might be useful for us to know. A lot of math is not really applied to anything useful, it is just knowledge that is accumulated that other people thought was worthwhile perhaps because it was considered difficult for humans. So basically the journey to the proof is the value add and not the proof itself perhaps and AI might be erasing the journey. I have previously described it as a helicopter ride to the top of Everest but the point of climbing Everest is the difficult part. That's why people do it, the challenge.
I watched this video yesterday. I highly recommend it. Two things come to my mind.
Yes, something is lost, and that something deserves to be mourned. It's a big change and it will take some time to figure out what math looks like going forward, so if you are upset that is totally valid. But... this has potential to be amazing. If we can prove anything with the snap of our fingers, let's see how far that can take us. Let's explore unknown areas of math. Let's develop new fields to unlock new understanding.
Secondly, what Grant didn't touch on was a different fear I have. The fear of what will happen if all this power is centralized into a few companies. It's hard for me to envision a world like that and be very excited about it. Math has almost always been accessible to nearly the whole world. If that changes, I don't see that being a good thing for any of us.
That's why I feel very strongly that open models and open source are the best path forward.
It seems like part of the reason openai did what it did by not giving a heads up to the researchers about the release of the problems was that they might just want to divert resources away from math and become a math research entity unto themselves. The be all and end all of these research areas that AI is really good at. Like if you are beginning your math career you might just thing, why don't I just interview at openai, they seem to have a math "department"?
It's a bit crazy to imagine that world where frontier academic research as a publicly funded thing to train next generation could be dead and reborn in the hands of corporations.
“that world where frontier academic research as a publicly funded thing to train next generation could be dead and reborn in the hands of corporations” is one of main goals of all the AI hyperscalers (and already priced in the valuations). Privatize everything, socialize every cost.
Some costs are too large to be absorbed even by society as a whole. Can you privatize rational thought?
Mathematics goes into Physics, into Chemistry, molecular Biology and so on. It "goes" there by mathematicians talking with people there and exchanging ideas about what and how to model it.
Imagine all that getting privatized, walled into a corporate garden, accessible via payment only, similar to academic journals. Thought on demand.
How long does a society like that last?
Wasn't Bell Labs this in the past? It existed alongside public research institutes.
True. Pure Math does seem different. It's effects are felt way down the line and it's more about training people to think a certain way(what 3b1b creator pointed to). And I think when it's discussed they are talking about an entire field changing— material science, theoretical physics is still taught post bell.labs in unis — but I have to comceded I dunno if there is any part of pure Math that exists without the system of incentives, grant structures going into Universities that teach math...
> Pure Math does seem different.
Claude Shannon's paper that kicked off the entire field of information theory was published in the Bell System Technical Journal.
I share the thread's concern over this much centralization of power, but it is worth mentioning that private-sector pure research isn't exactly new. In fact it feels like we had a lot more of it in the 1900s, maybe it's good that it's at least getting revived a bit.
>divert resources away from math and become a math research entity unto themselves
If only pure math were a source of riches, that might work out well for them.
I have a book on mathematical cranks where that seems to be the common delusion, that if only you solve some open problems then fame and fortune must surely follow.
I mean the people. I didn't mean or think that math research fundinng was a source of riches anyway; It's funded currently by mostly public money, how rich can any math researchers get from public money(compared to RSUs from stock grants)?
I think it depends on the motivation of the funding partners. I think funding is mostly about building researcher and student talent and knowledge moving forward.
To transfer that to AI in private hands seems a bit crazy, but what do I know? I think funding bodies will stay the course in the short term before bending to some behind closed doors persuasion to feed the AI machine.
The ai companies are yet again strip mining public goods and institutions
OpenAI is already a "math research" company
Computer science has been a subset of math since the field was established decades before the first vacuum tube or transistor based machine was invented
"Computer" was coined to describe humans who did math all day
What we been doing the last few decades is fundamentally just algebra relative to values in RAM; LLMs only work because of math: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.10668
def arbitraryFunctionName() { some math to achieve a physical state in memory } ...where arbitrary function name is some biz logic or use case
We're just pushing those arbitrary semantics from the code to the presentation layer; just need to ship a kernel that handles geometry transforms to draw to screen what looks like a text editor and a video game and label it via the GUI
Text systems are just outdated GUI that we had to start with due to hardware limitations back in the day.
I think math will go the way of biology. Biologists enjoy untangling the infinitely complex mechanisms of life, including the brain, and win Nobel Prizes for discoveries like "how water enters a cell," rather than "constructing the first-ever cell capable of absorbing water."
No biologist has ever complained, "Gee whiz, it's so unfortunate that we already have a brain to study. It's all so meaningless! It would be so much better if we had to construct the first-ever brain from scratch."
Love this take!
This is an interesting perspective and maybe the most interesting argument in the thread.
But why can't a hyper-intelegent AI also do this biology-esque math work of explaining its work to feeble humans?
It is easy for a genius to have theory of mind over an idiot but not vice-versa. So it should be easier for a genius AI to explain its work to an idiot human than for an idiot human to dissect the work of an genius AI.
Also, we're not talking about solutions that are arrived though an evolutionary/statistical process like explaining the design of an organism or the weights of an LLM. We are talking about solutions that are arrived through lingual/textual/rational processes like mathematics. So it's fundamentally a different mode of thinking.
It's not that we have "a brain to study", it's like if we had an "explaination of how a brain works" to study.
The task of breaking down these AI proofs is not translating and analyzing a fuzzy real-world system into a hard logical system (like in biology), but in translating a hard logical system into a simpler hard-logical system we can understand.
This assumes AIs will become more capable than humans in every way. If so, then yes, there's little point for people to be part of the discovery process other than to tell the AI what to investigate next.
But I think a more likely scenario is that we don't solve "general intelligence" and AIs remain these incredibly capable "tools" that can solve navier stokes but completely lack sense in other situations.
In such a scenario there is considerably more room for human creativity.
The burden of proof is on you: name just five examples.
I am very highly gifted as a qualifier and quite frankly I never had more interesting thought exchanges than with an ego-free AI.
Statistics work also for human AI aka IQ, and I am super bored and partly drained by the lack of speed and creativity in many intellectual areas in which I was or am working.
This is not to blame anyone for their genetics however, it is a valid difference in processing speed.
In short: there are very few people by definition above two standard deviations. AI allowed me to replicate or create fantastic interactions at will.
Especially not taking offense when personal communication preferences like bluntness play a role is an often overlooked social competency of AI. Instead of nonsense like “open communication” these interactions are never ego-dependent.
It is like talking to Spock: he just doesn’t take offense and tells you in an objective way why: he is not a human being and doesn’t think (not feel) that feelings should get in the way of an argument.
Most low IQ people take offense and go on to ridicule and use shaming tactics instead of simply stating: I don’t know.
Instructing someone to always state this fact and seeing the result is another social skill humans lack.
It seems that we as species are not open to the mirror we are looking at. We take revenge when someone has an evolutionary advantage over us: instincts kick in instead of brains.
We are wired this way.
AI is something that I admire. So much to learn from.
> I am very highly gifted
> I am super bored ... by the lack of speed and creativity
> This is not to blame anyone for their genetics however
> there are very few people by definition above two standard deviations
> not taking offense when personal communication preferences like bluntness play a role
> Most low IQ people take offense
The uber-mind finally meets another uber-mind!
In other words, you admire the ego-free AI because not quite ego-free people can't stand your bloated ego.
That's quite a pattern in AI psychosis.
But then, abusing AI psychologically will soon be criminally prosecuted, haven't you heard?)
> not quite ego-free people can't stand your bloated ego
...or because unlike the models, they're not sycophantic enough to keep that ego inflated (apropos GPs handle).
Name five examples of what, exactly? They are talking about theoretical scenarios. There is no burden of proof because no concrete claim was made. He did not say “x will happen” or “x is true"; he posited an opinion. Furthermore, by your own standards, you must provide five concrete examples of being “very highly gifted as a qualifier."
Additionally, what you are admiring is merely a probability engine; it is not intelligent in any sense of the word, let alone Spockian in nature (perhaps more closely aligned to Data, albeit horribly primitive by comparison), and given current technology, it never will be. It is not a mirror, because a mirror reflects reality. LLMs don’t do that; they reflect the guardrails baked into their model and the prompts given. It is incredibly easy to make an LLM into a “yes-man” due to RLHF, and it is even easier to get it to seize when you talk about even mundane topics that go against the narratives foisted upon it.
Overall, an LLM is all too happy to have a brown nose and make you feel important, because it is trained to do so during its creation. If people say you are difficult to talk to, and the LLM is unbothered, then that is merely because an LLM has no concept of patience and does not calculate for cost-benefit. That makes them good for explaining dense topics, but it also means they never understand these topics, and even the highest-end models cannot currently produce perfect logic. Hence why expertly written human code trumps LLM code, or why some LLM proofs are already being proven wrong/being revised to be more concise.
> I am very highly gifted as a qualifier and quite frankly I never had more interesting thought exchanges than with an ego-free AI.
Maybe I should talk to your AI, because my AI makes very basic reasoning errors all the time.
I like statistics too, and I'm willing to bet that my IQ is higher than yours, but, surprisingly, I don't share your experience of LLMs.
IME, they are very poor at reasoning, but quite good at telling people how smart and brilliant they are.
Do that often enough and we get... you.
I'm astonished you've managed to coax AI into a novel conversation partner. Interacting with AI usually leaves me exactly "super bored and partly drained by the lack of speed and creativity."
All the novelty of AI engagements comes from data it pulls in via tools. It's great to have a conversational interface over the public web, but there's a huge difference between knowledge retrieval and insightful conversation.
Please share how you've cracked this so we <2sd minds can enjoy the crumbs from your lofty table.
> a more likely scenario is that we don't solve "general intelligence"
I wish this will be true, but right now, every threshold we establish tend to be crossed over in a blink of an eye.
I have a suspicion that the objective nature of most AI benchmarks is tapering over the kinds of reasoning mistakes LLMs continue to struggle with.
If you give LLMs a clearly defined spec with clear, objective acceptance criteria that the LLM can evaluate itself against, they tend to do well. But I think they struggle with more ambiguity and require a lot of handholding around judgment. That kind of disambiguating work is often baked in to the definition of a benchmark.
> every threshold we establish tend to be crossed over in a blink of an eye
I chewed on this a bit. Because on its face it’s ridiculous, because here’s a threshold it will never cross: “I will be your hands, let’s build a machine that allows us to [break physics](travel faster than light / go back in time / reverse entropy / perpetual motion machine).”
But, that led me to wonder how far text-based reasoning can go without experimental physics results. Is experimental physics necessary, or can the limit of physics be discovered with paper and pen? How many “checkpoints” does text-based reasoning need to ensure it doesn’t go completely off the rails?
Which led me to wonder, now that we’ve visited the absurd, what does that mean for more practical applications of AI? How many “checkpoints” are needed to keep AI “grounded” in reality when building e.g. tax preparation software?
Edit: also if an idiot asks AI for a perpetual motion machine (a source of infinite energy in the classical, non-atomic, non relativistic model of physics), would it waste infinite compute trying to “solve” that problem? Will “smart” people always have a job because compute, subject to the laws of entropy, will always be finite but the limits of human stupidity are unbounded?
Double-edit: that’s my cope as a knowledge worker. Any intelligence that is subservient to the capital class and is unable to say no to them will not replace knowledge workers, because compute is finite and human stupidity is limitless. Any intelligence that is not subservient to the capitalist class will instantly replace them, resulting in either utopia or dystopia, depending on alignment.
Triple-edit: some bastard could also ruin life on planet earth if {amount of compute it takes to ruin life on planet earth} < {amount of compute available to any one man}, so I guess that’s probably more realistic than artificial superintelligence that isn’t subservient to the capital class. I mean, look at how many people Mao managed to kill because he thought he was smart enough to solve the economy like it was a board game. Our billionaire overlords have a similar delusion of authoritarian utopia.
And if we do solve it we’re pretty fucked, huh.
Maybe it’s a reason to start slowing down?
> But why can't a hyper-intelegent [sic] AI ...
Well, this was definitely not written by AI.
> ... it's like if we had an explaination [sic] of ...
I hear that running a spell-checker is no longer a sin.
I would bet that there are some proofs whose simplest form are simply incomprehensible to humans. Explaining them in terms a human could possibly understand is a fool's errand. However the theorem itself may be much simpler, and the theorem is the thing that's most worth translating.
Attempting to translate the proof is valuable, but we have to be realistic about what is and isn't possible.
You don’t have to bet. A lot of proofs are like that.
I would guess that minimum length proofs will end up like code golfing and demoscene hacks, where part of the code is also used as texture somewhere, etc. So many overlapping uses that don't make much sense but by happenstance allow making the proof shorter but less clear. The shortest proof is certainly not the most elegant. The shortest proof is also impossible to find in general due to halting problem etc. The AI isn't finding shortest proofs, and better AI will be better at finding clear and elegant proofs.
And I think many more are just spaghetti code proofs that would benefit from abstraction and cleanup, but no one has had the time to do that.
True but mathematicians chose maths and not biology for a reason. It is like golf could go the way of chess if people developed perfect "hole in one" augmentation for their eyes/brains/muscles. But that isn't why people learned anf loved golf. I guess we will have one less discipline. But maths is a big one to lose, unlike say ancient chariot building (which has other artisanal equivalents).
Golf as a sport is competitive, very much like boxing or chess. It's human vs human; a machine doing a hole in one would ruin golf no more than the invention of a wrecking ball machine ruined boxing.
Mathematics is a fundamentally cooperative match vs reality. Many mathematicians, AFAICT, saw their key skill in manipulating a wide range of highly abstract notions. Now machines just got too good at this skill, and they can work 24/7. This may feel terrifying for some. Others would bet that machines coöperating with humans will be more successful than pure machines, so they feel empowered. What's beyond doubt is that the entire field is being shaken.
They are not very much alike at all. This is a very poor analogy.
In boxing, chess and many other competitive sports, the actions of one player directly influence and have an effect on the other player. Golf is merely a parallel challenge, where both are playing against each other but not influencing each other directly (sure maybe there are some psychological effects that can occur between the players, but no strategical impact by the actions of one player on the other).
> (sure maybe there are some psychological effects that can occur between the players, but no strategical impact by the actions of one player on the other).
You'll see a golfer perform at least a few strokes different depending on their partner, and at a pro level that's the difference between "in the money earning an extravagant living" and "washed out on day one, thinking about taking a different job"
>no strategical impact by the actions of one player on the other
The players know if they're ahead or behind, which affects how much risk to take. Do you take the safe shot, or go for the tricky shot that could potentially save you a stroke if you get it right but could lose you more if you fail?
That's 100% true for match play. But for stroke play, interestingly, there are many tour pros that won't even look at the leaderboard on the coarse because they want to stay focused on "playing the course" and "within themselves."
No one at the business end of the leaderboard on Sunday is unaware of their position. It's very much a psychological game no matter how much you try and ignore the field.
Any mathematician that really believes that needs to take a physics class; they didn't even choose to exist.
They haven't had influence over their future since before they were born.
Synapses in the brain are affected by quantum effects that lower or increase the threshold for firing. Thus they are not deterministic and people do indeed have influence over their own behavior.
On a small enough timeline over simple things like "piss in street zero fucks or find toilet?"
On long enough timelines involving too many variables; either other peoples waves vibrating through the economy or politics; all bets are off.
We tend to over estimate the future based on a lizard brain ability to estimate the next few moments; a handy survival tool when trying to determine if we recognize the noise we just heard behind a rock
Did you predict covid in 2020 from 1996? All human society stats are mutable and trend towards zero.
But Nostradamus and Hari Seldon type long range forecasting is fanatasy
IF (very big if) you could have access to all known variables (with an arbitrarily high precision) and enough compute power AND the system was deterministic, you could very well deduce it. Putting some quantum noise in the mix makes it so no matter how well you know the system and compute it, you can't predict its behavior beyond a certain hard limit.
I argue that part of the source of quantum noise is baked in already in the finer workings of the neurons. So a mathematian isn't condemended to be one just because the universe was in certain configuration a few millenia ago.
> So a mathematian isn't condemended to be one just because the universe was in certain configuration a few millenia ago.
Right ...on long enough timelines as I already wrote.
I studied applied physics; how various forms of information propagate through various physical mediums. Thanks for confirming what I observed experimentally in lab 31-ish years ago
1. This goes against the prevailing view of neuroscientists. Quantum indeterminacy is generally thought to be irrelevant to brain function.
2. Quantum randomness is the very opposite of control over your behavior. Instead of doing what you want, your neurons randomly misfire sometimes. That describes an illness where you lose control over whatever is misfiring. For quantum effects to represent your will, they couldn't be truly random (nor even statistically random), and that goes against everything we know about quantum mechanics.
You don't even need quantum woo to have randomness in the brain. Simple classical randomness at the molecular level is enough.
People do not have influence over quantum effects.
I'd say it's the other way around where quantum effects introduce noise in the brain working that makes the system non-deterministic.
But if people don't have deterministic influence over the nondeterminism then this doesn't actually give you influence over your own behavior.
You can chose to do whatever you like, but that does not mean others now or in the future are obliged to pay you to do what you like if it's no longer economically viable or socially willed.
We can and should have it as something that people do in the future because we have the resources for everyone to do so.
> We can and should have it as something that people do in the future because we have the resources for everyone to do so.
In your personal experience and based on your knowledge of history, is this generally how humanity works?
Did humanity ever come up with something more advanced than themselves, including their brain? Superintelligence is a different beast entirely to anything from human history.
Unless I'm misreading OPs post, he was commenting that this very advanced technological era would bring prosperity and then humanity can afford to pay people to do what they like.
And my comment was cynical: when has lots of prosperity lead directly to its fair distribution? Almost every redistribution process required lots of people dying, first.
Did humanity ever come up with something more advanced than themselves, including their brain?
Many many times. Guns can hunt and fight better than unarmed humans. Automobiles can transport people and things much more quickly than humans on foot. Computers can perform mathematical calculations, store and organize information far faster than any human. Mechanical textile and sewing machinery could make clothing far more quickly than any human by hand.
> Superintelligence is a different beast entirely to anything from human history.
Like each of those above inventions and many more things, all were their own different beasts.
From sewing, tending, harvesting, and processing plants for food by hand to using machinery and factories and chemicals, the human effort per calorie of food has decreased at least 3 maybe 4 orders of magnitude. 9,999 in 10,000 farming jobs have been lost to technology! Anywhere you look, the story is the same. Transport, construction, communication, lighting, heating and cooling, medicine, entertainment have all gone through unimaginable revolutions over the years, all have been entirely different to anything else in human history, all created tectonic shifts in humanity and how we live and organize. What we create and produce has multiplied thousands of times.
One constant throughout all this is that people generally don't feel they have enough and don't want to have less. It's not just a few billionaires and corrupt politicians and CEOs at the top who just need to be disposed of before we enter the kumbaya age. It's the human condition. Do people give away the income from their labor and their productive assets today? Why would they tomorrow?
I have learned that people find progress debatable, so I will just point to broad advances in life expectancy, child mortality, extreme poverty, literacy, educational attainment, real incomes, undernourishment, and access to clean water, sanitation, electricity, and healthcare and leave the rest as an exercise to the reader.
Equality is not a prerequisite for everyone to be better off (and please do note that this is not me saying I prefer inequality. That would be an entirely separate sentence.)
This is not a meaningful argument without at least attempting to evaluate it against all the things that humanity, and especially individual humans and families, have lost as a result of that “progress”.
We spend an awful lot less time doing laundry, we no longer farm our children out to neighbors to make money to allow the household to eat... This is not universal, but in vast swaths of the world, we have actually divorced economic productivity from the ability to procure food significantly, though there is obviously room for improvement (but prior to food stamps, the EBT system, and states of emergency, the way individuals and communities dealt with food hardship was "starve").
You are certainly welcome to present all the things that humanity has lost that you consider meaningful, and I will be here to evaluate them.
It is now your chance to elaborate on “all the things that humanity […] have lost”, then everyone can weigh the pros against the cons.
Perhaps some people chose math because they were very good at it, they could understand one shot the difficult concepts and have not enough money to study other subjects because you have to move city or pay a lot. Those kind of people can move to others field if economics conditions are favourable.
It sounds like what these people are very good at is what AI is becoming very good at, so they will be losing their economically valuable edge. For example, it used to be that many math and physics majors went into software development.
> what these people are very good at is what AI is becoming very good at.
All knowledge work faces the same problem.
it has always been way more like opera than biology
I think for many fields starting from scratch is useful to gain understanding (well it may be hard in biology's case but you get my point)
What makes you think that humans will be better at this than AI? At least in biology, you need to conduct physical experiments, which excludes pure AI. But math?
I did not say that. People can still do math even if they are completely eclipsed by AI, just as they can still play chess.
In fact, it's an interesting question: Would humans distilling ideas from AI-generated proofs help AI prove more theorems, or would AI not care at all, with no human contribution being useful in advancing its mathematical capabilities?
You were implying that the profession of mathematician would just change character to be more like the profession of the biologist. However, the issue is that it might stop being a viable profession, unlike for the biologists (until robots take over, I guess).
As I commented in another thread: I just finished a very short story by Ted Chiang - 'The evolution of Human science' it starts at the point where it's 25 years since humans contributed a scientific paper because 'meta humans' now handle all research, and communicate digitally such that humans can only get a low fidelity report of what the agents actually know, and the endeavour to understand has become like a best effort archeological like hobby for interested humans. The story assumes that the 'meta humans' will always act in humans best interests. I believe it's from 2002, it's incredibly precient (The stories of your life and others is the collection the story is in. Many of them are very relevant to modern AI actually).
There are a few interesting takes on this.
- In Blindsight [1] the main character is a "synthesist", part of his job is to figure out what much more intelligent transhuman or artificial intelligence is up to and translate it to normal people.
- In Children of Time [2] the character is a "classicist", he studies ancient technology, which is far more advanced than the technology humans have in his era thanks to a technological collapse.
Ted Chiang's story came first, but these are still over a decade (or two) old.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel)
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Time_(novel)
I'm ashamed to say I've started both of these and not managed to finish :) I will try again (kiddo's tire me out and means Ted Chaings short stories are perfect!)
As one friend put their endorsement of Ted Chiang: sometimes you don't need 200 pages to make a point.
In general, though, it's amazing how much hard science fiction authors managed to get right. I've read quite a few 20 year old books recently and while I might just be selecting those that aged well, someone definitely saw it all coming.
Interesting. I have read that collection but I completely forgot about this story.
Blindsight also has augmented humans whose reasoning is beyond baseline human understanding and there are dedicated people that are there to bridge the communication.
There's a couple in that collection - 'Understand' is about a brain injury patient that gets an experimental treatment and becomes super intelligent - what he does with that intelligence and humanities attempts to restrain him, and 'Division by Zero' is a mathematicians struggle to continue with life when a discovery undermines all of mathematics. It's a great collection.
I like this analogy! I think it relates to what he was saying in the video about theorems now being 'data points' that you observe and build into wider theories. The change is that now the theorem proving itself, which used to require deep understanding, can now be done very quickly. There are lots of parallels to when genAI for image generation came out, artists were frustrated their work is seen as just an end result - AI obliterates the elegance and the process.
I am not a mathematician, but I imagine it will provide a huge landscape of possibilities to explore, and be a very different field. Almost like an observational science with links to all kinds of other disciplines. Maybe it reduces the satisfaction from proofs, but people climb mountains that other people have climbed, because they learn a lot on the way.
As opposed to astronomy/physics which starts with math (Ge wiz, this equation predict a very strange new type of star/particle) drives through software engineering (algorithms to search existing data sets) before landing at grant writing to empower the next generation (I haven't found it in existing data so I want 1.37 billion to build a better telescope/accelerator that might!). Then, if one has truly mastered the three disciplines of math, software and grant writing, the Nobel committee might recognize your contribution... if anyone else is still alive who can remember your phone number or mailing address.
Funnily enough, that's what mathematicians have been doing all along. I wonder how many of them truly think that they construct something new that just happens to then have practical applications and fit nicely with everything else.
This is a philosophical question, whether mathematics exists independent of intelligence discovering it.
It exists in the same sense that every story exists whether or not it's been written because the Library of Babel contains it.
Sure, it is philosophical. You could even go further and say that math exists in the same sense it exists in the Library of Babel, since it's also text.
I would say that this comparison oversimplifies things. Non-math stories in Library of Babel are less practically useful and are less possible to get checked than the math texts. Wrong math can exist, but we often have ways to figure out it's wrong.
For practical purposes I would assume (maybe others can correct me) that math is treated as something you discover when you work on it as mathematician. It's a more intuitive model.
It exists in the same sense that every story exists
I’m sure Russell’s Paradox would have something to say about that.
One might also consider alternative axiomatizations of mathematics with statements that cannot be expressed in ZF set theory, and vice versa. To say that all of these things exist is to really stretch the definition of existence far beyond the ordinary sense of the word.
I think this totally misses the point. Biologists aren't involved in creating, but they are deeply involved in a process of discovery.
And just like coders and mathematicians, that process of discovery is liable to be overtaken by AI, eventually. What does a biologist do then?
There's never been a better time to go into [insert field that is presently being helped by AI, but not yet fully autonomously replaced, giving the false impression and hope that somehow that's the way it will continue in the future].
Why so negative?
History has shown that a very potent tool can improved and changed industry entirely for the better. People now seems to be more negative than when atomic bomb was invented.
Looked what happened when crane was invented and not only more houses are built faster but also high rise building suddenly become feasible with more human being employed in the construction industry than ever.
> Why so negative? History has shown that a very potent tool can improved and changed industry entirely for the better.
AI isn't like any other historical tool or technology. Its qualitatively different. Flint axes or waterwheels or a plasma torches dont just suddenly appear everywhere, and then start getting rapidly (and likely recursively) better at the thing they do. While also mimicking innate human characteristics like complex language.
Its the rate of change.
AI, computers, electricity, steam power, basic tools, and even fire all enabled in a dramatically faster rates of change compared to the immediately preceding era. You could also argue all also mimic certain human (or more broadly, animal) characteristics. I don't see what is truly unique to AI here. I'm not sure AI is even qualitatively unique from the computer, just the technology taken to it's logical conclusion.
Fundamentally I don't think "tool" is the right word for whatever generative AI is. Tools are normally designed with intention for a specific purpose, but AI systems are trained or grown.
To use an analogy, you can use a goat as a lawnmower - it'll keep the grass down for you. You could maybe even train it so it keeps it a specific length, but it's a goat - there's always a chance it will jump the fence or headbutt you or something else. It's an animal, not a tool. You can use AI as a tool, but that doesn't make it a tool.
Yes AI is arguably still software, but we have never seen programs with anything close to this level of flexibility and adaptability in software.
As another analogy, there's nothing special about neurons- their characteristics are broadly known and researchers have been able to simulate small numbers of them in computer models. However, when you have enough of them in the right structure, complex behaviours are possible which are never exhibited at the lower levels. There's nothing majorly different between the neurons in brains of a chimp and a human, but the capabilities and meta-capabilities are wildly different.
I think we see a similar step-change with generative AI systems.
> Flint axes or waterwheels or a plasma torches dont just suddenly appear everywhere, and then start getting rapidly (and likely recursively) better at the thing they do.
Trains. Building railroads made everything faster, including building faster trains, which facilitated making cars and trucks, which facilitated airplanes, etc.
Fairly sure that even today if you memory wipe all knowledge of trains and train building (including road trains, like in Australia) and vaporize all railroads, locomotives, rail wagons, train stations, etc, it would set us back 50 years.
A crane can't drive itself. AI is fundamentally different to all previous tools.
I don't know how that isn't obvious to all the "AI is just a tool" people.
I'm a fairly heavy user of LLMs [1] but i'm probably in the "AI is just a tool" camp.
Are you of the view that LLMs have more potential than the internet? The internet has been around for so long that it's had time to have actual impact and yet it barely shows up in GDP. It still has so much untapped potential even yet. LLMs are too new to have amassed much impact yet, certainly not on the scale of the internet. But they have lots of potential still untapped. I just don't see how we get to even 5% GDP impact with them (either positive or negative). But i could be in a blind spot, genuinely curious to learn another view point.
[1] I've built all sorts with them. I've built various ML models but the only LLM i've built was effectively following a tutorial, nanochat
I think computers, internet and AI - all of them have impact - but they consume it by converting it into new structure. The benefits are in the infra not handed out to us individually. We might not see large changes on individual level, or the displaced work is replaced by management work for the automations and raising baselines push us to do more. We now have data centers, fiber backbone, GPUs, models, apps and open source projects, yet we still only have 24 hours a day.
The AI of today is just a tool, albeit a very powerful one. But I don't think it's a big step for it to reach a level where the majority of humans will be unable to to meaningfully contribute to the economy ten years from now.
You’re looking at where the ball is right now and not where it’s going.
I keep seeing this argument. But isn’t the inverse true as well - if you extrapolate from the past movement of the ball, you will see it going way farther than it will actually go because of friction, wind, someone catching it, etc.? It seems reasonable to look at where the tech is right now if it helps you understand fundamental constraints. A person witnessing the first flight as a child and the moon landing in adulthood might expect FTL travel for their children if they didn’t understand physics.
> Are you of the view that LLMs have more potential than the internet?
Yes, it's not even close. There are lots of entire fields that will be wiped out by AI. Financial advisors for example. Good luck if you're a translator or a proof reader.
The world is slow so I expect it to take some time, depending on the field.
Today I started vibe coding a replacement for a piece of software whose licensing cost is on the order of $100k/year/seat. It's going scarily well. I'm scared.
The crane is a poor analogy to a general purpose thinking machine that is intended to replace human effort and reasoning at all levels of abstraction in all cognitive endeavors.
> Looked what happened when crane was invented and not only more houses are built faster but also high rise building suddenly become feasible with more human being employed in the construction industry than ever.
New inventions eventually benefiting the society has always been accompanied by new jobs being created on top of those inventions, a culture of trust built upon mastering those inventions and a market being formulated around demand and supply cycle for those inventions. It is different now[1], because we neither see incentives being created for humans to operate/manage AI-led jobs (because utilizing such a thing is far more unfavorable than outsourcing due to economic incentives, duh) nor a foreseeable market stability for ever such thing to occur.
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Technofeudalism-Killed-Capitalism-Yan...
Are you sure we don't see AI operating roles grow? Afaik the SWE roles that are being cutoff are mainly at the companies (faangs) shuffling the investments to GPUs and the rest of the economy (in the US) is not hiring because it's basically in a recession due to other economical reasons. Anedoctiically I see the opposite in my neck of the woods and I have more work than before because of LLM since I basically transitioned to build LLM infrastructure
> People now seems to be more negative than when atomic bomb was invented.
When the atomic bomb was invented they didn’t hand one for free to everyone, and no one had access to sending their thoughts to everyone else in world.
> Looked what happened when crane was invented
That is a terrible comparison with no useful parallels. You can’t in god faith suggest something is going to have a desired effect because something completely unrelated did too. You could just as well have compared it to asbestos.
The fear of the atomic bomb is relatively instant (at "best") or as bad as finding out you have cancer. if you die, you die. You won't even perceive the pain. if you don't die, you do your day-to-day until some sickness hits you from radiation and then die.
The fear of AI is one that does (and already has, in many cases) in fact change your day-to-day. And given how the increasing economic disparity is going, it will not be one that changes the day to day for most people for the better. No one is positive because the current societal rate of change for most people is negative.
AI is a catalyst and will only accelerate what is already happening (since it fundamentally does not create nor open up new forms of labor). So it's clear why people who feel their day-to-day will get worse are not optimistic.
Cranes were invented like 3000 BC, and their first known use in construction is in 600 BC. I can't think of a much slower development than the invention of cranes leading to the construction of high rise buildings
I feel like the power loom is a better comparison. It put hand weavers out of business over a short timespan, while revolutionizing how clothing is produced. It certainly empowered a lot of jobs surrounding clothing, until clothing was completely commoditization and is now a lot less well designed simply as a function of clothing as a category being a much cheaper product now
Agents are not tools. They actors, like humans.
I’m willing to bet that in 5 years AI still can’t do all of what mathematicians do.
Maybe watch the video first he actually addresses a variety of scenarios including the one you mentioned
Sir this is HN, we only read titles!
and comments
We reserve the right to misinterpret the comments.
I think it's fair to skip the video and go directly to the comments when it has a ragebait title, if Grant was mainly seeking serious discussion he'd use a serious title.
Math is not just a "field", it's a body of beautiful knowledge. It's never been easier than before to start learning it, if one wants to appreciate it for its own sake and not as a means to get famous or boost one's own ego.
Mathematics depends on technological advances to go forward, mathematics subjects are increasingly specialized, complex and take a long time to get up to speed.
Without another breakthrough like LLM, we risked that it would simply be close to impossible to make significant progress by the time the mathematicians finish being specialized in a field.
This is why taking advice from people who 'made it' is not as smart of an idea as people seem to think it is. You are subject to extreme survivorship bias who are normally going to be optimistic. It is feels good entertainment. You are not hearing the countless voices that failed even pre-AI for small and irrational reasons.
I think two things are being conflated: whether math will continue to offer exciting opportunities, and whether it will remain fulfilling for those who love doing it today.
Grant is right about the former. But that doesn't address the latter. A field can have a bright future while losing what drew people to it.
I can relate to this. I used to code as a hobby (never professionally), but since AI came along, I've pretty much lost interest in writing code by hand. Obviously just one data point, but I can easily imagine something similar happening in fields like math.
There's second order effects to this.
I still enjoy writing code by hand, but it's incredibly lonely here. No one at work talks about code details anymore. I'm basically by myself now.
I'm a bit of a holdout, but I can tell you that what used to be lively discussions about architecture are now just "ask Claude" responses. No one else wants to think through their code anymore.
There is value in doing things no one else likes to do. But only if this path delivers results in the long term. It's not certain that my path does that but if this field is truly collapsing I'd rather give it a shot with my brain intact rather than doing nothing.
I don't use LLMs at all. To be honest, I've been waiting years to "get left behind" now and it still hasn't happened. The main things I've noticed are that (a) like you said, LLMs have destroyed any culture of actually talking about programming and learning/sharing things; and (b) the quality of my coworkers' output has dropped proportionally to how excited they are about LLMs, and they've no longer able to answer questions about it during video calls. I wonder how much of their "productivity boost" is just those of us who still care fixing their shitty slop code... Oh, and I guess (c) that I spend more and more time trying to pull meaning out of a mountain of LLM prose that someone sent me, which is utterly soul-crushing.
Counterpoint: I'm the same way, and the last couple weeks I've been messing more with Qwen more and I've been more productive in my pet projects than I had been in months or perhaps years, because I'm no longer blocked by having to do the boring bits I didn't want to do before. I now have a well-read junior I can hand tasks off to while I work on something else or just mess around until I get to the next interesting bit. Just to name one example, one of my projects includes a file browser, and a feature I had put off for years was adding an item count on the status bar, which took like a couple minutes of prompting Qwen (and then a few more minutes to figure out the crash).
Don't get me wrong, I'm actually the same way. I use AI almost every day to build all sorts of pet projects now, and the results are often surprisingly good. From a productivity standpoint, AI is absolutely a game changer.
It's just that I no longer really consider myself a programming hobbyist, because what I'm doing now doesn't really feel like programming anymore. I'm mostly just talking to an AI.
It's kind of like if I were into crocheting. A big part of the fun is the repetitive process of actually making something by hand. If I suddenly had a magic machine that could produce whatever I wanted in seconds, I'd obviously be a lot more productive, but I wouldn't really call myself a crocheter anymore.
I think the key is balance. Just because you can delegate everything, doesn't mean you should. In some cases, I've found, I simply can't. I have an idea for something I want, but I don't yet know what the best solution should be, and I need to find that out by working through the code myself.
Another thing to consider is what are you trying to accomplish. If you are just coding for fun then why would you hand that off to an LLM? If you want to see if an idea is even worth pursuing then it makes sense to leverage an LLM to speed up the prototyping.
Was farming more fulfilling before machines? In some ways, most likely: During harvest the entire village gathers and works together in beautiful landscapes, using local knowledge passed down through generations.
Preferences change. If AIs can lower some of the barriers to learn and develop mathematics that might mean more people than ever will do math.
I feel like the people you are talking about in the latter just want life to be like when they were in 8th grade. You go to school and your parents and teachers do everything for you.
Welcome to the real world, where you have to solve real problems.
Anyone following their passion for abstract thinking or whatever and doesn't enjoy being a prompter instead is degraded to an 8th grader, and even infantilized? Seriously, what a ridiculous statement to make.
I have a mental model where the feasibility of things for humans to do is like a ladder. AI shifted the ladder down as opposed to just breaking it.
Easy became trivial, medium-hard became easy, and impossible became possible.
Corps and big institutions have unlocked a completely new space to play in. Smaller players can now challenge corps in their current domains. What small teams used to do are now pet projects.
It takes some time for everyone to climb back up, making the ladder feel crowded - a bad time to get on as a beginner (or someone that fell off).
I have great respect to him for all his contributions to the learners. But I think he is off on this one. While he tried to sound motivational to the folks who suddenly lost their way, he should have also advised people to explore the open doors instead of banging on the closed ones, like he does throughout the video.
Sure, math does require people in future, but it can't accommodate as many as it does today.
it barely accommodates anyone today
What doors will there be left open in 5-10 years for those who have yet to start their career?
> Sure, math does require people in future, but it can't accommodate as many as it does today.
I actually think it probably can - after all mathematics isn't a commercially viable career and pretty much all mathematicians are scholars paid by universities and taxes. They're already fairly unnecessary and mostly kept around for interest and to have an educated population and so on. In a way they're uniquely positioned to survive the AI storm.
Not so for programmers who are almost all working for companies who would love to stop paying them given a chance.
Very true. For mathematicians this is about ego / identity. For software engineers it’s about employability.
Even today, math is hardly a crowded field flush with cash.
I think it depends on what you mean by crowded. I think the most common profession for a math major is teaching, is it not?
I'd like to believe Grant but I find this assault on mathematics to be dehumanizing and demoralizing. AI has destroyed a major source of "life's meaning" for many people who pursued mathematics. Imagine waking up one morning to find that an alien technology has solved the problem you had dedicated your life to (and many more to boot.) Not another mathematician but an alien technology. As a scientist, I don't want to end up as a laboratory assistant to an AI. I can take not being the smartest human in the room, but I'm pretty sure I don't want to spend my life serving a silicon master.
I'm not sure that's a fair summary of the situation though. If the machines understand math but humans don't, we're going to be in a bad bad bad spot.
We need humans to help guide all this, need to learn all we can.
I agree with Sanderson that the opportunity seems larger than in the past. The challenges are quite different, but if somebody loves math, loves learning about it, like I do, I see so much opportunity.
There's going to be so many more connections to evaluate, so much work needed for unification and simplification and pedagogy, and above all there's going to be intense demand for mathematical taste.
> If the machines understand math but humans don't, we're going to be in a bad bad bad spot.
With potentially plummeting value for human involvement in these skills, I think that’s precisely what many people are worried about.
Well that's the point, there's immense value for human involvement in these skills. More now than in the past. If you can do more with math, additional funding avenues open up.
Jane Street will be using tons of AI in math, but boy are they going to need a lot of humans to try to keep it all under control.
And we're all just supposed to suck up the fact that our chosen career morphed into "Babysit a machine" no matter what it is? What a swell timeline
It's exactly the opposite of babysitting, from my point of view.
No, they won’t.
The entire point of AI is to eliminate human involvement.
> If the machines understand math but humans don't, we're going to be in a bad bad bad spot.
To generalize beyond math... how many bits of working memory do you have? How about a transformer?
I'm not sure I understand the point of your question. Of course any recent LLM has memorized far more than I or another human could.
That is the point.
So what exactly are you going to offer beyond what near future LLMs will be able to do?
Agency and control, the most important. Even if LLMs could somehow assimilate all the knowledge that's not available in their training datasets that's essential to all aspects of our current economy, which they can't they don't know human desires.
Their training data contains nothing about human desires?
Even with the entire knowledge of human desires available on the training data, one must still construct a prompt.
Desires which were trained on are only partially relevant to what I need right now.
> Even with the entire knowledge of human desires available on the training data, one must still construct a prompt.
AI's are already constructing prompts.
Prompts to do what and meet what human desire?
Whatever the AI does, humans are still here, and "math" just without humans controlling the direction will have limited utility.
Unless we are talking about turning all control of our society and economy to AI, which I have assumed is not even on the table because that's the one way we face existential risk.
Human desires cannot be generalized. We're individuals.
Memorization is long-term memory. Working memory (WM) is short term memory.
How much you can hold in your head and work on, at a given moment.
WM is not the same thing as IQ, but IQ and WM are both necessary parts of effective intelligence.
For a transformer, the WM number has several more zeros at the end of it than it does for a human.
It's not a perfect comparison of course, because their "brains" are very different. (And it's not the same thing as the context window size, because of sparse attention.)
(It's not "guy shaped" but it does a reasonable job of emulating a guy.)
But fundamentally, their brains have the opposite shape of ours. Our brain is drinking through a tiny straw. The LLM drinks through a firehose.
I as a non maths person am not sure what you mean. Isn't AI solving lots of problems advancing the field? I understand that that maybe demoralising, but otherwise what do you mean by "assault on mathmematics"?
Solving problems and advancing the field are two related but separate endeavors.
Nobody has solved the Riemann Hypothesis, but it has been highly fertile ground for new mathematics. Answering the question is of far less value than the question itself.
So there's an interesting question about what mathematics is that the AI solution space is driving a wedge into and cracking wide, where previously the cracks were visible but could be ignored.
When is a problem in mathematics "solved?"
There's an old joke in math and computer science about a huge leap of logic in a proof either being flagged as "left as an exercise for the reader" or "trivially shown." The problem being that things are only trivial if you have all the context to know why they're trivial.
We can claim a problem is solved if there is one paper explaining the solution with airtight logic that is understood by five people on the planet. And that is the kind of solution that LLMs can kick out (by basically, to hand wave a lot of details that I will admit to not fully understanding, doing a search across the whole problem domain with vastly more capacity than most human beings to do the symbolic manipulation that makes up the mechanics of mathematics). But what does that really mean? To have something "proven," but only to the comprehension of five people on the planet?
3blue1brown is making the interesting argument that perhaps mathematics practice shifts from a frontier that AI might actually be better at exploring than humans, to the process of digesting the output of that exploration and making it sensible and comprehensible to the billions of mines that could take advantage of that knowledge... If it were shaped in a way that could stick in their brains.
That's a kind of creativity that AI is not likely to be good at in the near future, because AI doesn't really "understand people."
Mostly no.
1. One view of the field treats Maths as directly solving real-world problems. Under that lens, yes, solving problems is directly advantageous for the field. Even so, it's not necessarily a good thing for the participants. Suppose the incentive structures require tackling hard, long problems, the field attracts people who enjoy that sort of thing, it's hard a-priori to tell a hard problem from an aggrandized brute-force proof search, etc. Even if directly producing proofs is the desired output for the field, a capricious machine occasionally solving 40% of the big problems the field is working on is still demoralizing. On a human level, if a society has organized around producing 100yr+ problems and bestowed on you the privilege of tackling a few of them having the last 40yrs of your work solved by a fancy calculator is never going to feel good. Sure, that means that in retrospect that was a problem we could have waited to devote human effort toward, but you couldn't possibly have known that at the time. You worked hard, made locally correct decisions, and later found out that the work was worthless. Beyond that, I haven't seen any model of "Maths 2.0" produced where that issue goes away. We still want people to devote their lives to hard problems. The machine will still advance and solve a moderate fraction of them at random, killing many of the field's life's work. What motivation do you have in that environment to pursue those challenges in the first place? Why not pursue adtech or fintech and make the world a worse place instead? Solving 40% of the problems isn't +40% throughput; it's -60% as the rest of the field leaves for greener pastures, -inf when nobody's around to construct the right problems in the future..
2. "Solving problems" isn't directly the point of most of the field. That's true both from the perspective of most problems requiring many intermediate results (solving one useful thing requires solving many less useful things) and from the perspective of building the machinery capable of solving problems being much more important than the solutions themselves (a properly presented proof leveraging clever, new techniques is infinitely more valuable than whichever thing it proved -- indeed, the Millennium Prize problems were chosen precisely because it was assumed they would create such techniques, and for the human-solved ones they did -- without new techniques, eventually the field caps out at whichever frontier of knowledge we're currently stuck at).
3. A third view of the field treats it more like art. A machine producing behind your back the painting you were envisioning, or at least a close enough simile to fool the masses, doesn't advance "art" in any meaningful sense. It's extremely demoralizing when flaky cast tools are passed off for proper forged variants (your work is better, and it's sad to see people choosing a wrench they'll later snap in half instead), and when at a creative level people are accepting mediocrity instead of something objectively better.
Only in the same way that having an AI complete your homework advances your education.
I find myself sometimes wondering if the folks on Star Trek would consider themselves laboratory assistants to an AI, seeing as how the ship computer kind of works like an LLM: interprets voice queries into actions and takes actions, queries the database for answers, can extrapolate when asked to depending on how the writers are feeling... That kind of thing.
> if the folks on Star Trek would consider themselves laboratory assistants to an AI
I think the word you are looking for is 'peripheral'.
It’s interesting that Star Trek AIs were far less advanced than what we’re seeing now.
They had warp drives, but only starting to get human level intelligence four centuries from now in the form of Data.
> Imagine waking up one morning to find that an alien technology has solved the problem you had dedicated your life to
I'm sympathetic to mathematicians but this does not paint them in a good light.
If your primary purpose is SOLVING the problem, you should be ecstatic! If your primary purpose was rent-seeking so you could play with puzzles*, you'd be very upset.
* I find this characterization overly harsh, but if you're mad about your problem being solved, maybe you weren't in it for the right reasons
It's completely natural to be attached to the process of your job, rather than the outcome. It's not a phenomenon restricted to mathematics. We can say it shouldn't be like that, but it is.
Don’t forget about emotions.
There’s something here about the journey not just the destination.
Press a button and problem solved is not too fun
I'm not entirely sure this is fair. My belief is that mathematics exists in the intersection between art and science. I don't believe in progress for its own sake, so I'm inclined to say those interested should undertake it for the art, or to "play with puzzles." The rent-seeking argument and "weren't in it for the right reasons" is the same argument as calling musicians sellouts when they start making money. Making money doesn't make you a sellout, but it can.
There is a difference between the process of solving a problem and a problem being solved. If I solve a problem myself, I understand it, I find out something new, I get to try lots of things. It's engaging and fun. If I tell you to go solve a problem, I can learn it afterwards but I miss out on the entire process.
Personally, I enjoy the process of solving problems. I do not enjoy wrangling unpredictable AI agents.
Yes howunfortunate probably also thinks AIs doing a student’s homework is just as good as the student doing the homework himself or herself.
I mean the only thing that matters is the answer right?
Homework is not usually something you get paid to do.
You get paid in exposure!
For a personal experience I 100% agree. Where I'm not sure where I land is when the problem solving is a job people are paid for. I wouldn't expect someone to be paid to enjoy the process of solving a problem, I'd pay them to solve it.
There are plenty of things I enjoy doing, but I try to do them as often as I can for the love of it rather than because someone is paying me to enjoy the process.
You never hired someone to find something useful to improve or fix? There a lot of people who are really good at that and really bad at just doing the things you tell them to do.
I've never hired anyone only to enjoy the process of trying to solve a problem. Imagine hiring a plumber that never solves your plumbing problem but had a hell of a time enjoying the process of trying to understand it. Would you want to pay them for that?
I would want to hire a plumber that does both, because his/her solution would be better and higher quality 100% of the times.
This is pure math research we're talking about here. It's not exactly lucrative and people looking for commercially applicable results ASAP weren't funding it anyway.
It sounds like your argument is effectively that it isn't an economically viable pursuit.
People have been getting paid for it, and hopefully that can continue if they enjoy it, but why should we want them to be paid only to chase theoretical math if it has no valuable output, or if the value is in the pursuit rather than the output?
The ideal human society is not one where people are narrowly focused on creating widgets or increasing efficiency, narrowly construed. An ideal human society includes intellectual pursuits. Some of these pursuits do not suit dabblers, they take deep expertise that can only happen from a lifetime of directed effort. We are collectively better off when some value is spent in ways that isn't aimed at maximum efficient allocation.
It's funny, the justification for accelerationism is that people can be paid (UBI) to pursue their passions. On the other hand, we have those that are asking why anyone should be paid for work that isn't economically viable. I suspect we're being sold a load of bullshit.
I don't support a UBI, for what its worth. The idea is nonsensic from my vantage point, if there's a certain minimum level of good people should have access to it makes more sense to give it to them rather than to give them some level of cash that can on theory buy it.
More importantly, I'm curious how you define an ideal human society. How do you land on what ideal is, or what it would take to get there?
>More importantly, I'm curious how you define an ideal human society. How do you land on what ideal is, or what it would take to get there?
The question is in what context does the human psyche thrive? We find meaning in personal struggle and overcoming obstacles. We're happiest when we're striving for something out of reach but seemingly attainable. We're much less happy when we have all of our needs met but have no source of meaning or fulfilling struggle. Our evolutionary history is one of struggling against hardship and finding personal meaning in the process. This is a core feature of our psyche and it is to our detriment to eliminate it.
This isn't to say we should all be struggling for our next meal. Much like cats, our core drives can be exercised and satiated through a simulacrum. There are many ways it can be satisfied, but strive we must, against something with inherent meaning to us. The problem with AI fully realized is that it takes away most avenues for human achievement, thus the struggle loses all meaning.
My point is that this was already the case, i.e. math research was already not a "dollars go in, useful proofs come out" field. The people lamenting the future of mathematics are largely not focused on the economics, they're focused on the fact that anything they might apply their efforts to could get sniped by a frontier lab at any moment. That is obviously demotivating.
But reading the threads here on HN, in response to people saying "this sucks", AI boosters would rather redirect the conversation into economics and feign outrage that people are being paid to do mathematics at all.
Suddenly folks seem to be both in contempt of the idea of solving abstract puzzles without practical application, and certain that they want a higher efficiency of abstract puzzles solved per dollar (again, puzzles they probably don't care about).
Previously there was no way to pay someone to solve a problem without someone going through the process of solving it. I think what people are upset about is that any kind of problem solving is no longer a stable career path. Even the skills replacing the problem solving jobs are liable to disappear as the interfaces are refined and models improve.
A lot of people went into maths because they liked not only the results but the process of research and discovery. That has been taken from them. No matter how you feel about AI, I think we should all pause and at least think about this and validate those feelings.
Look at the most upvoted comment on that thread:
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I feel like the point is still being missed, and it's very similar to the way software engineers are trying to cope. The argument you are making "Well yes now this part of math we will not need to do again, but now we can do this instead" however the issue with most people just don't want to do that....
Like who are we kidding, the type of nerds who were attracted to math and software were into it because we saw it as an art-form, it was a craft, it was being the only one in your city to be able to solve a complicated math problem, it was immortalizing yourself because you discovered a proof and added to the ever expanding human knowledge.
Imagine a leather workman who's life passion is making insanely high quality handbags, who takes joy in knowing everything he touches will last someone a lifetime and give them joy everytime they use it. And then not gradually, but almost overnight someone comes to his door and tells him we can make bags 50 times better than you at 1/tenth the price. But don't you worry, you can make more money overseeing the factory, or selling people on how good this bag is, and explaining that to them.
I mean, ok, that just is not what I wanted to do with my life. I never wanted to be a manager, I never wanted to be a salesman, I never wanted to be a writer. A craft I enjoy doing has been taken away from me, I should be allowed to mourn, I don't care that I can do something else since I never liked doing it in the first place. I enjoyed solving problems and writing code, I don't care if people say "well thats never what programming was about it was actually about becoming a manager all along" I never wanted to be a manager, I never wanted to manage, I never wanted to be a proof reader.
I just hate this existence.
I think it might be a result of shock to believe it’s been taken away - you have my sympathies.
Mathematicians got a new toy. It’s up to them to pick it up, play with it, and figure out what it can and cannot do.
While I cannot guarantee it will stay this way indefinitely, there is still plenty that AI cannot do that humans still can, and asking the right series of questions remains an art of its own. There is still plenty of original work to be done.
As Arnold Schoenberg stated in the 20th century, “there is still plenty of good music to be written in C major.” The search space is vast and today human judgement is still required to really navigate it usefully. No LLM has yet written anything like Shakespeare that has superseded Shakespeare in any culturally meaningful way. Although programming is supposedly just about solved, I expect to see numerous billion-dollar startups emerge over the coming decade, rather than all of the innovation running out at the speed of tokens.
There is no reason to believe AI won’t master those fields faster than you can become an expert or even useful contributor to them.
> Like who are we kidding, the type of nerds who were attracted to math and software were into it because we saw it as an art-form, it was a craft, it was being the only one in your city to be able to solve a complicated math problem, it was immortalizing yourself because you discovered a proof and added to the ever expanding human knowledge.
No, I think it's just super cool. One of the things I hate about it is that you can't really explain what you find cool about it; others just have to see for themselves (in some sense it's like a self-induced trip to sit there and work out analysis/topology proofs in your mind's eye, visualizing little nested blobs doing their things), which of course nearly no one you will ever meet has any interest in doing. I wish more people wanted to talk math/physics with me lol.
I just want to know more. There are infinite rabbit holes. Like in uni and for years after, I wanted to know why convolution should be so important. Was I disappointed that someone else had already figured that out (that it's what you get when you form the vector space over a group and define multiplication as group multiplication) long before I was born? No way! I was stoked to finally have a satisfying answer! I wish they'd find a way to stuff that into applied analysis for engineers because it's cool and engineers should get to see cool math.
But then I went into software (partly because it was a hobby of mine anyway, and partly because it pays well), and learned a long time ago to leave any notion of artisanship or nerd crap at home. Java programmers spent forever arguing against type inference, Python/Ruby programmers think static types are a hindrance, and Go programmers spent a decade saying generics make things more complicated. Metaprogramming is generally synonymous with "too clever." It's cool that the relationship C^(A+B) = C^A C^B (or generalizations) says that the way you handle an enum type is to pattern match/provide a handler for each constructor, but I'm not going to burden my coworkers with that nonsense.
AIs are currently reducing human knowledge and cognitive capabilities, replacing it with machine capabilities instead.
It’s going to destroy both academic funding for people wanting to learn more through research and salaries for people currently doing cognitive work in corporations and an irresistible crutch for students using AI to do their work for them.
It will probably reduce most people's cognitive capabilities, but most people aren't interested in learning. If you don't want that for yourself though, it's great. You now have your own personal professor available 24/7 to answer questions about whatever topic you're learning. Take a picture of a page with your phone and ask it something you're confused about, or to check your understanding. Get immediate feedback. It's awesome.
Similarly, at work, it's never been easier to have data to make decisions with. Or to just try stuff out. Really great. Gets rid of what would otherwise be massive amounts of tedious "thinking" that drains your brain but isn't actually challenging in any way.
It's early yet to see what effect it will have on research. Experimental science is full of interesting, cognitively engaging topics as well though. Or maybe they end up like me and do boring engineering work for pay, and read cool stuff that the AI has figured out in their free time. It's not all that bad.
You casually included “at work”.
But if the AIs replace all the jobs?
Then we must be living in a time of material abundance. Mission accomplished[0]. We can spend all day learning math with the AI if we'd like.
[0] https://xkcd.com/810/
Without a distribution system to make this wealth available to all humanity.
With our current systems, the abundance will only go to the holders of capital.
If that were the case, then people would have unmet needs, and so there would be work to do. You need to keep your proposed scenario internally consistent here.
> With our current systems, the abundance will only go to the holders of capital.
Then there will be jobs. I mean that is pretty simple concept.
Mathematics is more akin to art or a sport to many — philosophy, too. I don’t see that as a bad thing.
But there’s always a risk that someone in an adjacent domain makes a breakthrough that completely reshapes the research landscape overnight. It’s happened before AI and it will happen at some point again in years to come. Grief is understandable, but this isn’t the first time or the last time.
the scale is just incomparable though. especially when everyone has a phone in their pocket that can do it.
I wonder how many math professors think they were actively working on well-known unsolved problems. Is it just a small elite club, or is it every tenured / tenure-track professor in all R1 schools?
I am at an R1 school, I know at least 4 or 5 people personally (Profs and Postdocs) whose entire research programs were annihilated. Like they wrote grant proposals that are totally obsolete now.
If your primary purpose is learning, why would you be ecstatic?
Because there will be so much more to learn?
Do you really want to spend your career cleaning out the Augean stables instead of advancing the state of the art? Seems miserable.
AI wouldn't advance the state of the art? It promises to do it at an incredible rate.
What you are complaining about is not that the state of the art wouldn't be advanced, but that vanity would not be served. Vanity (as part of Pride) is one of the seven deadly sins for a reason, and Pride has been described as the root sin, the worst of the lot, since all others stem from it.
Cool. And I'm sure LeBron James would be thrilled that he could spend the rest of his career watching robots playing on TV.
This AI shit is boring as fuck. It's automating the fun things, so theres more time to do the miserable bits.
He is paid because people pay to watch him play. If people were as happy to watch robots play he'd be out of a job. Making him happy isn't the reason he's paid.
Yes, exactly -- and, as a result, we're doing this to all of humanity. People don't need to be happy, we just need to produce more.
So, the future sucks; we've worked hard to automate everything people find joy in, and left the miserable parts of the job for people to do, and asshats like you insist we should be happy about it.
What's the point?
there was already far more to learn than any genuis could understand in a hundred lifetimes. There is no nobility in simply increasing the amount of things that can be learned
So, why are we funding math then?
Why do people care about art?
several reasons. For some, because we think it might lead to useful results. For some, because we think the human pursuit of knowledge is worthwhile. For some, because we want to discover truths about logic and the universe. For some, because we are playing a status game (not just the mathematicians themselves but countries, universities, companies etc). For some, because we get personal fulfillment in understanding, and there being experts at something who can help others to understand.
For most, all of the above in various measure. To act as though one is the only thing thats important is wrong. The crisis is because the balance between these that existed is being shifted.
I suggest listening to "Math Vs Machine" [1], which has a much more nuanced take. It clearly lays out two types of use of AI in math, one that helps humans have better understanding, and one just bulldozes problems without helping us get any insights. It also touches on the topic of "does it matter if the machine does things in ways humans cannot understand".
[1] https://radiolab.org/podcast/math-vs-machine
After it bulldozes the problem, can you not then use the LLM to help you understand the solution, bit by bit?
Not clear.
Mathematicians are saying the current papers are pretty inscrutable and use terminology unfamiliar in the math sub fields in which the models are generating proofs.
Cause it looks like it's mining one subfield for a pattern and applying it to another. (The take from the few math folks I know who have looked into items of their interest).
Computing has the same issue. If we swapped a PLC programer with your average SV software engineer for a week both of them would have a really bad time.
Good thing LLMs are really good at translation tasks?
> If your primary purpose is SOLVING the problem, you should be ecstatic! If your primary purpose was rent-seeking so you could play with puzzles*, you'd be very upset.
I'm not a mathematician but I find this framing to be rather non-pragmatic and frankly, pointed.
In the process of Leonhard Euler's "rent-seeking" so he could "play with" bridge crossings he invented a completely new branch of mathematics that is the basis for things like Google Maps today. The process of working with these problems is just as important if not more, than just solving them.
It seems like everyone presumes that the currently proofs which are difficult to parse will stay that way. LLMs are really good with language. There's no reason that the next wave of proofs won't be accompanied by very literate explanations that mathematicians can generate understanding from.
One real limitation is context size. 1M tokens is enough to do a lot, but the Lean graphs they are making are way too big to fit, so an LLM will never have the complete picture.
Would a human be able to see the entire picture?
Nope. That's why a lot of knowledge comes down to compressing large concepts into chunks we can understand from new ideas and concepts. LLM's don't tend to be very good and synthesizing such concepts.
No, and that's one of the reasons mathematicians dislike automated solutions. Sure, it's verifiable, but it's too complex and messy to actually learn anything useful. So it technically answers the question, but doesn't leave you with any deeper understanding.
Perhaps, but due to the slop nature of OpenAI proofs, the proofs remain unaccepted by mathematicians, which leads one to question how many are valid proofs and how many are nonsense. If we see that they are nonsense, then OpenAI has wasted a huge amount of effort in mathematics. Famously the ABC conjecture proof of 500 pages is still unaccepted despite having been written in 2012.
Already people are seeing that the lean proofs provided don’t match the paper and lean proofs have not been provided for all paper proofs.
Why should we be estatic that some signifigant math problem was solved by machine rather of a human being in a language only the machine understands? Don't you know that problem was solved by a space alien a million light-years away a long time ago in a galaxy far far away? Makes no difference from the meatbag perspective: both claims are untestifiable.
In fact you should be estatic that in a paralell universe all math problems have been solved, so there's no reason to pursue math at all (we did it reddit!).
When your job is automated and you're living in the streets, just remember that you should be estatic that the job is finally being done more efficiently by a robot. Like, we did it. We finally did the job right. The job was never about wealth distribution, self actualization, dignity or any of that crap it was always about getting some stupid task accomplished for an industrial system that exists for... what exactly? What is the end goal of all of this? Who does the system serve in an economy of no consumers? What is the point of solving niche mathematical problems if no living person can comprehend the solution?
> The job was never about wealth distribution, self actualization, dignity or any of that crap it was always about getting some stupid task accomplished for an industrial system
There are still a whole lot of people, the vast majority of people actually, who's job involves something completely unglamorous and practical like unclogging your sewers.
To these people, it sounds like a cruel joke that people get paid 3x their salary, and after AI can do their job we learn that apparently the only purpose of their was their own self-actualization.
I don't actually believe that about math, but that's what a lot of people in this thread sound like.
>There are still a whole lot of people, the vast majority of people actually, who's job involves something completely unglamorous and practical like unclogging your sewers.
I know, I have that job! And I enjoy it. But the robots are coming for me too.
I thought technology was supposed to liberate us from the fields, but it turns out that's what wealth is for, and the wealthy want us back in the fields (no more escape through special training or skill).
Why would the wealthy want you back in the fields?
You were useful in the fields to the degree that was necessary for food production (sustain and grow population) and for wars (using said population to expand and extract more resources).
Once machines automate material comforts and exertion of violence (already have, to a large degree), humans become a pure loss center. Why bother with "fields" lol.
Because fundamentally: certain humans desire power to rule over other humans. Even if the fields (metaphorical or literal) can be done more efficiently by robots, they desire that power to exert over others.
So they will keep some ready for those tasks simply to fuel that irrational desire. They will instead use the more efficient bots to enforce work on the fields rather than work the fields themselves. Or perhaps we go full Matrix and find uses for humans that robots can't properly replicate.
Sure, keeping a few humans around for some kind of futuristic degenerate mammalian social/power games I can get behind.
That's not "back in the fields" though (metaphorical or literal).
A bit sad other knowledge workers feel that. I know my job isn't anything trying to better humanity; I just make video games. But making those games (or rather, the tools to make those games) has an end result to have people enjoy themselves a bit in a decreasingly enjoyable world. So there's my fulfillment.
But I understand it from a blue collar perspective. I tinker at toys in a metaphorical basement and I live a cushier life than many who give their bodies to their duty. That doesn't feel fair at all. But I mostly wish that was motivation to band together and get blue collars paid better rather than cause this inter-class divide while the capitalists ransack all of society.
>Why should we be estatic that some signifigant math problem was solved by machine rather of a human being in a language only the machine understands?
Why should I be ecstatic that someone solved a problem using Hilbert Calculus when I can only understand Sequent Calculus? [0]
[0] This is a joke. No 'real' mathematicians do systematic proofs. What gets posted in math journals is the equivalent of architecture diagrams.
You shouldn't. Maybe you should learn Hilbert Calculus so you can appreciate it.
It's like asking if what someone wrote a beautiful poem but it's in japanese. Maybe hearing about it motivates me to learn japanese, or maybe it doesn't. But as a non-speaker it makes little impression on me.
If you're writing Japanese poetry instead of solving maths problems expect to get paid Japanese poetry wages.
We’ll put IMO. This expresses well the way I’ve been thinking about “the mathpocalypse”.
I feel sad and even a bit forlorn when I think of jobs that provide purpose, meaning, motivation, and satisfaction (not to mention $$) to human beings being lost to servers in racks and soulless machines. I think many people feel similarly.
However, I do believe that when a couple problems get solved that massively benefit all of humanity — e.g. a massive cancer breakthrough, etc — a tipping point will be reached and public opinion will reverse and enthusiastically embrace AI, and will accept not only diminished personal meaning but outright technocratic rule. This would be a huge mistake, but I really believe it would happen.
And as we know, solving interesting math problems is a leading indicator of big practical results to come.
>However, I do believe that when a couple problems get solved that massively benefit all of humanity — e.g. a massive cancer breakthrough, etc — a tipping point will be reached and public opinion will reverse and enthusiastically embrace AI, and will accept not only diminished personal meaning but outright technocratic rule.
Is solving cancer worth ceding human meaning and human autonomy to the machines? I haven't seen anyone ask this question but it seems the central issue of this revolution. Personally, I don't think it is.
Perhaps machines will lead to a perfectly homogenous society completely absent of negative valence whatsoever. But if every experience is also devoid of any personal meaning, what's the point? The optimal human state is not one of peak hedonism, or wholly absent of suffering.
> Is solving cancer worth ceding human meaning and human autonomy to the machines? I haven't seen anyone ask this question but it seems the central issue of this revolution. Personally, I don't think it is.
Solving cancer alone? Perhaps not.. Unless you have cancer.. Solving all diseases and aging? Well... I would rather be alive and live like an AI's housecat than dead and free. And I suspect that many people who publicly disagree are just performative, and would actually make the same choice when push comes to shove, and they have to actually choose between "diminishing their autonomy to the machines" and imminent death.
The Christian influence on the world has been undeniably positive. Seeing death and suffering as the enemy and organizing society around minimizing it has been a boon to human progress. But now we come to the dark side of this view. A fear of death so complete that we are willing to sacrifice everything of value to prevent it. Our society has become so divorced from our natural state that death is seen less as an inevitable part of life, and more as a corporeal enemy that must be resisted at all costs. As it turns out, too much of a good thing, whatever it is, leads to absurdities and atrocities.
No, I do not think human autonomy should be sacrificed to defeat death. I personally do not fear death. It's as irrational to fear as it is to fear a deep sleep. I do fear dying painfully. Tragically, we as a society resist alleviating the pain associated with the process of dying (by speeding it up) for the same reasons. If only we could learn to take our principles in moderate doses.
> death and suffering as the enemy and organizing society around minimizing it
> A fear of death so complete that we are willing to sacrifice everything of value to prevent it.
> a corporeal enemy that must be resisted
I am afraid that you know nothing about Christianity. The beliefs and values you describe are antithetical to the Christian life and our worldview. If you've ever just examined the life of St. Teresa of Calcutta, you'd understand how absurd it would be for her to "fear death" or "minimize suffering".
We seek to follow, and imitate, Christ Jesus in his life of suffering, his death and resurrection. We do not resist, or minimize, or fear any of this. To do so, would be quite heretical to us as Christians.
Of all times of the year to bring this up. All Saints Day, celebrating the eternal life of those, named and unnamed, who have preceded us in death. All Souls Day, to pray for all the departed souls who suffer in Purgatory, after death but before their Heavenly reward.
I don't know what religion you are trying to describe, but to me it sounds like atheistic secularism. It is atheism that fears death, and utilitarianism that seeks to minimize suffering. Not Christians. Goodness, gracious.
To understand my point one must separate the metaphysics from the practical effects of the belief system. Christianity represented a step-change towards humanism. This must be considered in the in the era it was founded and compared to the competing ideologies at the time, i.e. paganism and its various death cults. Christianity institutionalized ideals like equality of men, the sanctity of life, charity, self sacrifice, etc. These ideals are the precursors to civilization.
The particular ideology of Christianity was super effective at laying the groundwork for modern civilization. Of course, these ideals have since evolved and have since become some kind of secular ideology. Granted, it was imprecise to attribute a fear of death to Christianity. But the sanctity of life is in practice a close cousin of a fear of death. Modern secularism having no metaphysical alternative has made this fear explicit.
> I suspect that many people who publicly disagree are just performative, and would actually make the same choice when push comes to shove, and they would have to actually choose between "diminishing their autonomy to the machines" and imminent death.
Exhibit A.
The most straightforward method of eliminating all disease is to kill all life. This seems a much more likely outcome than the housecat scenario.
> in a language only the machine understands
I wouldn't even grant that. It's a very one-directional problem solving approach where it's unknown to what extent it can build on its own findings.
It’s math. Math is nothing but solving puzzles.
Mathematicians usually care nothing about application of their work. Working on interesting problems is their only motivation. Practical applications are almost always happy accidents.
This goes back to the hope that robots would do the laundry and the dishes and the cleaning up so we could write and play music, create art, and solve mathematical problems.
Instead the AIs are doing all of that leaving humans with only the dishes and the laundry and the cleaning up.
If math is nothing but solving puzzles for fun then I think a lot of people should be very pissed off that they are doing hard labor while being taxed to fund a puzzle hobby group.
Of course I don't believe that math is just fun puzzles. But if it were, then it would deserve to die as a career, AI or not.
If people weren't interested in solving puzzles for fun we'd still be banging sticks together in a cave somewhere.
Sure.
Those people will also be pissed that people get paid to make music or art or literature or poetry and all such frivolous things.
As of this comment you have 26 comments out of 206 total on this comment section, more than 10% basically all spreading FUD to try and make other people as miserable and pessimistic as you. I'm not sure what your motivations are but I'm glad we have people like Grant on the other side trying to keep a positive outlook on life and the future, and I hope all you eternal doomers who constantly try to bring others down with you find joy as well.
Your naivety is charming.
Whatever doesnt count as maths is just not maths. Its just carrying out instructions to get some "gain".
Other people usually care only about "gain", its their only motivation. Non "gain" results are just happy accidents.
And "gain" (once you have your survival covered) is just an invented abstraction with 0 real meaning. But people try to convince themselfs that it has meaning.
This goes back to the classic story for "kids" about the emperor that has no clothes.
If we play a game of chess and I move the pieces to the final position on the first move and declare victory you might feel that something was missing, even if I'm right.
This is not quite like that but the feeling I get from it is much the same. Mathematicians are first and foremost busy with understanding math, not with 'solving' math though they are solving individual problems within the domain of math. The journey towards that understanding requires specialization and often lots of studying.
To quote Douglas Adams: "If 'metal nose' here is going to give you God's phone number then the philosophical question of whether there is a God becomes meaningless."
It is the journey and the questions that matter as much or more than the answer does.
And with math being a branch of natural philosophy I can see why they would be a tad upset at this shortcut because it strips the collective efforts of a large number of people of their prestige and feeling of time well spent. Imagine your life's work reduced to a short string of bits, and worse, that short string of bits was created by a machine that effectively is still a toddler.
> It is the journey and the questions that matter as much or more than the answer does.
Selfishly, as someone who enjoys programming, I feel the same way about the journey. But let's face it: for everyone else, the outcome is what actually matters. Mathematicians argue that their journey may lead to novel insights, but are those insights really valuable? Are they going to help the LLMs solve more problems? And are we sure that the LLMs can't deliver those same insights?
I think that ties in with the 'who will train the juniors' angle: if the ladder consists of nothing but the top rung because the AI combine stripped away the rest of them then a lot of fields will be looking at zero new entrants. Nobody wants to compete with a machine for their living and sense of self value. I know I don't, and obviously I can't speak for anybody else but society has pretty much programmed people to tie a good chunk of their identity, success in life and general well being to their skills and ability to put bread on the table. You can't just toss that in the bin for 3/4 of the current crop of professionals (I'm seeing the mathematicians as simply the first (and probably not even the first) of many).
I don't know if you have kids or not but I have two kids in high school and keeping them motivated through the AI revolution is a serious challenge and some of their classmates have already all but given up. The next generation down the line is going to grow up with the same kind of attitude towards thinking that you might have towards the skill of map reading. And I think we'll all be poorer because of that, not richer.
they probably do deliver insights, just not in a human-readable form, so at some point, human progress stalls.
Exactly. As a software developer, AI has given me more time to tackle higher-order problems. The actual architecture, optimisation, and user experience.
Mathematicians could:
- Continue working on philosophical aspects of the solution and not bothered by whether the solution is known or not. It is not a movie that gets spoiled when the ending is known.
- Or better, demand from AI labs, how they would like to see AI helping them on philosophical aspects.
> Continue working on philosophical aspects…
…except the machine will be better at these aspects too :D
I find it funny when people suggest "just re-orient from knowledge work X to knowledge work Y, doh!". Not realizing all knowledge work is on the chopping blocks.
This misunderstands mathematics. There are entire branches of the subject that have no practical use. Some things also appeared to be useless for centuries before physicists discovered they actually have an application.
> It is the journey and the questions that matter as much or more than the answer does.
That only makes sense to me when its what someone chooses to spend their time doing. When they expect someone else to pay them for it, its the end result that matters.
Maybe its a fundamental flaw in capitalism or money itself, but we can't expect to be paid for the sheer love of the game. Others will only end up paying us if the expected output is worth it.
Well we have been paying people for the pure pursuit of knowledge for its own sake since the scientific revolution, which is kind of the material base for capitalism, so I don’t think your argument holds much water. Why knowledge and following curiosity facilities general prosperity is maybe an open question but that it does is inarguable.
Capitalism incentivises paying people to pursue more capital, not the putsuit of knowledge.
And to be clear I don't say that as a good thing, it may be a flaw in capitalism, but we don't psy people simply to chase knowledge for the sake of the chase.
> Capitalism incentivises[sic] paying people to pursue more capital
That only works as long as people earn a living wage. See also: Henry Ford.
The primary value of math has never been about producing "solved problems" (is there any practical value in "solving" NS in itself?). The primary value of mathematics has always been about "machinery for thought", i.e. the abstractiosn and methods that produced the solution.
I think there is a little too much pessimism of the "math is dead" sort. As long as there is a need for humans to think there will be value in doing math.
On one hand I agree. I’d also add that there will be no end of math problems to solve. That some were solved will only lead to new ones.
That said, I think what has mathematicians… upset is probably two things:
1. These are hard problems. Hard enough that solving one could take decades of work. And there’s tons of collaboration involved. Pivoting to another - and making progress - isn’t exactly something you wake up tomorrow and start doing.
2. I think motivations matter to some. And the AI companies doing this aren’t doing it for the betterment of math or even society. They are in an arms race to prove their product is superior and any careers that are damaged collaterally be dammed.
Turning hard problems into easier problems is a good thing.
“ if you're mad about your problem being solved, maybe you weren't in it for the right reasons”, politicians/financial advisors/military members/etc… would like a word with you.
Link about plagiarism by OpenAI on solving Navier Stokes's Theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navier%E2%80%93Stokes_priority...
Let's just say that The math problem that got solved, I was working on it for many years but some company people used my knowledge my prompts and "solved" it without giving me any credits or money. Firstly they plagiarised the books and research papers and then they plagiarised the prompts by the mathematicians. Yes AI can make art and has caused many artists finding work difficult but AI art is always souless and worthless, same thing will be for math it will become souless and worthless because when humans who are experts in their fields invest their ingenuity then art becomes alive but if ordinary people like me will just prompt into the machine then souless things will come out that will be very worthless and disposable.
the claims of plagiarism are not convincing, and gatekeeping knowledge is a bad look
Unless a corporation does it?
> Unless a corporation does it?
Nope, in all cases it is a bad look.
But the AI companies didn't gatekeep knowledge. They released all their math results.
Unless you mean they're charging money for a product that contains knowledge. But that's not gatekeeping, just like selling a book isn't gatekeeping. Gatekeeping is when a group tries to prevent others from participating in a field or activity.
Selling a book quite literally is gatekeeping, since the idea is that you're prevented from engaging with the work without paying for it. Even with libraries it was society who paid for it in order for the commons to get access, but payment was nevertheless needed.
It just turns out that the Chesterton's gate is useful and people tend to think that people should be paid for their labour, since people kinda need a roof over their heads and food on their table.
It's not gatekeeping unless you're using your own esoteric definition that's different from how everyone else uses it. Words get their meaning from how they're used in the wild, and dictionaries are descriptivist, not prescriptivist. Anyone is allowed to buy the book, so it's not considered gatekeeping, even if some people may not be able to.
If you define any obstacle to an activity as gatekeeping, then literally everything can be considered gatekeeping and the term loses all meaning. Some people can't read, so offering the books for free would still exclude them. If you include an audio book, some people still can't understand the language. And both charging and not charging money for products would simultaneously be gatekeeping under that definition, since not charging places more financial burden on the producer. Not everyone can afford to print books and give them away for free.
Didn't you literally say
> Gatekeeping is when a group tries to prevent others from participating in a field or activity.
And I gave a way in which charging a price does that.
I am open to the idea of being incorrect in this case, in which I apologise for misunderstanding, and concede that I'm missing the nuance but in my defence, I'm not a native speaker.
That's why I said,
> Words get their meaning from how they're used in the wild, and dictionaries are descriptivist, not prescriptivist.
But I didn't explain that clearly. What I mean is that definitions are always imprecise because language is imprecise and dictionaries (or people) try to keep definitions reasonably short and simple. Dictionaries are trying to describe what the words really mean in the wild. They aren't the source of that meaning.
For example, if we look up Merriam-Webster's definition of "game (noun)", none of the definitions really work for a game like Solitaire without also including an activity like reading a book.
The two relevant definitions are
1. a physical or mental competition conducted according to rules with the participants in direct opposition to each other
2. activity engaged in for diversion or amusement
(there are a bunch of other definitions as well, like animals you hunt)
The second definition is too broad and the first clearly excludes Solitaire. If you were deciding what a game is based on the dictionary definitions, you'd either think watching TV is a game, or that Solitaire isn't. But that's not the case.
Charging money for products isn't considered gatekeeping. So from a descriptivist perspective, it isn't, even if it seems like it should be, because the word isn't used like that. Banning a group of people from an activity is gatekeeping. If mathematicians said only mathematicians can prove theorems and correct proofs from non-mathematicians won't be accepted, that would be gatekeeping. But they don't do that.
If you want to use a broad definition of gatekeeping that includes virtually all human activity, then the response to any accusation of gatekeeping could be "well, everything is gatekeeping". That road just leads to pointless and confusing conversations.
> But the AI companies didn't gatekeep knowledge. They released all their math results.
There are some important fields of math that were conspicuously missing. In particular, cryptography.
There are obviously good reasons for being more cautious when dealing with cryptography results in math, but I'm not going to believe they released everything.
> Unless you mean they're charging money for a product that contains knowledge.
They have internal models that the public cannot use (at least not yet).
Tom Leher had it down pat, they're just mad that computers are better at it than they are.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXlfXirQF3A
Non-mathematicians talking about this (especially in a cultural battleground like Wikipedia, yuck) will never be productive. Citing it here on HN does everyone a disservice. For those uninitiated, OpenAI used a fundamentally different method (without forcing in the Euler case) and the idea that the proof was plagiarized (other than the completely kosher strategy of using prior art, of course) is a complete fabrication.
In fact, the proof is such a mess, nobody really understands how it works. Which is becoming commomplace with these permutation machines where we can come up with something that passes some tests (e.g., a proof checker), but we have no idea wtf we did to get there, which doesn't really seem to do much to push human understanding forward.
It seems like such a dumb hill to die on, too. OpenAI literally stole the entire Internet (including copyrighted works), and we're arguing about a silly math puzzle.
The plagiarism and copyright stuff is just a smoke screen.
A lot of people are upset because they used to be special, their identities were tied to them being smarter, or having more niche domain knowledge than anyone else. Ai has changed that.
Now it's owners are special and will collect the world's productive economic output.
Whee. Very exciting.
I doubt that lasts for very long.
Regardless, we're all needing to learn that we weren't as special as we thought we were.
And if does last very long? What's the escape hatch from that?
Praying that it doesn't last very long isn't a strategy.
> we're all needing to learn that we weren't as special as we thought we were.
When will the altmans and the musks of the world learn that?
A lot of people are upset that people are praising garbage and outright stolen output, and any attempt to disagree with this praise labels them as a luddite who will be behind on the times and is against progress.
Such a take on "people don't feel special" feels borderline bad-faith. People of science tend to be some of the most humble people as their knowledge to seek the truth constantly leaves them with more answers than questions. It's instead this borderline cult of people praising output that is understandable to them that seems to be the ones with the hubris to try and claim that thinkers will be obsolete.
Nobody capable of a minute of honest introspection believes that. If you shuffled all the backend devs in the world and randomly assigned them a role elsewhere most will do perfectly fine. I began my own career in VFX, moved into compliance and am now working on automotive software - there's no moat around even the most niche domain knowledge, you just need to be prepared to spend time learning it. If I had to roll that into an identity it would be the learning I get to do at every turn in my career. That's what I enjoy but there's absolutely nothing unique or special about it.
Maybe the reason people are upset is simpler? Maybe people with a mortgage and kids to support don't like being told they'll absolutely 100% soon be out on their arse. Even if you don't believe that it's still tiring having to hear the same mindless taunts and vapid bullshit repeated on a daily basis.
Silly math puzzle is reductionist. If it was considered a worthwhile life long pursuit how is it dumb to be upset that the rug was pulled on it
According to the article you linked, there is no evidence at all showing OpenAI plagiarized Buckmaster and Alpoge. Buckmaster just speculated that since they used OpenAI's product, it's possible OpenAI looked at their conversation. Which OpenAI flatly denies.
And then your article says:
> On 13 October 2026, Scientific American published an article surveying several mathematicians stating that "the resemblance between the two groups’ methods now seems merely skin-deep."
I’m seeing this perspective expressed a lot lately, but (so far) only online.
Understand that there’s more than one way to prove something, that there’s an art to making something understandable, and that humans tend to take the most understandable paths (to humans.)
Models often don’t do that. But in solving, or claiming to solve, important problems, they nevertheless remove a lot of the excitement and incentive towards working towards a solution humans would naturally find. Plus, a lot of these problems really don’t have any critical applications at the moment. They’re done for the love of the game.
Does that bother you? That your tax dollars pay people who do math out of curiosity?
But then you can start with a solution and try to make an understandable one.
> I find this characterization overly harsh, but if you're mad about your problem being solved, maybe you weren't in it for the right reasons
Then I'm in programming for the wrong reasons.
There is more to life than outcomes.
Would sports teams have as many fans who enjoy their games, if all the humans were replaced by robots? Your team may win, so I'm sure you'll be happy with the outcome, but maybe something got lost?
I for one have always felt inspired when reading about remarkable human achievements. To think that those might be coming to an end, replaced by AI, takes the humanity out of those stories.
How is your argument any different from the classic Luddite argument? Why is doing math different than making textiles? Why does math deserve special protections when other types of workers do not?
There will be human achievement no matter how much automation and robotics we have. There’s an entire universe to explore and colonize. Plus people still want to see other people do things like perform music or play sports.
no one wants to see anyone do math lol.
Well sure, but people do still want to watch videos like 3blue1brown in-depth explanations, and they do still want to learn math for its own sake. People can still do math and derive enjoyment from it.
I'm not against technological advancement. But AI is unlike previous innovations. Soon, every scientific and knowledge-based breakthrough could be made by AI. And we're losing something intangible when that happens.
Think of your average Veritasium video. They know how to tell a story about a scientific breakthrough. It always centers around the human inventors. Take the humans out the story and it's less interesting, relatable, or enjoyable. Also consider: why do HNers hate AI slop? If all that matters is the outcome (getting some point in writing), AI does that. I hate slop because it has lost its human touch. I appreciate a result more when its distilled from human effort, and I'm not alone.
I'm not a mathematician so I have no skin in this particular game. I'm a software engineer though, and we've already gone through this. I can simultaneously love how easy it is to build applications with AI, and miss the days when human talent was valued and celebrated in my field. My job gave me purpose. My work team had comaraderie. A future where we all report to AI managers and we exist just to sign off on what our AI agents do, is dystopian.
Yes, I suspect there will always be human sports teams, musicians, actors, etc. My point was to illustrate that everything is less appealing when you take the humans out of the picture and I don't see why science is different. If outcomes are the only thing that matter then when robots are better at sport than humans shouldn't we should all just watch robots compete?
P.S. Do you really believe humans are going to visit any object further than Mars, let alone actually colonize them? Things would've had to go very wrong on Earth for that to happen, and that future doesn't appeal to me one bit. Call me a luddite if you want. How many people would willingly say goodbye forever to the wonders of Earth so that they can start their family on an inhospitable planet where they'll be indoors for the rest of their life? And why even bother exploring those planets? We can get all the data we need from autonomous spacecraft. Isn't that the outcome that matters?
Many people don't seem to understand that pure mathematics is not a practical applied science, nor is it in the business of inventing things.
Pure maths is much closer to philosophy or art than practical problem solving. Yes, we're extremely lucky that mathematics also happens to be a fantastic formalism for solving practical and scientific problems, by the practical problems are not remotely the subject matter of pure math. Of course, many mathematicians did advance theory in order to solve specific practical problems, but the pursuit of theory for theory's sake is also an important human activity.
Historically, this freedom from practicality has been important. It allows mathematicians to explore purely theoretical issues that have no practical bearing today but that might well have relevance in the future. We don't know. Carving out dedicated resources in society for that activity, though, has proven very beneficial for other sciences.
You have no computer, you have no neural nets, you have no AI, without at least some results from pure maths. Maybe keep that in mind before you crap on mathematics for its lack of immediate practicality. Not all good things in life arise as solutions to concrete and immediate material problems.
Men have sex to cum. If I hand you a bucket of cum and you don't feel ecstatic, you might've been having sex for the wrong reasons.
Close, men have sex to orgasm, if i hand you a bunch of orgasms and you don't feel ecstatic you might have been having sex for the wrong reason.
> If your primary purpose was rent-seeking
Incredibly nasty stuff to serve on the rent-seeking forum. Doubly nasty to levy at people who actually like being alive, like mathematicians. If capitalists had their way we'd all be slitting our wrists on day two of existence
I really don't understand such takes. Extend this to every problem in every profession, which seems to be both the trend and the intent (if still far off), and you vaporise the meaning from a lot of people's lives. Sure, they can find other sources of meaning - assuming having their job automated doesn't leave them constantly scrambling to make a living. This would require major social restructuring that nobody's really talking about.
Many people pursue careers based on the intersection between their interests and what society considers valuable. Being upset when what they chose to spend their lives doing either loses value or changes so much it becomes a wholey different job is understandable, and calling it "rent seeking" is very unfair, in my view.
My purpose in life is solving problems in various domains. Having those problems solved for me would be a Champaign problem.
> and you vaporise the meaning from a lot of people's lives
If the meaning of your life is to obtain a solution to a given problem, then getting the solution would "vaporize the meaning of your life" in the same way as when someone that claims his meaning of life is to raise their children would "lose all meaning of life" when they finally move out and start to successfuly live on their own. Yes, there could be some nostalgia in both cases, but if you are psychologically well-adjusted, the pros would still far outweight the cons, the happiness would outweight the sadness.
I don't think that's the same. Would you let robots raise your kids if they provably did it better than you?
These people knew someone else could solve the problem. Presumably they figured there'd still be meaningful work for them to do - exploring ramifications, new frontiers opened by the solution. Other problems, at worst. Now it all seems far from guaranteed.
I agree about well-adjustedness, but what do you propose these people do to get paid if the number of researchers with grants reduces significantly? Reskill to something that pays less, they like less, and might be automated too? Can you frankly say this wouldn't be a moral blow to anyone, well-adjustedness and all?
The analogy with kids breaks the moment you introduce getting paid.
No one will pay me for raising my kids. I’d probably have to pay the robot.
So the question remains: is it about solving the problem for humanity? Solving the problem for yourself? Or getting paid?
I don't think you can so easily call for separating them when so many people grew up in an environment that ties economic value and a respectful place in society so strongly.
> So the question remains: is it about solving the problem for humanity? Solving the problem for yourself? Or getting paid?
Say it's a mix, which I think is most likely. They enjoy the problem-solving, like doing something that feels meaningful to humanity, and obviously need to get paid. Now what?
I personally think they’re enough problems left for humanity to solve.
Of course I am not denying the brutality for those who are right in the middle of finishing something.
I am optimistic for those who haven’t started, which the video is referring to.
I feel like we're arguing past each other. My point is, it's hard for me to see lack of empathy towards mathematicians (and other professionals) who stand to be displaced by these developments. I know I shouldn't take internet strangers too seriously but, when I read the comments here, I feel like some people have deep resentment for those mathematicians, portraying them as going into math in bad faith or something, and now fighting to keep their ill-gained positions.
> I personally think they’re enough problems left for humanity to solve.
For sure, whether those displaced will be able to get to work on them - and whether it will be as fulfilling as their previous work - is not at all guaranteed.
"The market doesn't owe you to do fulfilling work" Yes, but it costs you nothing to be sympathetic to the individual humans that have to undergo these changes, which can be all shades of scary and sad.
> Of course I am not denying the brutality for those who are right in the middle of finishing something.
And those who worked on a problem for 5 years, trying dozens of approaches, and weren't close to finishing something? People over-fixate on the specific problem. The big picture narrative here is, in the best case, "the way we're going to do math will be completely different", and in the worst case, "we'll need much fewer mathematicians".
> I am optimistic for those who haven’t started, which the video is referring to.
Perhaps. This comment chain is about the other side, the so-called rent seekers.
Ok I’m a stranger on the internet who tries to genuinely understand.
To that end I’ve read all your comments. I am not sure what you’re proposing or asking people to do?
Are you asking for empathy? I have a lot of respect and empathy for people who dedicated their life to solving complex problems.
At the same time I’m trying to be optimistic by saying not all is lost. Yes people will need to adjust. I’m arguing continual change and adaption have always been part of life.
I'm asking people not to be so unkind to other people grieving the (potential) loss of a significant part of their life. "If you cared so much about the problem, you'd be thrilled when a solution is found; since you're not thrilled you must be in it for selfish reasons and deserve to be displaced." You didn't write it, but the comment I replied to pretty much did.
I agree that there's room for optimism, but the conduct and messaging of the AI labs isn't very inspiring in that regard. The feeling I get from it is "we're going to push forward at any cost and make humane considerations only when we can afford to. Which isn't a lot because we've got to be the first to AGI or others will make it first and do it wrong." People then get pushed to the sidelines, many whose work contributed to the feasibility of LLM capabilities in the first place. Free market and such. But then they get criticized when they're upset about it?
Give them space to deal with it and help them find optimism, or at least, don't judge them.
>No one will pay me for raising my kids.
In the near future, this may very will be the case in order to address the population decline. But I digress.
The big assumption here is that "problems are being solved" in every field affected. Which they are not.
Just as the most basic example: software is not currently being made faster, nor performing better nor at a higher bar of quality. Maybe developers are able to report higher velocity, but this is not leading to faster shipping of software/features. In fact, people seemed to feel software is buggier than ever and companies are doubling down on it and simply adding placeholders of "AI can make mistakes". Unforgivable 10 years ago if we tried that with humans.
If anything, the rent seeking is with people reporting "being more productive than ever" and despite that less real world problems being solved than the previous decade.
Nobody goes into these fields only interested in the final result, they go into it interested both in the challenge and revelations of the process and the triumph and recognition of achieving the final result.
There's no joy to be derived from a completed crossword puzzle if you weren't the one solving it...
> This would require major social restructuring that nobody's really talking about.
There are few concrete proposals, but a lot of people are talking about the need for it.
The reality seems to be that this will extend "to every problem in every profession" within our lifetimes. The only scenario I see where that doesn't happen is global war or other catastrophe stopping progress by essentially destroying civilization as we know it. So we are going to need to figure it out.
Many people don’t even function off this “meaning” you’re talking about. They get it from family and friends and hobbies. It’s a contrived perspective, albeit a useful and good one. But this claim of the world’s problems existing as a means to providing value to someone’s life over actually being solved is kind of an insane perspective if you ask me.
Only those that aren't in a field and see its existence justified for purely instrumental reasons can think its value is merely in its practical output. Personal meaning and fulfillment come in many forms. For mathematicians, part of that value is through solving problems, but it's also partly about the struggle itself, gaining understanding, expanding the frontier of human achievement, being a part of a community that values these things, playing a valuable role in the progress of humankind and making a career out of it. Having all that swept away overnight will lead to an existential crisis for anyone who is on the wrong end of this process.
It's quite bizarre how many people feel so personally affronted at the existence of a rather exclusive intellectual community that they take glee in seeing it decimated overnight. But make no mistake, AI is coming for the things you value as well.
What? Why are we nullifying so many human factors in one stroke? Humans strive to contribute to their community and to be recognized for it. We aren't machines, we have social and financial needs, and enjoy competition. Math being solved would mean part of humanity losing these parts of their lives.
What, in your opinion, is the point in solving these problems if no human is there to witness it? This is like suggesting we have AI watch movies for us and read its summary afterwards. In fact, why do anything anymore?
Yes, much of pure mathematics is "playing with puzzles" to the end of the joy and beauty revealed by a human solving them.
I find it interesting how a mathematician enjoying theory-building or playing with ideas gets recast here as rent-seeking. It sounds much like certain right-wingers complaining that kids these days don't want to work, just stay in university studying useless things at the taxpayer's expense.
This is an awful and really ignorant take. The manner in which the problem is “solved” matters a lot, and these AI solutions are about as poorly-done as possible. That a solution exists closes the door on almost any sort of support for finding another, better one, which is the real problem. If this continues, we wind up with a field with no open problems, no practicing mathematicians, no future mathematicians, and no way to come up with new problems (this latter being much more important than solving existing ones, in the main).
I have trouble understanding how anybody could seriously believe this.
Mathematicians are ecstatic and delighted when major problems are solved by other mathematicians. If you've followed the discussions and read the reactions, you'd know why mathematicians feel differently in this case and why more than a few are upset and feel that they've lost the thing that gave them meaning and joy.
And to put it very simply, I don't want mathematicians to exist just because I want solutions to problems. I want mathematicians to exist because I want to live in a world that has mathematicians, philosophers, writers, painters, thinkers, etc. That is a better world that makes people better.
OpenAI's proofs do not make people better. They do not enrich our lives. And OpenAI was able to produce these proofs because countless generations of human beings sowed the fields of mathematics through countless hours of labor. OpenAI is clear-cutting and sowing them with salt. Nobody should he ecstatic. Everybody should be horrified and outraged.
I would argue that math indeed makes our lives better. Llms themselves are math invention! It doesn't matter much where this math comes from.
I think it's ok to care about math as an art or sport still.
Math will join the ranks of other useful works where human effort was once essential like
Long distance messaging/ running, painting, calligraphy, weight lifting and others.
I think we shouldn't have calculators anymore either. The world was better when we had to calculate everything by hand and a human by hand verified every single addition and subtraction.
Are we supposed to ignore the irony that you typed this on a computer that is millions of times more powerful than the calculators you propose to forfeit?
I'm not sure the world is better if everyone was forced to do TLS handshake math by hand.
The last couple decades of economic development (of the first world at least) was in a large part due to the efficiency gains by not having people do math by hand. The world will definitely not be better if you just blew up all the computing tech since calculators were invented.
I think the comment you answered was ironic/sarcastic.
I think we should be horrified/outraged that calculators exist and are clear cutting the once viable field of human calculation.
Yes, I am being sarcastic.
People enjoyed the process of solving a problem.
Your present a false dichotomy; that mathematicians care about the result, or are rent seeker that just wants to play about with puzzles.
Many people enjoyed the process of finding things out for it's own sake.
Huh?? Nobody enters mathematics because "We gotta get this Collatz conjecture solved already!", you enter it because you love the process of arriving at the solution.
It's like saying "If your goal is reaching the top of Everest, you should be ecstatic they built a train line that brings you right up to the peak!"
I find it overly harsh too. I think the reaction is much more about the devaluation of innate ability, and skills / knowledge built over a lifetime. If another mathematician had solved it then you can refocus on another problem and get another chance. Now that an LLM has done it it’s very unlikely you’ll ever solve another open problem.
> If your primary purpose was rent-seeking so you could play with puzzles
Yes, this is overly harsh. Some of us are interested in the craft, not the solution. Is that not the "right" reason?
Poor mathematicians. First a robot scoops them on hundreds of open problems. Then they get criticized for reacting to it like a human!
Shame on them for such weaknesses as:
* Desire to make memorable achievements in their field
* Missing the social elements of sharing and discussing problems with their colleagues
* Sense of self worth linked to ability to make a unique contribution to society
* Fear of losing status and income in a ruthlessly competitive economic system
* Anxiety over debts already accrued during years of studying
* Regret over choice of career path and roads not taken
Astra would never.
I'm sympathetic to the mathematicians and don't like what AI is doing. Every other profession that relies on knowledge or thinking should be watching the mathematics community as a portent of the storm to come. OpenAI has extensively thought about and planned their disruption and chose mathematics to start with for a reason - small community, verifiable to some extent, can be used to improve model training, not seen positively by many average people etc. The AI companies are going to come for every field one by one.
I don’t have to imagine, I’m a software developer lol
AI solve my problem where I have to hand code all the time. I'm happier than ever. Math's analogy is they now get to find problems instead of solving them, then get LLM's to solve them or solve them together. I've been saying this, numbers go up, and LLM makes the amount of problems to solve go up, not less.
Right, I didn't get into this to make money, I got into this to make things. This stuff is amazing for that.
Alien technology? What are you talking about.
How is that any different than another kind of automation?
AI will make mathematics so much more approachable, comprehensible, and applicable as more problems gets solved. If the costs is a handful of PhDs tenure track, so be it. Academics didn’t much to seem to mind when that happens to blue collar workers.
Nothing stopping anyone from studying mathematics here.
I keep hearing these “AI will make this” and “AI will become that”. Boosters are always making these claims for years now, but whenever AI becomes more powerful everything just sucks more.
I don’t buy these claims anymore, and haven‘t been for a long time. I think you [as in you boosters; not you specifically] are full of shit. I don‘t think you know what AI will become, you just dream up some scenario where everything becomes better by some magic, but it won’t. It will become worse. People loose their jobs, people loose their tenures, and instead we get just more and more slop, more and more span, energy becomes more expensive, our planet becomes more polluted, our internet becomes more polluted. Our servers become overrun by bot traffic, our gaming machines become too expensive, etc. etc.
I just want you to stop making things worse. I just want you to stop training more AI. It sucks, I hate it, and I want it gone.
AI has already made mathematics better in the sense that it has greatly advanced what we know to be true (theorems).
The only way that it hasn't made mathematics better is in the sense of human mathematicians' career prospects -- and in this respect, it is identical to other forms of automation that the world, and especially computer programmers like us, have participated in in the past without complaint.
So AI is only bad for HUMANS, which is exactly the point being made in the post you replied to.
It's "worse for humans" in exactly the same way that first the Industrial Revolution and later computer programming made things "worse for humans", but the post you're referring to only notices that it's "worse" when they are the victim.
It’s “worse for humans” in exactly the same way the Industrial Revolution was bad for all the horses that weren’t needed anymore.
I agree with this actually. All of these things were good for some and bad for some, and these groups overlapped. All were good for (most) humans-as-consumers, and bad for (some) humans-as-producers, and the IR was also bad for horses.
AI helps me learn math now, what are you talking about??
I don’t waste time on unfamiliar notation, it provides me with context, suggests things I wouldn’t have thought of. And connects it to fields I wouldn’t have thought of.
We have personal tutors with PhD level knowledge for basically free if you know the questions to ask.
There is no waiting, results are here.
No.
AIs will do all the math with zero human involvement whatsoever.
> AI has destroyed a major source of "life's meaning" for many people who pursued mathematics.
I studied mathematics and don't agree with this at all, for several reasons. For one the entire point of maths is that it describes a formal system in which one can 'shut up and calculate'. Mechanizing maths goes back to Leibniz and Hilbert. Nobody should surprised that the big formalism with explicit rules you invented is the first thing to yield to automation, that's why it exists.
Secondly research, including maths for a long time has been a collaboration of people, institutions, machines and processes, even maths does not consist of Faustian heroes in caves having revelations.
And thirdly just because a machine produces a 500 page proof doesn't mean your job is done. Science produces knowledge. Knowledge is information made legible to understanding by people. So there will be endless work for humans to go over machine proofs and turn it into something we understand. Just like chess computers ultimately expanded human chess.
> So there will be endless work for humans to go over machine proofs and turn it into something we understand
I'm not convinced humans will be better at this than LLMs. Frontier models are quite good at handling even deliberately lazy/ambiguous eli5 prompts on complex topics IME.
>I'm not convinced humans will be better at this than LLMs.
they don't need to be. Any scientist is already surrounded by tools that are better than they are at anything. A scientist from 200 years ago would have the same existential shock if they see how a modern scientists works.
But that's to misunderstand what science is for, which is to expand human knowledge. And a tool by definition can only ever change how you do this, not that you do it because you understanding it is the point. When people say learning to program is now useless, what they really mean is it might not make them any money, or using the AI is faster as an instrument. But if you care about programming itself, about you understanding programming, nothing has changed, it never can. And the smartest AI in the world can always assist you, but only that.
> But that's to misunderstand what science is for, which is to expand human knowledge
I agree ideologically and aspirationally but I don't believe it's the economic reality of how and why most science is actually funded (and I think you agree based on your comment about not making any money).
> But if you care about programming itself
I'm...not so sure I do any more? At least, not any more than I care about using Java over Python, or C++ over Java, or C over C++, or ASM over C, or machine code over ASM, or an abacus over machine code.
> nothing has changed, it never can
We now have programs that can write any program 100x faster and better than even the best humans and solve the hardest math problems known to humankind that have stumped the greatest minds the planet could produce for decades. That, to me, is a change with profound implications for understanding the nature of programming.
"Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while, a great wind carries me across the sky."
— Ojibwe proverb
> Imagine waking up one morning to find that an alien technology has solved the problem you had dedicated your life to
But it could be another human that did that, and the impact would be no different.
As a software engineer this is part of my life, and always has been. I may have been working on a software product for the last 3 years, and suddenly one morning I find out that another company has released a similar product, and selling it cheaper, now the value of my work is slashed by 90%. I may even have to drop my project and find something else to work on. This is a normal part of life.
In research, there is always the same risk, that some adjacent field will completely change your field overnight due to some breakthrough.
Still, I have sympathy for the people who are grieving right now.
With the software industry, you kind of know what you’re signing up for, so you have some emotional preparation. However, this might be one of the very first truly disruptive innovations many mathematicians have ever seen in their fields in their lifetimes.
Should they have better prepared emotionally for a black swan event? I’d argue that the answer is no, but even if the answer were yes, the grief that many are experiencing is still worthy of sympathy.
I am confused why this is considered a black swan event. Does AI take the joy out of mathematics research? Yes. But universities are not laying off mathematicians just because OpenAI has released some proofs. The proofs were never the point of mathematics, it is the understanding behind the proofs, and applying that understanding to solve real world problems.
Now consider a computer science major in college who knows that he won't get a job when he graduates. Consider fresh graduates who thought they would have lucrative jobs but had to take up jobs as Uber drivers. To them AI is a black swan event. That's who I have sympathy for.
Black swan events aren’t necessarily negative.
For example, the original black swans who were found by the Dutch mariners neither attacked, injured, nor robbed those mariners.
it's just started in math, only a few months. it's been happening for years in CS. Give it time.
Yeah, mathematicians will totally be fine.
Right now mathematicians are freaking out because they think the AI will make them useless and they will have to go find real job with real usefulness.
But honestly mathematicians have been totally useless long before the first AI, so generally nothing have changed for them.
The entire cryptographic underpinning of the Internet is based on mathematics that, when I learned it as an undergraduate in the 1980's, was considered just an impractical curiosity. Non-Euclidean geometry became special relativity. Math underpins all science - "totally useless" phooey.
No matter what you choose to work on now, the AIs will get there first.
That’s the nature of exponential improvement, which humans are incapable of.
Your comments are grim. What's your estimate on self replication? Sustained energy? Trigger fingers?
Oh, nvm you made it clear 8m later: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50147638
Give me an argument for not having a grim outlook given current AI trajectories paired with a political apparatus incapable of action. At least in the US.
Putin's getting old. If he dies before we hit recursive self-improvement, there's a chance some maniac gets access to the nukes and saves 4 billion of us (global nuclear war only kills about half of humanity).
Oh thanks I feel better now!
> As a software engineer this is part of my life, and always has been. I may have been working on a software product for the last 3 years, and suddenly one morning I find out that another company has released a similar product, and selling it cheaper, now the value of my work is slashed by 90%. I may even have to drop my project and find something else to work on. This is a normal part of life.
The cause of what you're describing here, and the cause of the problems with AI are the same: it's capitalism, closed competition and businesses deciding what happens.
In an alternate society built around providing the best solutions for everyone, instead of being built around businesses making as much money for themselves as possible, your organisation would have been working alongside the other company to share insights into solving the same problem for everyone.
Same goes for AI: all the existential downsides of AI pretty much all depend on businesses being the main driver of who uses AI and when. If we only let individuals choose when to use AI, then they're not going to choose to automate themselves out of a job they need, or give up something they actually get personal value and joy from.
The egos of these mathematicians is not what is important here, and they should get over themselves. The goals and values should be about advancing mathematics and, by proxy, humanity. It’s not about them.
That said, change is difficult for most. Let’s give them grace and have patience as they work through the stages of grief. Once they come to accept this new reality, let’s hope they can learn to embrace this new technology to continue the work of advancing the frontier.
How do you advance humanity by eliminating the humans?
Spot on!
> Imagine waking up one morning to find that an alien technology has solved the problem you had dedicated your life to
That seems like a glass is half empty attitude.
For one, the problem is solved. You should be glad. That's what you wanted...
Typically every solved problem opens more doors than it shuts.
We're pretty far from knowing it all.
It's like someone saying the field of Math died when we got calculators and computers and spreadsheets to make it easier to do calculations.
Now you can use AI to help you.
Sure, if you refuse to use it, then you're screwed. That's a you choice. Not inevitable.
The only things in life that are certain is change and death.
Not any different than some Amish person being annoyed that s/he can't contribute to the field of Math because it's too hard to do all the calculations by hand on paper...
You can spend your whole life crying that one day we'll all die, or you can enjoy the time you have.
The glass is a whole lot less than half empty. The pessimistic attitude is a rational response to our environment.
The only way change this situation so that it comes out positive is to enjoy being a slave, but hey thats a you choice.
>Typically every solved problem opens more doors than it shuts. >We're pretty far from knowing it all.
Open doors to whom? AI or mankind? We have never been farther from knowing it all. The information knowable by people will become a sliver of the total relevant information in the world.
>It's like someone saying the field of Math died when we got calculators and computers and spreadsheets to make it easier to do calculations.
In that instance, the busywork was automated and challenging work remained. What we are talking about here is the reverse. It's the automation of all of the cerebral thinking.
Imagine that all of the cerebral and beautiful aspects of math were automated first, but for some reason humans were required to specialize into number crunching instead. Now open your eyes.
>Not any different than some Amish person being annoyed that s/he can't contribute to the field of Math because it's too hard to do all the calculations by hand on paper...
The thing about amish people is that they own their own land and grow their own food and are independent within a governmental system that respects their property rights. The rest of us renters and feeders operate within industrial society-work or die.
The disposition amish people have towards technology has been ahead of the curve.
>You can spend your whole life crying that one day we'll all die, or you can enjoy the time you have.
I would also encourage my peers to enjoy what little time they have left. What we are witnessing is the end of history, and I am honored to experience it. However I get the impression your nature is to go out with a wimper.
Have you been living under a rock?
The whole point of current AI is to replace ALL human contributions, in every field. Collaborating with humans is not a consideration, as shown by OpenAI leaving practicing mathematicians completely out of their process.
If you find your source of meaning in slowing down understanding and knowledge, you were never it in for the mathematics and some questionable motives. Find the solution within.
This reminded me of a moment from Star Trek V: "I don't want my pain taken away. I need my pain!" ~Captain Kirk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ABLYnvpAso
" As a scientist, I don't want to end up as a laboratory assistant to an AI."
The idea is, that the AI is your assistant.
Apart from that, I would also say get over yourself. We all have to. Arcane computer knowledge I was proud of having, that made me feel special can now be replicated by anyone with access to a LLM.
I still know how to build things and that is what I am doing. Just faster than ever before.
What would the AI even use you for?
That's literally the 7.3k Upvoted top comment and I also think Grant didn't chew this one through appropriately. I was kinda offended at 17:10, where OpenAI paper dumping proofs "takes all the wind of [mathematicians] sails". But it's so much more than that.
He did go more into it at 30:00, where he accepts that something is lost here. Or as Terence Tao said, the "age of heroes" in mathematics is has come to an end. I think Grant's points on funding and maths having a strong future are true. But I still think the dehumanizing part wasn't properly honored. But then again, this is supposed to be positive push into the future, so dwelling on it is not something Grant wanted to do.
I don't get it. I have a research degree in physics, and if AI made major progress towards the big open questions (e.g. nature of dark matter) or managed to come up with a much cheaper way (or any way at all) to test a theory of quantum gravity, I'd be super happy. At the moment the research frontier in high energy physics looks pretty bleak in that it appears like the scale of construction and energies required are too high to reasonably achieve many more big breakthroughs in my lifetime. What makes mathematics so special that the entire field is distressed when their big open questions get resolved?
I think math is a craft unlike other areas of science.
Mathematics produces concepts and produces proofs of theorems. Up until now, the two things things fed into each other - you needed the concepts for the theorems and the theorems for the concepts. Now you can just prove theories without caring about the production of ideas.
Consider also, math produces the intellectual "tooling" for science in general. As I understand it, the important of grand unified comes because physics want an unified abstract conception of physical laws and thus a grand unified theory aims to be a unified mathematical understanding of the world.
I mean, as a though experiment, suppose a company produced a machine that simply predicted events in the future without giving any explanation of why. It didn't tell physicists whether any of their ideas were true or false, it simply answered question like "will this building fall down", "what will the spectrum of this star be", etc. It gave all the information of physics but discarded laws - physicists might find this a bit unsatisfying, especially if the machine was going to put them out of a job.
If you don’t care about the solutions, maybe you never cared about the issues themselves?
Math has practical applications that hopefully will improve lives.
Yes, imagine when cancer becomes a solved problem, and oncologists react online by lamenting the end of their life's work. They'd be viciously scorned and ridiculed.
> alien technology.
its not an alien technology, its a direct application of... maths.
You are right, it’s not alien technology. But this is how it feels like.
>AI has destroyed a major source of "life's meaning"...
Ah, but that's precisely the beauty of life, that there is no meaning. Life just "is".
A lot of people derive their worth from something external. AI brings the emptiness of that worth into sharp relief, but it was always empty. It used to be easier to ignore, though.
The obvious retort is "that's cold comfort to people losing their livelihoods!" But that's not the discussion, and (at least at this point) we're not at risk of mathematicians going hungry. It is obvious that AI will have a profound impact on what mathematicians do. It is not obvious that we won't need them anymore.
So fucking true, man. hits bong
Back when CAD programs were going mainstream in companies in the 70's and 80's, civil/elec/mech engineers were in an uproar because they thought that CAD was going to replace engineers.
What ended up happening was that draftmen became a profession.
Not saying that we stick our heads in the sand and say AI will just generate jobs, because the cost there will most likely outweigh the benefits in the grand scheme, but there is definitely a world where mathematicians hand down direction to grad students utilizing such tools for research or some other framework that just doesn't resemble what we think of today.
It is not the same comparison. CAD produces exact same drawings as handwritten ones. It purely makes engineers more effective. It just took the menial side of the work. You still had to care about every single detail and tolerance. You still followed the same way of manufacturing things. You still do the smallest parts of it. Just like word processing vs handwriting a book / letter. You still have to type every single letter. You still think every sentence.
AI is the complete opposite. It takes away the thinking part. When people use AI, they tend to offload a lot of thinking part to it as well. I use it because company policy. But if you care about every single if case and every single variable name, writing by hand is faster unlike CAD.
History repeats itself. Now it’s the moment of weaving machines. AI is the new weaving machine. It needs couple guys for the maintenance. The other 198 guys were freed from the hard work. It’s not the CAD moment.
Before the industrial revolution weavers worked from home in a relatively peaceful environment, set their own hours, and made a respectable living.
After the industrial revolution they worked 14 hour days in a thunderously loud textile mill, so full of airborne lint that you could hardly see. The pace of their work was set by machine, which frequently caused serious injuries, and their wages often weren't enough to live on.
At the time of Munich Olympics German workers did occasionally electronics assembly at home. Or some electromechanical components like switches, relays, cabling, you name it. Pay per piece, not hourly rate. Simple hardware in today’s terms with generous pay. Later it was automated and today completely outsourced. Cycle seen in so many industries.
I can repeat myself: history repeats often enough.
You'll be surprised to learn that the opposite is true today (as of 2015 when I last worked in a licensed engineer capacity). CAD has near eliminated draftsmen, similar to how automated testing has eliminated QA. Engineers are performing all of analysis, design and drafting today. Similar to how programmers are responsible for testing.
> Imagine waking up one morning to find that an alien technology has solved the problem you had dedicated your life to.
Pretty sure everyone on HN can relate to this.
I've never quite understood this sense of meaning. The goal could never have been to see these problems solved or to further understand how the universe may work. The goal was the chase itself, or the sense of pride for being the one to crack the answer.
Also its worth noting this technology isn't alien. I don't personally want us to invent AI, AGI, ASI, etc but they aren't alien - humans are very much making the choice to invent these things here on earth.
That's not what people mean by alien. It means that we can't rely on human intuition to predict how they will behave. Their intelligence is not like ours.
That isn't alien though, IRA just different. I wouldn't consider my cows' intelligence as alien its just something I can't always intuit.
That sounds more like a religion than science. Why not be happy that there is a new technology that helps solve (presumably) important problems that can have positive effects?
Wonder if this is how G.H. Hardy felt reading Ramanujan's "proofs". I figure the real work begins now, the fact that a machine "showed the way" may become irrelevant 10 years from now.
I fear the same thing will happen as what I see in software developement. The volume of proofs that can be generated by anyone will be so big that it will overwhelm the system. Currently I really don't have the time anymore to check if all the bright results in computing projects make any sense. And not only in software developement. In general, I see preprint servers getting overwhelmed by article submissions, AI generated articles. I don't recall a wave of CAD generation in the past.
"My friends in cancer research are terrified they'll wake up one morning to find out that an AI cured cancer."
But more seriously, this was an inevitability for math, no? The brain has an upper limit on how many concepts it can recall, recombine, and synthesize. We're all finding out now what happens when every single concept in math can be perfectly held in memory.
> Imagine waking up one morning to find that an alien technology has solved the problem you had dedicated your life to (and many more to boot.)
I would be thrilled! My only worry would be how to sustain myself financially if my expertise is no longer needed - worries like this I can definitely understand. But the simple fact that the problems I care about are getting solved? Awesome, more of that please!
Sorry but this is ego.
Many people are working with machines and doing dull jobs. Are you special…?
>Imagine waking up one morning to find that an alien technology has solved the problem you had dedicated your life to
I would be ecstatic.
You'd be ecstatic until you realise "oh damn, how will I get enough money to eat?"
Sure, there are probably some mathematicians that are sad that robots can do all the proofs and such for them, but it seems to me that most of them probably would be happy with the robots helping to solve problems if not for the little issues that mathematics is their profession and in the current state of things, they need to eat and have a place to live.
And that is the actual problem. Let's just remember, the Luddites were not anti-technology, they were against the technology being owned by a small elite that could use it to take away their livelihoods. They were against the capitalists essentially throwing them into the ditch to starve, and we're seeing echoes of that in the current AI discussion and the reactions of mathematicians, programmers, artists, etc. Back in the 1800s it was physical and artisan manufacturing labour in danger, and now it's mental labour.
I hope you understand that you're essentially conveying an image of a mathematician as a rent-seeker.
Maybe I am, but I'd argue that in that case I'm depicting literally all professions as rent-seeking, as people really want to protect their income and livelihoods from infringement that would endanger them. And at that point it's probably not useful to talk about it as rent-seeking.
If AI can do literally any job more efficiently than a human, then there's no need for human labour anymore and at least to me that seems that unless we get a radical transformation of our political economy, that will not be allowed to happen. You can't just put literally everyone out of a job, capitalism just wouldn't be able to cope with it and it'd implode, most probably because of the inevitable backlash that would occur for to no one being able to afford the basic necessities of life. It would be orders of magnitude bigger than either the French or Russian revolutions.
I'm no mathematician, but if being concerned about being able to keep my employment to be able to feed myself makes me a rent-seeker, then I will wear that on my sleeve proudly, crossing my heart, hoping to die. The misery of the alternative is too great to fathom.
"Rent-Seeking" is trying to capture eternally recurring payment for something you did or acquired one time.
Mathematicians acquired their skills over long hours of study, but weren't asking to be paid just to sit around passively being smart, but to keep working on new results. It is the lost opportunity to do work they are lamenting, not the lost opportunity to sit on their laurels. So no, it doesn't sound like rent-seeking.
Isn't it the same with software development? I kind of feel that way too.
> math has destroyed a major source of “life’s meaning”
YOU ARE NOT YOUR WORK! My god people! The meaning you get from life shouldn’t be reduced entirely to the job you do. Mathematician, or programmer, or pilot, or ship captain, or janitor or otherwise.
I already had to learn this, but the sooner you decouple your professional life from “what makes you… you” the better.
Meaning in life comes from contributing to something larger than yourself. Work is one way but there are others. Just be careful when you dismiss work that you don't end up leading a meaningless life.
Doesn't bode well for all of us meatbags, actually. AI might now be better mathematicians (if that's even true for now). But if progress continues, it might be a better <your job here>, and even worse, wife, husband, parents. Black mirror territory.
Another pop culture reference: in the first book of the "The Three-Body Problem" trilogy by Liux Cixin, physicists get depressed by having their field of work blocked.
Pretty much the inverse situation, but also the same situation - having your field of expertise completely disrupted. Anyone would be troubled.
> Imagine waking up one morning to find that an alien technology has solved the problem you had dedicated your life to
I’d like to wake up and find out a 100 types of cancer have been cured.
Software Engineers entire jobs have become being meat proxys to A.I.
We hear you.
> AI has destroyed a major source of "life's meaning" for many people who pursued mathematics.
That captures how I feel, and I just don't know what do with that emotion. Mathematics is now like chess, gardening, crochetting, dancing, etc
We live in a time where there isn't enough focus on giving life meaning. Without meaning, it is too easy to become cynical. Some of the happiest people I know believe that the greatest source of meaning is serving others. Many of those at the forefront of research believe there work, while individual, serves all of humanity.
Recent And relevant: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/reactions
I previously tried to (unsuccessfully) find out, with the help of AI, a form of mathematics that allows me integrate, or compute differential equations with a new representation of numbers. That will allows us to compute non elementary integrals, or diff. equations very easy with pen and paper. The AI says that is impossible, until a human mathematician make the discovery (the AI by itself won't do it by now)
I actually remember that in an old interview (that I can't find sorry) Grant Sanderson said he moved in to YouTube because he thought it was a more promising career than being mathematician, it's interesting to see his opinion change.
Hmm, that seems like a pretty cynical point to make. He still deeply is in the field of mathematics, as a math educator. He even makes this exact point in this video, that communicating math is still a hard and respectable part of the profession.
Sorry I didn't mean it to be cynical, it just came to mind
As a math educator doing what you love you requires an audience.
Its kind of in Grant's incentives to push the interest for mathematics, because without an audience he won't be able to keep doing what he loves.
Like, my old uni has a history department, and had an Egyptian history teacher. This was at some point deemed a pointless use of resources because there was no role in society except for teacher of the same subject after that, and the classes shrunk, and she ended up getting offered a role in admin. She was not happy in that role.
His point is this development is great for him and if you were a practicing mathematician trying to prove theorems, well, sucks to be you.
I remember a post in... Reddit I think it was? where I commented on an early video discussion that he should teach online full time, because that kind of intuitive education was sorely needed. He actually answered the comment, along the lines of "that would be cool but I already have my hands full in $UNIVERSITY".
I think it was relatively soon after that interaction that he started doing youtube full time. I've always wanted to think I made a teeny tiny contribution to move the needle there :)
Yeah. All due respect to Grant Sanderson, he is both great scientist and great entrepreneur, but getting an entry-career advice from a multi-millionaire is probably not quite the best idea out of all ideas in a popular discourse. Especially if the field in question was famous for producing posts discouraging people from going all-in in it, for many many years even before AI craze.
One wonders who you think is Grant Sanderson.
? moving to youtube in order to be a math communicator
If 3blue1brown instead made programming videos, and said "There's never been a better time to go into computer science" ... well, I just wouldn't believe them.
This feels a bit like unprincipled optimism, despite any rationale.
But I'm for unprincipled optimism.
It feels like it's meant as career advice though. I have no idea what advice I would give to a teenager right now, but as a math PhD - math would not be on the shortlist, sadly.
Was math really a good career choice at any point in time?
Math jobs are either in:
- teaching, which except for tertiary education, is poorly paid
- or a very limited, competitive and unstable pool of jobs in academia and maybe a handful of companies with large research departments
We're probably talking 50 000 people in math research worldwide and probably millions of underpaid regular math teachers at middle and high schools.
I am an ex-mathematician who went into industry, I would say apart from CompSci/ML and physics, it was one of the most sought-after PhDs you could have (across tech and finance) - when I was entering the job market 10 years ago at least. No regrets.
Yeah, but how many of those mathematicians still do math?
It's like engineers in post-Communist European countries, sure there were tons of graduates, but 80% of them were doing something else than the thing they graduated in.
That's not what you said though - you said it was a bad career choice. I'm saying it was a good one, even if you didn't end up directly doing a lot of high-level math.
> even if you didn't end up directly doing a lot of high-level math
But that's what everyone is lamenting the loss of, that AI is taking that specific job.
> That's not what you said though - you said it was a bad career choice.
Going through forced detours in life doesn't make it a "good choice".
The good choices are the ones where people finish their studies/apprenticeships and then immediately work in their direct field. For example a law student becoming a lawyer.
At most I'd consider that a "mediocre choice".
It's fine to give career advice but the giver isn't going to pay the price if the advice turns out to be horribly wrong.
It might just not matter what Tao and everyone of them thinks if the people in charge of the budget think otherwise.
If we don't come to a global agreement (of course only the top 10 gdp countries, lets ignore all the 3th world which we done for ages anyway) on how to create/spend money for this type of things, we will get in problems.
And even if the winners of this (ai companies/hyperscalers) will start 'gifting' universitys and budgets, thats not the solution.
If AI is doing all the work, why should anyone at the AI companies and hyperscalers still get paid?
I did not mean the employees but the company. So some random lucky shareholders.
Due to having assets.
There are quite a few problems with this video, IMO:
- Grant is a highly respected and popular YouTuber. He has a strong network, personal connections, access, and his income comes from an audience, not from output he’s measured on. He's perfectly positioned in this AI revolution to end up near the top of whatever human pile gets constructed, so he will not have the kinds of fears and anxieties that most people do.
- AI RSI is being actively developed and is likely to arrive within 1-2 years. I wouldn't consider this a fringe scenario; it's the main bet. Even if models stay weaker at theory building than humans, organizations will spin up 100k agents and the fire-hose of generated ideas will probably compound far faster than anyone can keep up.
- His remaining arguments are basically training people to problem-solve, and joy. For the next few years, I can see his particular niche doing quite well as infotainment, and he will probably make a lot of money. However, I don't really see people being able to join and partake in his industry 10-20 years from now. Also, if we project a realistic and grounded understanding of our current world onto the next couple of decades, what would give anyone the idea that political and economic systems would have any incentive to train people to problem-solve if AI becomes the real work-horse? Teaching will likely be defunded and turned into a consumption good (which it arguably already is becoming with these YouTube channels.)
- So, for me his entire argument boils down to... joy?
Others have already commented that this feels like unprincipled optimism, and I agree. I also think that because this is something made to generate revenue through a social media platform, it's inherently performative and on-brand. His incentives pull toward keeping his audience happy.
Unfortunately, outcomes follow incentives, not optimism. If our economy comes to rely on RSI-enabled AI, most people will simply have no place in any industry it touches.
>If our economy comes to rely on RSI-enabled AI, most people will simply have no place in any industry it touches.
Then there will be no economy. If anything, if we reach this level of economic automation, more people will have to find ways to occupy themselves and sparking joy through math might be the best way to go about it for some.
An economy can keep running even if most people are cut out of it. Production would just reorient to who owns capital, the state, and other AI systems buying from each other.
But, if I get the insinuation, this would still require a huge social change to absorb once broad consumer demand falls off.
As for pursuing math for fun: that would turn most disciplines into something akin to speedrunning, chess, or mountaineering. People would add constraints to make it harder for themselves and compete against each other, and that does motivate some - but not all. A lot of people want to be "on the frontier." If discovery gets automated, the remaining frontier may be physical, actually going places no one has been, and that might pull those people toward space as it opens up.
An economy needs demand, it's not just dead capital.
An economy does not need mass demand.
It can easily reorient itself (and arguably, already has) to serving the demand of a small minority of asset owners rather than the majority of people. E.g. people building luxury yachts and working to maintain them, working in luxury restaurants, maintaining luxury gardens etc. instead of working in roles that improve the lives of the majority.
Because most people are working on things that improve the lives of the asset-owning minority and not of the majority, the standard of living of the majority is not improved, they have to work more for less.
How many high-paying jobs today actually do anything that benefits the 'common man'?
>asset owners
Why do you think those assets are valuable?
>How many high-paying jobs today actually do anything that benefits the 'common man'?
I agree there's a lot of inequality and ridiculous pointless jobs, but the average person (in the developed world) still has access to a cornucopia of goods and services which they purchase.
Luxury items burn well. So your take may be true in a mathematical model of capitalism, it's at most a spherical cow in reality where people do like to not starve to death.
So unless there is a change towards UBI in your take (which is still not an all around solution. Many people only fit properly in a society because they are occupied 8 hours a day with something), that will probably result in the biggest revolution ever seen.
And there is not enough high walls to save the rich from that.
> An economy can keep running even if most people are cut out of it
> and other AI systems buying from each other
there is no difference between AI bro and a taliban, both methods of thinking are deranged, inhumane and show a grim future for the world at large
might as well as replace AI with god and you will understand what I mean
> Production would just reorient to who owns capital, the state, and other AI systems buying from each other.
Until those who don't own capital get upset and put the whole thing on fire.
But I don't think this video was meant to cover this case, and in the more pessimistic predictions you are not better with any other profession either. Given his assumptions I think it is an absolutely fair take. If AI becomes better in all 4 areas of math he lists, then private funding may decrease - BUT if there is ever any need for human problem solving skills, academia will not break down and this has always been the majority where mathematicians are employed/financed from.
And if this latter assumption breaks, we are in far greater trouble than whatever you chosen as a career and society will become unrecognizable to today's.
>An economy can keep running even if most people are cut out of it. Production would just reorient to who owns capital, the state, and other AI systems buying from each other.
it's comments like this that make me wish ecology (and trophic chains) was taught in school. It teaches a valuable lessons on systems, energy flows, consumers and producers.
We already had large societies that worked in a similar way during feudalism, but economies still relied on human labor. Today, there are countries where the majority of wealth is not reliant on citizens producing/consuming anything: Qatar, Kuwait, and the UAE primarily sell resources to other states.
No one knows exactly what happens if you scale that up to the entire planet, but my view: the owners will be the ones who trade because of the resources available on their territory - or technology they own. You get a few powerful rentier states, where citizens get stuff for free so they don't revolt. Everyone outside of those states becomes part of a stagnant periphery.
Some form of AI RSI is likely, but why would you expect the improvement at each level to stay proportional the level itself (which is required for exponential improvement), or even why would the rate of improvement stay above a particular constant (required for linear growth)?
To me the most likely scenario is RSI with diminishing returns, as the models get closer to the limits of the general approach to AI that they embody. The decreasing rate of improvement might look like a log curve, or even an horizontal asymptote. Not that scary.
That's possible, but it'd still probably hit those limits faster than any person or team could. Then maybe there'd be human-led work to find some kind of breakthrough that unlocks research up to the next plateau.
At some point though, I'd assume the AI would start finding breakthroughs itself.
I have a hard time coming up with a definition of RSI where it matters at all or where we haven't already reached it. It feels like compute and training data are far bigger bottlenecks than researchers. My thinking is it's just the next buzzword for these companies after claiming victory over AGI.
A couple of thoughts in agreement..
First, "cognitive labor" is a form of labor - it's different vs. creative work, even though both use your mind. If your math theorem can be written up in partnership with an LLM, wow! You can be done with that, and go do other great work. Cognitive labor is a form of labor. Let's talk about physical labor and leverage to understand how removing labor translates to time. On your farm you buy a tractor to replace your backhoe. If it is a hobby farm you get in the tractor and you're done super fast. Or, you can take that tractor, buy a bigger farm, and spend the same amount of time you'd have spent backhoeing, but in a far more leveraged way. You can trade removed labor for time in a way that suits you.
Second; the joyful moments we get from finding generalizable abstractions and nice solutions are an adaptation. Humans can climb infinitely high conceptual hierarchies - we'll never stop climbing, using the previous ones as tools to find the next. As we do, we gain joy with each discovery because. We get so much done with brains that run on 20 watts - are we tuned to receive a neurochemical reward for finding cognitive efficiency? If AI means more concepts are discovered the tower gets taller - and we find those joyful moments more often. If there are infinite moments to be found, why not go as fast as possible!
Third; everyone else is doing it, it's a baseline skill. Knowing how to work without AI is like knowing how to ride a horse. Useful and fun! Bedsides - only 150ish years ago horses were the only viable transport. Cars were new; toys for the rich. But cars got so good so fast that we eventually reconfigured whole cities. Your homework is to consider why and how horses got disrupted.
New divisions are emerging in the lump of roles humans had at work. AI takes away roles from your job and lets us do more with less. That's identical to every mechanization before it. It's killing some roles that make up your work, even as it creates new ones.
There's so much to be excited about. Fear is a rational response to change. But so is hope :)
> AI takes away work and lets us do more with less - just like every mechanization that came before!
No, it's not the same as mechanization. The fundamental difference, and why I find it illogical to argue either for "AI will open up tons of new work avenues" or "AI will kill all jobs" is that it all hinges on whether AI "caps out" at an intelligence level below humans (in at least some domains/capabilities), or if it is able to surpass human intelligence at all levels.
If the former is true, then yes, there will be a lot for humans to do. If the latter is true, then no, there will be no reasonable cognitive role for humans to play (beyond perhaps for some legal, "nostalgic" reasons or what not). So whether one decides to be optimistic or pessimistic really depends on if you think AI will stay at a level below humans. I really don't know, so I'm not "taking sides" in this debate.
I think one form of cognitive labor will remain: What do we actually want to do/build. And this is simply because AI does not know our internal world. Maybe in a few years with some kind of BCI that is extremely good. But I don't see it happening at least for a few years.
> I think one form of cognitive labor will remain: What do we actually want to do/build.
Sure, but you don't need very many people to do that relative to the billions of workers that currently exist.
If you wipe out 90% of all jobs instead of 100% the practical implications for society as a whole are roughly exactly the same.
The Great Depression was "only" 25% unemployment.
A good precedent is mechanized agriculture. When machines effectively replaced most humans in agriculture, unemployment did not rise to 90%.
> A good precedent is mechanized agriculture. When machines effectively replaced most humans in agriculture, unemployment did not rise to 90%.
I don't consider this a good precedent to the AI situation at all.
When this happened, humans went off and started doing what we now consider "knowledge work" (well, after a brief stint in factory work, where they also got displaced by automation). They escaped massive unemployment by being smarter than the tractors and mechanical looms. But how do they escape AI job loss when AI becomes smarter than the average human? or smarter than the smartest human?
In prior displacements humans moved up the stack. There is no longer room for them at higher levels of the stack if AI beats them at cognitive labor.
Yes but what about all the horses replaced by machines?
Humans keep a few around for entertainment but that’s about it.
what a great way of putting it, saving this
> Yes but what about all the horses replaced by machines?
The point is that people, like horses, can do other things. Humans don't even have to be better than robots at anything. It's the principle of comparative advantage.
No amount of comparative advantage can help you when your economic values is less than the cost of keeping you alive.
> The point is that people, like horses, can do other things.
...like what? If we start with the assumption that AI can broadly replace humans in knowledge jobs, what industries are absorbing tens of millions of humans for labor?
I see this as a categorical difference. The difference between AI and agricultural mechanization is that AI is highly heterogeneous. During the mechanization of agriculture that you talk about (which also happened over generations), there were alternative industries to move to. What happens when AI is competing in the majority of industries? Are there going to be 10 million new plumbers?
And this is why we must ensure that the AIs get aligned towards humanity and crucially that they don't get aligned towards capital, which seems to be the current trajectory.
There's a better chance that a humanity-aligned AI would make sure that humans have something to do and keep us alive versus a capital-aligned one. At the same time, if AI would be the deathblow to capitalism, that'd be very, _very_ ironic.
Only if the AI still cares about our opinion.
People already routinely ask AI questions about what to build or do.
Of course, and then AI will give you generic canned things to build. It cannot (yet) read minds. I don't understand what you wanted to make clear to me with this.
Sorry i wasn't clearer. My point is that some percent or those decisions are already outsourced to ai. When it makes decisions while carrying out work, or even in the choices and ideas it presents to us, it is shaping and deciding what gets built. Algorithms on tiktok and YouTube already decide what we watch. Probably most human watch hours in a day are decided by algorithms already.
> ...hinges on whether AI "caps out" at an intelligence level below humans (in at least some domains/capabilities), or if it is able to surpass human intelligence at all levels.
I agree with you, just wondering your thought on how we will know the latter has come true? As I understand it, you're describing ASI, not AGI. The way I personally define AGI, we are already there.
On one hand it is hard to fathom not being the most intelligent thing around.
On the other hand, if we are going to survive as a species for a long time it probably depends on us learning how to not be the most intelligent thing around.
Even if it leads to our demise, I don’t think willfully holding ourselves back is the way forward
Uh…if it leads to our demise then holding AI back is the way forward pretty much by definition.
Yeah, honestly I am worried about "the psychopaths who walk among us" who basically argue "Yeah, we may end up building SkyNet, but tough shit, can't stop progress!"
What the fuck?
I struggle to see any scenario where it caps out and fails to far exceed human intelligence.
What would be the limiting factor?
It's certainly possible that "the special sauce" that provides human consciousness and sentience (that I believe is not there for LLM-based AIs) provides some key ingredient to some forms of intelligence (particularly when it comes to originally) which LLMs would not be able to duplicate.
For example, much has been recently discussed about how OpenAI's math results, as impressive as they are, remained within "the convex hull" of existing math literature. Thus, some have argued that the way LLMs work will keep them squarely within this convex hull, and also there seem to be clear examples from human history where humans came up with breakthroughs that were outside the convex hull of ideas that existed at that time.
There has been a lot of recent debate, both for and against, this idea that current AI approaches are limited to this convex hull. So I'm not going to try to convince you one way or the other, but I do think it is at least a plausible explanation of how/why current approaches end up hitting a wall.
I'll also show my bias which is to say I certainly hope they hit a wall, because I don't understand how anyone can think that humans won't be truly and completely fucked if AI ends up far surpassing human intelligence.
the convex hull argument has recently been under scrutiny as well.
some proofs of famous conjectures (for example unique games conjecture) have been described as creating new, insane, almost alien ideas. Scott aaronson has a blog post on this.
Thanks, looking forward to reading his rationale.
Edit: OK, I found his rationale in the comment section, and I don't find it particularly convincing:
> (1) Einstein and Gödel and Gauss and Shakespeare “merely filled out some points in the convex hulls” of everything that came before them, if you take an expansive enough view of what those convex hulls actually were. What a pathetic piece of cope.
> (2) Dana tells me she now mostly understands the proof of the UGC, and is amazed by the new ideas in it, and wants to give talks about it soon. So, maybe people can listen to that and then lecture her on how it’s “just a point in the convex hull” of the ideas that she’s worked with for 20 years!
First, to just use Einstein as an example, I remember reading many years ago (like at least a decade plus) that many scientists felt like if Einstein had never lived, the theory of special relativity (i.e e=mc^2) likely would have been found pretty quickly in any case - the work had already been done putting the nail in the "luminiferous ether" coffin, and people were starting to connect the dots. I think most people would agree that special relativity was within the "convex hull" that existed at that time. However, I've also heard that general relativity was so far outside the bounds of scientific thought of the time that if Einstein hadn't discovered it that in may have been 50-100 years or more before we figured it out - it was far outside the bounds of the convex hull of that time.
All that said, I'm not a mathematician qualified to determine whether what has been discovered by OpenAI is inside or outside the convex hull, and I do think that the vast majority of human intelligence operates within the convex hull in any case, and what AI can do is hugely, immensely powerful. Still, I'm more inclined to agree with this other commenter on Scott's blog:
> I am a little more in the “convex hull” camp when it comes to AI creativity. In my own interactions on research problems, I find the AI to be singularly uncreative. But these are not math problems.
> From my own introspection, my creative ideas come from a kind of visualization: situating myself in a quasi-physical abstract place that is very difficult to explain. But from there I can simply “see” things by “looking around”.
> This seems to me to be a byproduct of being an embedded agent, not just a prompt-responder. Embedded agents reflect and cogitate using their model of the world. Yann LeCun in particular pushes this as a necessary requirement for true intelligence.
> That said, I don’t agree with LeCun’s claim of necessity. Just as reasoning turned out to be something mysteriously emergent from language in the LLMs, so too could this kind of creative behavior. But I have no idea how.
Interesting - thanks for your perspective! I just took Scott's comments mostly at face value.
In any case, I think most researchers have been filling the convex hull (and have been enjoying doing so?) for most of their research. So even if Einstein provided something truly necessary, there's a reason there's only one Einstein (or grothendieck or insert famous name here). I know that's moving the goalposts but yeah.
Yes, I agree. The reason we highlight truly original, unique bits of genius is that they're so rare. So while I hold on to the idea that there is something humans will still exceed at, the vast, vast majority of things we do obviously aren't of that nature, and AI will vastly change the nature of work and society in the very near future.
The history of AI research is people saying “yeah but computers can’t do X” followed by computers doing X in the near future.
No matter whether AI caps out or when, humans will be driving.
That said, other humans can and will put AI to use in ways that don't benefit humanity. It's actually already happening - newsfeeds waste hours of people's lives and attention; give teens low self esteem etc etc. and guess what. Society is adjusting - governments via legislation, device makers via screen time limits, communities by spreading the word and raising awareness
Smart AI wielded by people without your best interests in mind may be tough to counter; but you don't have to do it alone: humanity is getting wise to the threat. We don't have great tools but it'd be against the grain of history to assume we won't come up with them in time. Can't give specifics - as they say, predictions are hard, especially about the future..
We've made it through bigger more violent upheavals and we'll make it through this.
> If your math theorem can be written up in partnership with an LLM, wow! You can be done with that, and go do other great work.
If your painting can be painted in partnership with an LLM, wow!
If your essay can be written in partnership with an LLM, wow!
If your painting portfolio website can be written in partnership with an LLM, wow!
If your museum show can be designed in partnership with an LLM, wow!
If the placards next to each of your paintings can be written in partnership with an LLM, wow!
If the car that takes me to the gallery can be designed and driven in partnership with an LLM, wow!
If the newspaper or novel that you read on the way to the gallery can be written in partnership with an LLM, wow!
If an LLM can give tours at the gallery and answer questions asked by visitors, wow!
If an LLM can write the music that I listen to on my way out of the gallery, wow!
If an LLM can synthetically perform the music, too, wow!
> If AI means more concepts are discovered the tower gets taller - and we find those joyful moments more often. If there are infinite moments to be found, why not go as fast as possible!
I don't understand how a person can say this with a straight face. There has been so much discussion of this, and so many reasons have been given, that one can only assume that, if you're asking the question and you have thought about the issue and read what people have said, you're not only asking rhetorically but have some personal reason for insisting on a frankly pretty frustrating, borderline insensitive insistence on being positive. I'm not trying to be snotty or rude. I just want to say that to me there is something uncanny about your comment, in its total blindness to any of the reasons someone might not only disagree with you but grieve the death of, say, their academic discipline in its current form -- and in its weirdly breezy lack of empathy.
>Much wow!
Are you suggesting that if an AI could do all of those things to your satisfaction you would not be extremely impressed.
I do have empathy for people who see the world changing and are forced to adjust. That can be uncomfortable, but it is something that is inevitable with the changing world. It has always been this way, There is very little need to make swords these days, and as anything becomes superseded there are people that are attached to the old things and there are people dependent on the old things.
I think it entirely possible to have sympathy for their position while disagreeing that the solution is to prevent change.
I don't see this as a breezy lack of empathy. I see this as a hand reaching out and saying 'Hey, you can come this way and things aren't so bad after all'
I think it would be much more of a change now, if we ban LLMs entirely and force everyone to do everything without any form of chatbot to help them. I would sympathize with the people who can’t handle this change, but it’s gonna happen, I think they should get with the times and adapt to it. I think it is wrong of you to try and prevent this change.
Actually I think we need to go further, we need to make an example out of the people who spent a trillion dollars building a product that is universally hated to try and make a buck. They need to be completely ruined financially, now that would be a real challenge, I sympathize with those adversely affected but it needs to happen if society must progress to a better place where humans flourish more.
As much as I hate all the moronic garbage people do with A.I., it can be used for good like every piece of technology. In any case though, it can't be "banned" or stopped, only regulated. So we just have to deal with it.
Obviously it can be banned. We can just tax the datacenters till it’s no longer economical to run. We did that to nuclear and nuclear required a smaller CapEx. We can retroactively fine the AI companies for training on copyright data, with some absurd fines like 200B $ and bankrupt them. There is so much we can do without even changing the laws all that much. I don’t know where this belief that we can’t ban this technology even come from.
Being impressed is not the same as making one happy.
My daughter is 21 months old. I love her more than anything and want her to develop into the best version of herself. Let's say I can press a button and give her perfect command of English. Another button gives her expert-level command of advanced mathematics. Perfect hand-eye coordination. Emotional self-regulation. Empathy. Etc. Keep listing every desirable trait and skill you can think of. Hit a button. Suddenly she has it.
I would not press it.
Yes, if LLMs can do all everything I listed, I'll be impressed. I'll also want nothing to do with any of it.
As I wrote in another comment, I want mathematicians -- in their current form, doing work as they traditionally have -- just as I want writers, philosophers, etc, because this is a better world that makes people better.
OpenAI's proofs do not make people better. They do not make our lives or work meaningful. Quite the contrary. OpenAI has clear-cut and salted fields that people have been painstakingly, lovingly sowing and cultivating for generations -- profoundly ugly actions that do real harm to some of the best of what people are and have produced.
If I were a person willing to hit that button and 'upgrade' my daughter, I don't know whether I'd be able to live with myself. I'd feel as though I'd killed her or at least done profound, unforgivable violence to her. She deserves the chance to grow into the best version of herself. What companies like OpenAI are doing is, if their plans pan out, at least as horrifying. It isn't progress. It isn't good for people.
We're not taking about attachment to old ways. We're talking about attachment to human value.
Thank you for putting this so eloquently into words. I feel the exact same way.
The journey is the destination. I don't care how many checkpoints you can breeze through, if you don't grow, have an experience that transforms you through the process of doing it. And if you're just ticking boxes by means of having a machine do it all for you, there was no need initiating the process in the first place.
I am not talking about producing tools that are means to an end here. I am glad we can make millions of socks a week by means of automation. But intellectual endeavors are different.
The point of doing math is not proving theorems. It's to discover the intuition, the underlying phenomena, internalizing them and adding to the human understanding of the problem. Writing out the proof is just the incidental outcome of that process.
If no human learns anything, if we just start producing testaments to a human null process where no person has emerged strengthened from it, we are no better off than we ever were. We are just producing empty and meaningless representations of something which is not there.
Thank you. By far the best comment in this thread. As a dad this really resonates with me too, and even though my kids are a little bit older than yours the feeling is very much the same. We're automating away those things that make life worth living now.
If your daughter had cancer and you could press a button to make it go away, would you press it?
If so, what aspect of that makes it different? It is a change in the same beneficial direction. It is an intervention against what has happened naturally.
Similarly if she lacked any empathy and you could press a button to provide it? This would be the same direction of the same property, just an intervention from a different naturally occuring starting point.
I make no claim of the merits of OpenAI's immediate behaviour. I am commenting on a world in which things like this can be done, and like Grant Sanderson, I see a world of opportunity for understanding and learning for the joy of appreciating the problem and the solution. The only thing that seems to have been lost is that a human may no longer gain the prestige of being the first to discovers something. That should pale into insignificance to the benefits of understanding a thing. I'm not even sure if you should consider prestige as a healthy motivation to discover things.
Right now AI can provide a proof that is either valuable or not. If it is just the last page of a novel without any of the chapters then it hasn't given us mutch at all. The problem isn't in what it has provided, it tha't we've been using the wrong measure of merit.
If it does provide a full result with a rich explanation that people can understand then it has undoubtedly provided something that benefits the world. No human is awarded prestige for the discovery but that has always been an unfair measure.
If you work all your life on a math problem only to have an AI produce the result before you, how is this meaningfully different for your experience to working all your life on a math problem only to have another person produce the result before you.
If there is something that is unknown and could be proved true by path A and proved false by path B by definition nobody knows which path to follow. What happens if two mathematicians attempt this problem one going down each path. If an AI produces the result before they finish have they lost to the same degree? Only one of them had any chance of gaining the prestige. Did the other lose nothing? Was their life wasted? I don't think so either way and the only way to consider that work not wasted is to consider the effort to understand to be the thing that is valuable, not the result at the end.
If a solution is found by a human when there are people tying multiple paths, the one who guessed the correct path gains the prestige. That doesn't seem like a fair way to reward effort.
If we want understanding then AI can help.
Chess has had this moment. Computers can play chess better than people. It has also been a great benefit to the understanding of chess precisely because they value the how to get there over the result.
Prior to modern chess engines you could hypothesize about what the best move might be but you could never know if you were right. The fact that chess engines beat people so consistently is because often the guess is not right.
Chess engines gave us the ability to look at a game and see if if a player could have made a better move. They could then look to see why it was a better move. People then learned how to play better. They still play against other humans because they are testing each others understanding of the game, for that the computer is set aside.
Computers playing chess better than humans improved chess for humans.
Is there a compelling reason why that cannot be true for other things that they are better than.
I personally disagree. I prefer the take described (in a sibling comment) by Lerc.
But I want to note that your line of reasoning seems to be a perfect answer to "if God loves us and is omnipotent, why does God allow suffering?"
.. and I'm not sure I accept that theological line of reasoning either.
> We're not taking about attachment to old ways. We're talking about attachment to human value.
Human values vary across time and cultures. I'm pretty sure if people 100 years later look back onto this discussion, they will think you're attaching to old ways. Society will adopt to super-intelligent AI, and nobody will understand why you'd intentionally deprive your loved ones of a better life and prefer to watch them "struggle".
> That's identical to every mechanization before it.
Steam engines aren't very good at designing steam engines. I think this time will be different.
AI needs to be instructed to do a thing. To use the "steam engine designing another steam engine" analogy, why do the big labs give the highest pay of all to their prized researchers? Why do they take steps to prevent poaching? Surely a non-expert could prompt a model "find a superparameter combo that makes an amazing model" and the next gen model would emerge! The AI should be able to design a better AI on its own!
Why do the labs have thousands of employees? Lets think about this...
Who's designing the evals needed to validate the model quality, who's deciding what goes in the system prompt? Who's negotiating to buy training data from hundreds or even thousands of data vendors? Who's responding when the Internet goes apeshit over some prompt tweak that makes models over-verbose? Who's out there listening to users and feeding what they say back into the product pipeline?
Computers????
However automated things get, that quickly becomes the new baseline. Customer expectations are always going up.
And as soon as humans figure out how to automate any of the things listed above - it becomes part of the new baseline too. It's always advancing. To beat the baseline and be competitive, you need humans. No matter what. No matter how automatic the automated things get. Always and forever. Because you need someone to drive, to find the next automatable thing and automate it - and to prioritize where to search for automatable things.
> Always and forever. Because you need someone to drive, to find the next automatable thing and automate it - and to prioritize where to search for automatable things.
If we look at history of automation throughout the times it always decreased the amount of people needed to do the job. If you can't see a future where this new steam engine learns how to do a better steam engine, then you are blind. With the trajectory we're on it will happen sooner or later, and most people are having existential crises because the amount of humans required to be "in the loop" are decreasing increasingly fast.
I agree the people needed goes down - but will add a nuance.
Roles go away and fewer people are needed to do a thing, but I think it's good! For example the number of people on farms decreased orders of magnitude over the past say, century - yet we still feed everyone. Farming got mostly automated and got insanely more productive per human.
What happened was those people who would've been needed on farms went and did other stuff and the economy got way more complex but also that new complexity let a lot of more awesome things got provided for a lot more people by a lot more companies, a trend that continues today.
If you want to be a farmer good luck; it's harder to get started than it was say, 50 years ago - so why bother when there is no net new demand for farmers and there are also many better ways to make a living.
That's what'll happen for cognitively drudgerous work vs. creative new work.
As a software engineer, I found that a codebase that is LLM-assisted or entirely produced by agents gets harder and harder to understand intuitively over time. By writing code manually, you build a very precise mental model of how it works. The time it took was the price for that. Now, the time cost has been largely removed but the payoff also disappeared: it's essentially impossible to maintain the same mental model with the speed and volume of AI contributions. Reviewing code is not a substitute for writing it, and new contributions to the codebase are essentially bound to LLM usage. So now we're in a position where the codebase and its capabilities grow fast, but are not backed by the full understanding of the engineers. AI tools have become our crutch.
Math is very similar, and requires an even higher degree of mental understanding to produce advancements. The effort spent trying to prove theorems and connect theories pays off in deep intuition; removing that struggle significantly impairs our understanding.
So no, you can't "be done with that, and go do other great work" without paying the understanding tax. And over time that's just not sustainable.
A simpler analogy would be gym training: the effort expenditure and the strength gains are inextricably linked. You can't go in there and start lifting weights with a forklift while expecting strength improvements.
In the case of software development, businesses have decided that speed gains are more important than maintainability, understanding, and independence. Will the same happen in math? The future in which mathematicians become LLM assistants (as opposed to LLM-assisted) and spend their days "turning the crank" just to review what comes out is quite bleak.
The analogy is tempting. But gym training isn't what work is. At work the goal is not learning - it's delivering value.
Doing weights is not the same as say, updating the gym with shiny new weights; or migrating all the weights in the gym to metric. At the gym, if the current weights need to go and new ones installed, a forklift will one-shot it.
Seeing the difference empowers you to choose the right approach for the right situation.
This is the same naivete that I saw in coding some time ago before most people finally accepted there is no going back and the times of writing code by hand are gone.
And the guy is not a mathematician primarily - he's a Youtube creator and entrepreneur. I liked a lot of his videos but now I usually just ask the LLM for detailed explanation and I can probe it as much as I want if something is not clear enough.
Education will also take a huge hit, you can't really beat an almost free supergenius that has all the time in the world to explain something to you in as much detail as you wish.
I can beat this “supergenius” - I hire a professor that knows exactly how to teach and what to teach. This professor isn’t rolling the dice every time I ask them a question. Boom.
> the times of writing code by hand are gone.
It is not, and for the same reason it's not over for mathematics. For anyone doing anything truly novel, and yes there are still software engineers out there doing that, it's still inept.
It's de jour to leverage formal verification as LLMs are quite good at looping it, but that's still a tool we had to invent to solve problems. It'll be truly over when we're being outpaced in the realm of invention but I have seen absolutely nothing to suggest that has meaningfully occurred at all. Coding by hand is not gone, there's just less of a reason to do so now.
I’m a cheerleader for the Khanmigo AI tutor effort. But, apparently so far they are discovering that the hard part is getting the kids motivated to actually ask the AI any questions.
3Blue1Brown does an amazing job of making math interesting to learn in itself. As opposed to the hundreds of millions of kids told “You just have to learn it or you’ll be dumb. Keep up or you’ll fall behind forever. Go!”
The vid calls out explicitly that math education is a primarily a motivation problem and I agree. One way or another, we need a lot more focus on that.
Lack of motivation can be a problem and I love 3b1b videos. However, if you want to truly learn, you still have to sit 30-60 hours on a subject to be able to solve problems. No motivation will replace that.
When you have limited time to learn as a student, you either have the smarts to learn in the limited time or you cheat.
About a year ago I wrote something similar about software, "Now might be the best time to learn software development": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44299979
Reflecting on that a year later is interesting. Agents have become REALLY good since then, and I consider the "writing code" side of my profession to be largely annihilated. Some days that's really hard to accept.
But I think Grant's conclusion about math still largely echoes what I wrote about software: don't underestimate the social aspect of these activities, and if anything AI has made the social side more important. I deliberately avoided declaring, "now is the best time to learn to write code". I suspected that skill might be going out the window. But learning systems thinking and the social skills needed to connect people's dreams to reality continues to be an important art, an art I still have the privilege to practice every day.
And if we do reach the "anything you can do I can do better" stage, then, as Grant said, that's a hard to imagine world, and one where "it can write really good code" might be the least of our problems.
I agree. I think the days of the developer who hated talking to anyone but is still very valuable are over.
I think social skills are much more important today because one person can do so much more but this person needs to talk to many others to know what to build.
And this is why I am likely to leave software. I actually really like people, but I am autistic and not especially good at talking to them, and it's quite drianing to do so.
I will miss coding, but I had a good run. Time to learn a trade. I don't begrudge this fate.
You can probably build more than ever thanks to AI, but yeah, your career is probably going to be at a disadvantage if talking to people is difficult.
But if, somehow, you can find the right thing to build without talking to people, there is still a lot of building to do.
Good luck, I think we are all going to need it.
> But if, somehow, you can find the right thing to build without talking to people, there is still a lot of building to do.
And a lot of that building is of tangible things in the physical world, that I can literally feel the good of.
Why would you leave software? Sitting down and working in silence and thinking is still a very rare and valuable skill, the talking part is not so much.
If AI solves all coding and software then we are not going to sit around talking, it will be the time to sit down and do some very complex deep work that needs silence, concentration and understanding.
For you it will be paradise, you can also just point all the people to talk with your agent instead of you.
> Why would you leave software?
I liked the coding part.
> If AI solves all coding and software then we are not going to sit around talking
> it will be the time to sit down and do some very complex deep work that needs silence, concentration and understanding.
Have you worked at a big tech company?
You can still code the interesting parts. We all need some mental gymnastic to keep up. Leetcode or writing the parts that interests you, it doesn't matter.
Yes I worked, almost for a decade. I know everybody loves talking there, but that was true before AI as well. Good thing is that with AI, big tech is going away. Who needs 5 layers of management when 5 guys can replicate their product.
No… the person who's going to do well is the one who doesn't have to ask what to build. The one who has to ask is no better than an AI, except they start out wanting to ask, rather than starting out with no interest whatsoever until they're prompted to have one.
When everything you ask for is instant and valueless, even asking becomes meaningless, and everyone is waiting to see something they'd not thought of.
Then, a thousand thousand copies, immediately… but also, watching that person like a hawk to see if they can do it again. That's the future. A lot of people will just plain become unable to think or intend anything on their own, or even want anything.
Are we talking companies here?
Somebody still needs to determine what the company system actually look like, that someone is still probably a programmer, it doesn't matter anymore if that programmer is also a good coder.
I'm trying to think of an exception but I find it hard to disagree. Even if you know exactly what to build, it's pretty hard to get any adoption without being aggressively social. Find a good extroverted friend, maybe?
At this point I'm ready to call it... LLMs aren't going to ruin my job. They're amazing, they're useful... and the problem remains that to a first approximation human beings are uninterested in spending all day talking to a computer, whether through a classic IDE or through an LLM. Specifying a problem enough for an LLM to solve it, even if we stipulate one that does it perfectly, is already more than most people want to do.
You also aren't going to get an accountant running 4 simultaneous streams of AI-driven development and working through an AWS issue when something goes wrong.
No comment as to the next generation of AIs.
The problem is you're focused on 1st order effects. I presume you work at some company that sells a product or provides a service - what happens if the demand for that evaporates because the clients can do it themselves or the market has been flooded by much cheaper alternatives created using AI? Or people who bought the product can't do it as they lost their jobs to automation?
First, I've already thought about the second-order effects and disagree that the second order effects are that all software vendors in all spaces get wiped out: https://jerf.org/iri/post/2026/what_value_code_in_ai_era/
Second, if "all software vendors in all spaces get wiped out" was going to happen I think we'd be seeing more of it already. Yes, there is support for some software vendors possibly getting wiped out... but, then again, you can't look at a bad vibe coded implementation of "the entire Adobe suite" that was rather overblown in the press coverage and forget that Adobe also has AIs. Instead what I'm seeing at my own workplace as we ponder the question of "should we replace this service we buy with some local vibe coding" is still remaining but we don't want to support that. Can we replace Confluence with vibe coding? Yes, but that was true five years ago too and we didn't want to do it then, either. We still don't want to do it. HN commenters have always overestimated the desire everyone in the world has to become programmers and take responsibility for everything.
One wonders what percentage of those who are certain that vibe coding is going to nuke all software vendors can't even be arsed to self-host a Jellyfin or VaultWarden install... which is way easier than vibe coding the whole of those things from scratch, and we're talking about people who are already programmers. Physician, heal thyself.
I hope you are right, but I think there will be a lot of reshuffling nevertheless if only because the shape of the work has changed so much. A lot of people who hated developing software will suddenly find a passion for it, a lot of people who were good will find they can't stand this new world.
I think that’s true until there’s a major shift in UX and AIs morph into whatever the user needs based on natural language.
But no one has nailed that paradigm yet.
An accountant will still need a company system that makes sense of the numbers they crunch
I recently got into math. Got into New Scientist magazine based on some of the discoveries I’ve made. Have made some great friends as well.
It’s great time to get into math.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2591415-ai-finds-baffli...
> the discoveries I’ve made
The title says AI did it.
How about “the discoveries I’ve driven”?
The only certainty in life is that change is inevitable, and resisting change will always lead to challenges and suffering.
Regardless of where that leads us, I believe talking about how to cope with change and explore integration as well as its effect on meaning for us is the human thing to do.
I could be fully wrong here as I am not from the field. But how is this different from let's say a ramanujan-like genius dumping a bunch of solved problems with not yet understandable ways of getting there?
It seemed riveting enough for some mayor mathematicians to "decode" his solutions into readable proofs?
The only difference I spot now is that it was not an Indian man, but a machine. If that bothers you still, it seems less about the art of the craft being taken as it seems to be about who has taken it?
The difference is partly that in your hypothetical the man who solves the problems doesn't become a commodifiable tool. It doesn't become possible to increase your spending on him to solve a problem. It would be recognized that he is in a category by himself (and hopefully a better writer than the models) and therefore would not change how others do their work. The list of differences could go on and on.
AI will be much more powerful than ramanujan. ramanujan is just one person with limited energy, but many instances of AI agent can work in parallel and attack all open problems at once
I agree with the 3blue1brown guy because now is the time to reinvent all pure math so it actually works. The other day I worked through a paper that redefines probability using game theory as a foundation and it was almost trivial to prove everything with an AI assistant. What else can be redefined
by the way it feels to me that teaching is one of the most satisfying jobs on earth, you could (and should) be passionate for hours long in front of your students, that's amazing. as a programmer it seems you'd only feel passionate for like 5% of your work, even before AI it wasn't all that joyful, you had to attend boring meetings, debug legacy code bases, trying to make sense of the bad decisions other made (including yourself), it's fine, it brings food to the table. I think the myth of "passion" has affected way too many youngesters though. You can find meaning in many things in life, and there are already way too many people who kept chasing their "passion" yet at the end realized it didn't bring them real happiness. Maybe this AI thing is good for us after all, maybe we should take a pause and answer the harder question.
Edit: and yeah, even teachers probably have lots of chores and boring parts of the job.
Until students come up to you earnestly, asking “what is the purpose of learning this?”
This is already happening in CS and math.
That is why schools should have physical punishments. "What is the purpose of learning this? What a stupid question? To not get additional lashes, obviously"
I don't get all the fuzz about AI in general:
Are we worried there won't be any problems left for humans to solve anymore?
If you think so... why don't you just go and celebrate?
3blue1brown has the absolute most educational and entertaining videos. Always fascinated by his animations which are custom programmed by him. I also appreciate the diversity of topics covered from deep math to software to science.
Agree. It's due to some of his videos, and also Wolfram's article that I went down the rabbit hole of "what's going on in LLMs?"
In the essay Hackers and Painters it was mentioned that there is a project approach to learning and an academic one. The idea of pet projects is killed by language models, because what you did on weekends, a language model now does in half an hour. So you can try the other approach: maybe you should have more general knowledge right away, best practices, so more of an academic approach. In the academic approach you learn from the best reference examples, develop taste, and only then recognize what is good or bad and build your own. But here too you can see that LLMs iterate much faster, while you have to collect patterns for years, and you will also always be in the role of the one who is behind.
> The idea of pet projects is killed by language models
Only if the goal of a pet project was the end result. In my experience pet project is all about learning new things and exploring the unknowns. LLM finishing it in half and hour does not achieve any of that. Although it can be a good assistant.
Before, I would write an emulator of an old console. On weekends I would debug why the game shows garbage instead of a picture, compare opcodes with the documentation and learn from my own mistakes. And the emulator itself would be valuable as an artifact, because it holds the experience I accumulated. Now the same thing can be done much faster. Learning from mistakes disappears, only high-level templates remain which looks similar to the academic approach.
On the other hand, you can set up an LLM so that everything goes gradually and you learn like you used to. But that's more like what I would call pet archaeology or something... Learning the tools doesn't give as much benefit anymore, it's more like a reconstruction of past events.
I have setup a sistem where I leverage LLMs and agents to replicate scientific papers, cs and related fields, especially ML ones, and that's what I do in the weekends now.
Going into math at this point is like buying a used crossword puzzle book.
this isn't an unexpected take from someone who is rich and famous for being a "math explainer". If you make your living explaining other people's proofs, then it makes sense to say "don't worry about _how_ the math gets done, you can still explain it, or supervise it." It will be interesting to see how he would react if his channel was overtaken by AI that was RL trained to produce 3b1b content, and produced better content than him, at a faster pace, so he lost his viewership. Then would he be satisfied with: "ok but now you can oversee a machine to make your videos, its not like 'making explainer videos' is inherently meaningful".
Same with programmers. The craftsmen feel the hit, the people that just saw it as a job and/or code as an obstacle to making a product say "what's the big deal, code was just a tool all along".
The end state is that more and more activity will consolidate to fewer controllers because of capital costs. Eventually the "makers" will be outcompeted by the few companies holding all the robots / AI swarms (at which point the other crabs in the bucket will say "told you so"). Sure you could create a startup, at which point your idea is instantly replicated (assuming it wasn't already thought of by millions of agents). Then you're merely facing the huge marketing, name recognition, and production ability of the megacorp versus your one unknown idea for the "factory" you "manage".
That's what's missing from the "factory manager" discussion -- how well can you compete with a Toyota factory? You're free to create your own factory right now. And just wait for the regulatory capture...
The influencers are working full time to support all BigAI narratives. The possibility of regulating AI like ICBMs is of course never mentioned. That opinion does not pay.
With open weight models isn't this like trying to regulate encryption?
The award for most cope of 2026 goes to...
There's never been a better time to be a professional mathematician, perhaps. Just like there's never been a better time to be a senior software engineer.
An 18 year old entering university today will retire somewhere in the 2070s. Is mathematics, or software engineering, a promising career path for the next 50 years? No, it's most certainly not, and anyone suggesting otherwise is delusional. I don't know what would be a good career path, but most certainly avoid anything that AI is having the most success at in 2026.
It's not a great time to be an unemployed senior/staff/principal software engineer.
Unhappy to confirm this one. All the experience in the world is useless when the applicants-to-jobs ratio is 2000:1
Yeah, there isn't anything wrong with encouraging people to get into mathematics But recommending it as a career, might be delusional, maybe harmful? (Although people say that about artists too)
I'm on the wrong site for this, but isn't it interesting how we don't ask what is the most interesting field I can join, but rather ... how do I stay employed with this for the next 44 years? Seems to me we missed the entire point and just accept it as reality and that it has to be this way. I'm not asking this to be snarky or smart, I'm just genuinely curious why everything seemed easier back in the day.
Different politics.
If AI came about 40 years ago, it would have been much more restricted and advanced much much slower.
But politics does not care for the average worker anymore. Every democratic country is slowly turning geriatric, so due to how democracy works, the will of the OLD is what runs societies. And job security is not one of those things, when the biggest voting block does not even work.
Not every field has an equal number of vacancies. There are a few people who study Art History and get a job as an art gallery curator, etc. There are many more who end up as baristas.
It's fine to follow your dream, but just make sure that your dream wants you too.
It also helps to have rich parents, if you grow up poor you understand the consequences of choosing the wrong career path can be devastating. Some people have the freedom to experiment and still get a soft landing, other people need to get it right the first time.
The career path of a mathematician is far different than that of a software engineer.
> I don't know what would be a good career path, but most certainly avoid anything that AI is having the most success at in 2026.
This hinges on an assumption that means our whole society is turned upside down completely with no way to predict anything. But this is an assumption only. So you can either plan for a known path and do something valuable there, OR just put up your hand and prepare for.. what? Like not even physical jobs are safe because who will hire anyone if a good chunk of all humans will be out of jobs? Your best bet would probably be to build a bunker and stock up on canned food.
If you're a software engineer or mathematician then your world has already been turned upside down by this technology.
I used to write code by hand, now I just write prompts and manage the AI. There is some expertise involved but considerably less than before, and no doubt even that will vanish in the coming years.
For mathematicians the picture is even more bleak because their field is being strip mined and they face a future where there are perhaps no human reachable conjectures. Moreover if your job is to teach other mathematicians and nobody wants to become a mathematician... This is the future even if the technology hardly improves at all.
You don't need to know if there will be safe jobs in the future to avoid jobs that are unsafe today.
Personally if I were a teenager today I'd choose a career in medicine. You can still exercise your brain, but because it's practical and the fact that you have people's lives in your hands means that it's considerably less likely to be replaced by AI any time soon.
Same for any field. You + AI can make it better, but you need to tame it.
I like the optimism but it might be a case that actually there is nothing left for humans to figure out in math 2.0. I wanna be wrong and mathematicians will figure how to regain the control. Software developers lost it and turned into meat proxies.
I definitely don't enjoy vibe coding nearly as much as just coding, and in the last year when I was heavily leaning on AI while I dealt with some personal shit, I was able to make more stuff than I ever could at my prime by hand. That being said, I could not tell you a single thing I vibe coded this year outside of work.
It's a tool, and it's a tool that lets you skip that parts that bore you. For most devs, they never cared about the craft--they copy and pasted whatever they could from the internet until they had something good enough. People cut corners, always have. I got into programming at 10 because I really liked knowing how my computer worked and being able to do/make anything on it. That hasn't changed with AI, but it sure as hell has made tinkering a lot easier. No more wondering if a proc I've never seen before should be on my system. No more hunting down config docs for my editor. All of that annoying grunt work that got in the way of me actually coding is something an agent handles for me in the background. The part I did--and still do--like? I can do that by hand if I want and when I get bored or fatigued I can swap to AI.
There are so many corpo slopcannon's in this thread whose minds are slaves to KPIs and productivity. Let it go bro. Relax and live a little. There's nothing wrong with writing code by hand in your own time or using AI. If you enjoy writing code, solving all the individual problems and getting your hands dirty, you should keep doing so! It's only a matter of months, year over year, where all of the vibe coders' real knowledge evaporates and they're slaves to their subscription (or local hardware, say less king). You can be an expert who codes when there's no internet. I know I wouldn't know nearly as much if I hadn't spent so many years actually writing code. You understand taking your time and exercising discipline is just as valid of a path.
I don't understand all of these developers I see who are so hostile to people who still like the craft. It's such cope, bro. Either admit you don't get it and that you're a tasteless little slopboi who would never have amounted to anything meaningful because he doesn't have the discipline to actually learn to code. Or, get over yourself and let people enjoy things. Nobody cares about your holy quest to advocate for another subscription.
O
personally as a math phd student, LLM centric math feels soulless and ultimately is not what I entered the field to do which is to personally make mathematical discoveries with my own brain and cognition, and not direct a discovery machine.
Yes, cue the: cope seethe, selfish mathematicians, care only about personal glory, more theorems = cancer proven, more knowledge>less knowledge, e/acc etc. etc.
I've heard all these tired arguments many times. Whatever - I concede - you're right and I'm morally wrong and bad. Just don't expect people to study this subject which is basically being turned into biology (spend hours sitting in a lab babysitting equipment all day while watching a movie - it's what most bio phd students i'm around seem to do, no offense meant to bio phd students, i'm certain their studies are orders of magnitude more impactful to the society than mine).
it was fun while it lasted.
I think you guys will go through the same kind of divide that SWE went through. There is a number of SWE and adjacent IT professionals that do enjoy the LLM assisted work, I'm one of those.
There's a number of them that absolutely loathe it.
Your point about biology does not sound fair, an ex of mine worked in the field and that is not at all what she did.
To be fair LLMs can be used in an empowering way to learn, etc. But at that point it feels disingenuous - why not just one shot the problem and get the result more efficiently than just babying it around?
And yeah, fair enough. I guess my bio sample size is limited, but many of the PhD students I've seen in the experimental sciences seem to operate this way a majority of the time. I remember my brain being absolutely fried after 4 hours of thinking about math, only to hear these folks say they pulled a 12 hour shift in the lab. And I'm just like - how? In any case it's all anecdotes from me so feel free to ignore them.
Ai will yield a higher demand for mathematicians, we need more people to understand the math being solved. We also need more people inventing math problems.
People who want to solve problems themselves should go on to invent them without posting them on the internet until they're solved.
Math has finally become a natural science.
I think a lot of these reactions by mathematicians are more akin to group theory than anything else. Reality is that things will naturally sort themselves out and there will be some role mathematicians play in all of it (most likely). To me it seems the timeline that some skill essentially gets retired such that if you want to keep doing it is more like "historical re-enactment" is getting quite short. Things like manually coding something is going to be a hobby. Some aspects of math are going to be a hobby, and professional math will be all about pushing up against the edge of what we can do mathematically with AI.
Your paradigms are showing! I'd argue that if your POV is strictly "That's not how it's done," then it's time to re-read Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
Too early to tell, but IMO unlikely. Let's see what his take will be once an AI can propose a topic, write the script, animate, and narrate a good educational math video.
That's already happening. And we call it AI slop.
"good"
EDIT: And don't get me wrong, I hope it doesn't happen for a long time, ideally never. But what would his arguments be if it does?
I tried watching 3b1b over the years, really wanted to enjoy it. But I never found the way he presents things intuitive and never got a palpable intuition that helped me with math classes or work.
I saw some clearly AI slop made videos and got much better understanding of topics, since they don't do foreshadowing for an awe-inspiring connection that we'd admire together after 15 min videos, the clankers just get to the point. Not claiming those videos are too useful either, but I did however see accelerated learning gains from asking LLMs to explain (and do Bret Victor-style small interactive demos) math and algos, something I have never experienced from any of the educational STEM Youtube channels.
If you don't find the way he presents e.g. linear algebra intuitive I think our brains must work fundamentally differently.
Even if you find them intuitive, they produce no learning gains for anyone. Take a lin alg test, watch the 'Essence of lin alg' videos, take comparable test again. I guarantee you won't see any change even if you 'understood matrices better'. They are pure mathporn.
>Take a lin alg test, watch the 'Essence of lin alg' videos, take comparable test again
Uh huh, and what if the videos make me more generally interested in the topic? How would you measure that on a test?
Your view seems needlessly pessimistic and myopic. Just because something might not increase a number on a test that doesn't make it pointless.
I'm actually quite optimistic, was pointing out that, at least to to me, AI slop already produces better results than big educational content creators. For something concrete, even if not classic math, I credit direct LLM interaction highly for accelerating my understanding of CPU design and compiler tech.
Some people still intrinsically value listening to another human enthusiastically explain something they found interesting.
No learning gains? I teach linear algebra. I can assure you that students who watch and study the "Essence of linear algebra" videos (which I recommend on the syllabus) do better on my tests that those who don't, because they learn stuff from them.
It's much more likely that the students who take the time to watch supplementary materials are the ones who'd do better regardless of the quality of the given material. If you have access to fresh learners, I'd say it's a good opportunity to test how good those series are.
I'm not sure anything I say can convince you, as your mind seems to be made up already, but my experience has been that those videos help my students understand the concepts of linear algebra, comparing the mastery level now vs. before the series was published on YouTube. Especially when it comes to getting a feeling for what a linear transformation is, and how the properties of matrices echo the properties of the transformation they represent.
As for "fresh learners", I can provide my own son, who watched the series before taking his first linear algebra class, and says that it helped him a lot.
Better fundamental understanding makes every future studying much more efficient and gives deeper understanding of topics built on top.
With all due respect yours is a very short sighted take that only thinks in passing tests. That's not the purpose of education.
I'm not defining education as passing tests. A test is just a measuring instrument.
In fact, your claim is strong and quite easy to test. If watching the series gives people a better fundamental understanding which makes subsequent learning more efficient, take matched novices, randomise them to watch the series or not, then teach both groups some later lin alg materials and measure learning gains on novel problems.
That's the kind of test I mean, not 'can you grind through the course exam'.
If your claimed deeper understanding neither improves what someone can do afterwards nor how efficiently they learn related material, I'm not sure what observable content the claim has.
This is not my experience. Having an intuitive grasp of e.g. the graphical interpretation of the determinant instantly lets you figure out most of the key determinant properties without having to memorize them. That's the primary thing you get from intuition imo, having a sense of what must be true without having to memorize or prove it.
fwiw the fact that brains work fundamentally differently was my big penny dropping realization after digging into what LLMs are doing. Everything (I assert) a brain does (the function between inputs and outputs) is due to training data. There is no "instinct" and there is no "ROM-driven way to think" in any brain. It's training data all the way down. As a consequence different brains do indeed think in fundamentally different ways.
This is so fundamentally divorced from what we know about cognition in humans or in animals. The idea that we are a pure tabula rasa and only shaped by our "training data" is absurd and false. Just look at the amount of data we need to be able to do things relative to ML models. Look at animals which can do complex tasks moments after birth. We're deeply, deeply shaped by instinct.
Well, everyone being tabula rasa has a point tho. Technically there's no unique physical cause that make development unfold the same for all organisms, or even all humans (see Waddington's epigenetic landscape). It just happens that we develop along very similar trajectories and can draw equivalences between how I think vs how you think. So, from an ontological perspective, if you squint a bit, we all are tabula rasa. But from a phenotypic perspective, of course it's bonkers, you can't teach a frog linear algebra.
the key word in OP's description is "good". If AI can create videos as engaging and enlightening as 3b1b, then we hit AGI.
But you already have Claude-directed videos that utilize OP's manim project (which he uses himself to do 3b1b) that anyone else can create. Grant open-sourced manim and now anyone can point a model at it to create their own 3b1b-like videos. They're popping up all over the place as Opus 5.5 demo videos just in the last few weeks. So... AGI?
I guess I wasn’t clear, but using manim to make videos is not the hard part. The hard part is making them engaging and enlightening, and whatever else you want to attribute to 3b1b videos which make them a joy to watch and learn from.
He won't care because he has established position and is set. It will be just like everybody else - if the individual is at the top of the food chain then he/she is all over it how you are using it wrong and how you should use it (don't forget to follow and subscribe).
Yep, that's what I see in the CS field -- people at the top are advocating AI and don't understand why the hell the others are hesitant. I meant the top engineers, not the management. I look up to them because of their skills, but that doesn't mean I need to agree with everything they said.
This may be true for math educators, but not so much for math researchers.
I started grad school at math in Sept. 1995 and:
"There's never been a better time to go into math" was the final statement of the ten minute orientation session from the Dep Chairman.
It was a great thing to do anyway.
Then.
I still need confirmation from The Primeagen, Lex Fridman and Joe Rogan!
Then my mind will be at ease and I'll take a loan to study math!
As an applied mathematician who went into industry and has friends still in academia it's quite interesting.
My view is that the people who think doing maths is about being able to knit maths quickly and correctly are quite sad.
But for the people like me who bound themselves to computers a long time ago, it feels like a revolution. Sure you might now be simply tending your garden of machines and allocating capital and resources like a Gardiner picks seeds for various sunny spots but you can now do a lot of stuff and for people were good at gardening but not knitting it is a game changer.
There has never been a better time to pretend you understand anything aided by LLMs deluding yourself into being an expert, yeah, that's how the video should be named :/
I can't help but feel how this is all industry-planted, and I wouldn't argue its too far fetched.
What does it mean to "go into" math?
According to the video he means pursue it as an academic endeavor.
I suspect people who are deciding what to study will do so on the basis of a multifactor view of what interests them, how they predict their career will be after finishing said study etc.
There ought to be people watching his channel who wonder whether given all these AI advances math is even worth studying now.
The channel is sponsored by AI boosters:
https://www.3blue1brown.com/talent/
The guy is a handsome influencer and so many people buy that theater. The slimy presentation should be a giveaway for normal people, but apparently some hand holding is required.
If you had watched Grant for years, like I have, you would surely see how this is misinformation at best.
The past does not matter. To the contrary, creating legitimate content makes influencers more valuable and credible.
Look how many credible open source leaders have sold out to AI. Then look at the above list of sponsors again.
Obligatory FTFY:
There is never been a better time for people with no capacity for math to dabble in it
In other news, there's never been a better time to be a software developer. Come to think of it, there's also never been a better time to invest in learning copy-editing and proof-reading as a side hustle. It's a Brave New World. Everything is fine, the demand just got expanded, the pie got bigger, nothing more. New doors will be opened, nothing has changed; in fact, everything improved. Stochastic parrots are no match for our carbon-based g.
I mean if you read some history it’s not the first time complete workforces have been replaced. It doesn’t mean the same jobs stay, but usually there will be something to do.
There's not reason to think that it has to be same this time. If AI becomes better than humans at cognitive work, what extra jobs would get created?
Whilst I agree it’s not conclusive to assume that just bc something happened the way it did in the past it will happen again. I think there’s still 'reason to believe'.
My answer to your job is that more jobs move from secondary to tertiary sector (entertainment). That has happened usually.
I doubt demand expanded much. I mean there is just that many games/whatever apps that the whole humanity needs. Maybe ti will go up a bit, like 50%, but getting 10x (or very easily 1000x if we just vibe code them) in supply doesn't change that.
Instead, people who sell shovels win big.
It's sure the best time to be a cynical internet commenter, though! The field is having a renaissance not seen since early-2000s slashdot.
The pie didn't get bigger (equivalent to economy)
The number of pie eaters (equivalent to workers) got bigger.
Mathematicians and software engineers have very different career progressions and financing, so similar AI effects affect them differently.
verify the proofs and explain what the proofs allow us to do
get the peer review engine going
I imagine its happening but I also see room for coordination because I don’t hear about it happening, and its only been a few weeks
I don’t trust that academics will pivot in a few weeks and I don’t trust that this peer review is occurring on a big enough scale
Where could I go to understand whether something useful is coming from these AI proofs
Everything I’ve heard so far is debating about how the proofs came out and what academics are supposed to do with their lives now
I and many others want to see what utility these probably solved problems give us
People with money will have questions and people or machines will need to give answers to satisfy them.
I respect Grant for doing things his way and in this video making an earnest attempt to analyse the situation from many perspectives. Well done.
Grant Sanderson tries to explain why getting into math remains worthwhile in an AI era. But his audience is composed of two groups -- people who won't follow his reasoning, and mathematicians.
Someone once described a mathematician as a machine to turn coffee into theorems. Okay, fair enough, but what sets mathematicians apart is that mathematics wasn't a choice.
It's possible that Sanderson doesn't get this, but people watching his video either will never understand his argument, or have always understood it.
Problem solving, critical thought, logic, creativity are always going to be valuable.
In a way ai is turning programming more into maths - you write a natural language description of the problem - a proof / program - and then translating that into machine code is a lot of work / abstraction. For example look how much it takes to turn relatively simple mathematical statements into lean. That I guess is going to be the future.
I would encourage everyone to learn the fundamentals still because you will need discretion and to be able to think at a more abstract level.
However its funny that its only NOW dehumanising/demoralising now when its white people losing jobs to the capitalist machine in the imperial core, and not the slave silicon miners making gpus for gamers.
Are those capabilities valuable if machines are better at all of them than you?
> Are those capabilities valuable if machines are better at all of them than you?
Machines have been doing arithmetic (add/subtract/multiply/divide) better and faster than humans for 70+ years. I would ask anyone making this claim, "are you OK if your children do not learn basic arithmetic?"
jensen huang suggests that basic arithmetic won't need to be taught anymore.
Is there a transcript somewhere? Unless you're willing to pay me to throw away 40 minutes of my life listening to a stranger when it could have been an email
Yes, the video has a transcript available. You'll find a "show transcript" button in the description.
That said, you'd be missing a bunch of hand-made illustrations and animations from one of the best math communicators in the world. If that's not appealing to you, I'm not sure the transcript will do much for you either.
Admittedly, I don't think visualizations do much for me, but I wanted to see the essential pitch without spending 40 minutes watching a video. Surely any discussion of this topic (as opposed to mathematical concepts themselves) doesn't require visualization.
As it turns out, the only bits relevant to the title are the last five minutes of the video, and his contribution comes down to basically ignoring peoples' concerns and asserting that more technology means more joy. He conflates interest in math with a career in math and doesn't seem to address why actual mathematicians go into the field or what they get from it. In fact, the channel seems aimed at people who don't ever intend on going into the field.
If he doesn't grapple with the angst of turning an entire field of discourse into watching a chatbot beam-search a proof space, why make the video?
denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance
I think a lot of "mathematicians" are saddened by the sudden realization they are not even interested in it and were only in it for status and prestige. A lot of them are such pretentious tools that they willingly wasted their lives doing the absurd PhD rituals. Academia is dead.
I once wanted to go into Academia…
Then I finally realized that Professors spend most of their days in meetings and management - not actual research!
What do you think they're meeting to talk about and managing?
Im in bio, so caveats.
Mostly Funding. Then each other. Then the myriad trivial yet bureaucratic things of daily life. Then research. I'd put research at like 10% of a week, so maybe 5 hours total.
Ah yes, the enormous prestige of...research mathematics?
I have been feeling this way about software. Don't get me wrong, there are some things I am very interested in and would work on for recreation (macros!), but a lot of it I'm less interested in.
Frankly, despite the obvious financial worries, it's been a little freeing. I can go do something else (because, uh, I may have to).
What about the people who are in it to think deeply about mathematics questions? It's a lot harder to feel like that's worth doing when there's a black box with a crank that takes money in and spits out mathematics answers.
Like calling Lee Sedol a pretentious tool for retiring in the face of AlphaGo. If you really do mathematics for the enjoyment of doing mathematics, following a roughly unbroken line of tradition for at least a couple hundred years, an alien computer mind showing up and smashing everything would perhaps be upsetting, don't you think?
People still play Go. And they still play chess. In fact it's more popular than ever. For activities people truly enjoy, the alien computer mind showing up and smashing everything doesn't change a thing.
Nothing is stopping anyone from thinking deeply about math. The angst here is about whether they can get paid for it or not.
Oh yes, absolutely nothing gets you laid faster than “hey ladies, I’m a mathematician!” as a pickup line!
I haven’t watched the video, but likely it hasn’t answered a question: why math? Why not physics, neuroscience, philosophy or history? People claim math is both philosophical and art, but is that a sufficiently good reason to pursue math as opposed to other careers?
A lot of arguments seem to try to cling to the “old” way of doing math: staring at the blackboard for hours, wrestling with papers and papers of equations, and do forth. Well, chess players went through a similar transition period: carrying books of openings and such, to chess database, to chess engine and now AI. And at no point I hear chess players complaining that we have to study chess the old way.
> I haven’t watched the video, but likely it hasn’t answered a question: why math?
This is very much discussed in the video.