Comment by esafak
2 months ago
Isn't this sucking the fun out of math? It's not like we're going to get any tangible benefit out of them, so why not let mathematicians keep their jobs?
2 months ago
Isn't this sucking the fun out of math? It's not like we're going to get any tangible benefit out of them, so why not let mathematicians keep their jobs?
The thing about math is we don't usually know what is pure fancy and what is civilization altering until far after the discovery. Once in a while it's a real targeted crack at something practical but most often it's collecting things which seem trial until you use them together and suddenly you have computers running LLMs.
If it were really just about funding people who like math to have fun then it's easy to do forever: just don't have them look at the results and keep paying.
What is their pay going to be justified by once computers start conjecturing and proving theorems on their own?
Mathematicians will be the ones who can tell us if the computer theorems are decent or not.
Otherwise they’ll be the ones like Erdős who pose the questions in the first place.
Either way it will always be humans who decide what matters. AI is speaking our languages, not the other way around. We’re in charge. It’s impossible for us not to be, unless we can train an AI from dolphin data or other natural phenomenon.
The AIs intelligence is tuned to us and in 300 years we’ll need new training runs for the update from human zeitgeist language and the 2200 century famous mathematicians.
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This is kind of insane reasoning. It's basically asking "what is their pay going to be justified by once their pay isn't justified?"
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Is this question just for mathematicians in isolation or does it imply the same for most other jobs too? I think the answer for the former is we don't, mathematics would become a hobby the same as we don't hire people to be human calculators anymore because we have machines better st it. For the latter, it depends - some say UBI while the machines do the work, others say dystopia ruled by the machines or their few owners, yet others say anything in between.
Put differently: There is no natural law of the universe of why we pay people to do work. It just works well for us currently. If it stops making sense we do something else that works well for that new currently.
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Attending department faculty meetings
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Isn't the pursuit of knowledge alone good enough?
The job of a mathematician is to study mathematics, not to create proofs.
An automatic proof solver doesn't make mathematicians obsolete any more than the excel sheet made accountants obsolete.
Conjectures and proofs are the fruit of the understanding. Nobody gets paid to think without producing anything.
How about philosophers?
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That’s the problem, the coupling of work with the right to survive
You went deep ... and I for one appreciate it.
I mean, it doesn’t have to be deep to be meaningful.
The connection between “needing to work” and “right to continue existing” is THE problem with society right now.
You think AI boomers are paranoid because they think robots are going to replace the jobs? People are paranoid because they don’t know how they’re going to exist in a post-work world.
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In undergraduate math it doesn't matter if someone else did prove a result a hundred years before you. You still need to write your own proof and deeply understand it. Maybe in the most advanced PhD math it can have some impact, but these proofs are becoming intractable by humans alone.
I don't envy the talented young research mathematicians starting their career now. While there's still space to distinguish yourself (inventing completely new mathematics), the path to recognition is narrow.
> Inventing completely new mathematics
There will be fewer good mathematicians, but more great mathematicians!
It's probably more akin to changing where the fun is in maths.
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| your brain on neocapitalism |
This will keep happening until we stop people from doing it.
Get the looms while you're at it