Comment by zamadatix
2 months ago
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.
> 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.
AI companies are accruing power by virtue of its knowledge and ability to do work. If endowed with agency, which seems likely at this rate, it is the AI itself that will be powerful. And we'll be in charge because AI is trained on human language? I can't fathom the logic behind this.
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?"
I think you're trying to say their pay won't be justified? You are not being clear.
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.
It is for all jobs. We have to be open to new arrangements. I like the recent proposal (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47748123) to tax AI companies that destroy human demand. My point is we have to sort this out now because AI companies are quickly usurping power from labor, and if we wait there will be even more unrest, and worse.
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Attending department faculty meetings
We have found the true use case for AI.