Comment by d_burfoot
2 months ago
Every single knowledge worker is going to face this kind of crisis. It will be worse for people who cared deeply about their craft, but the crisis will have the same shape. The way through is to change the way you relate to your work, and to appreciate the fact that you can now produce far more output.
Mathematicians should realize: instead of spending decades on individual theorems, you can now create whole new subfields of mathematics. Of course, you won't be doing the creation directly, in the way the mathematicians of old did; that's just not the name of the game anymore. But you will still be directing the research and involved in the creation.
The creation is the actually enjoyable part.
Taking a helicopter to the top of Everest is not as rewarding as climbing the mountain.
You are completely discrediting the joy humans derive from actually -doing- the work, and not just, telling someone else to do the work.
There is a reason artists hate AI, its because they enjoy the actual act of painting, like mathematicians enjoy the act of proving theorems and programmers enjoy the act of typing lines of text into a file on their computer.
We are intentionally deleting all of the enjoyable high agency jobs and replacing them with "model babysitting".
Jobs are not generally meant to be enjoyable (although that is a benefit if so), they are meant to get work done. It's funny seeing office workers here on HN have this sort of opinion and contrasting that with blue collar workers, ask a miner or house builder how fun their job is.
> ask a miner or house builder how fun their job is
The average person on a residential job site I've talked to has looked and sounded like they're having as much fun as the average software dev. And none of them have said stuff like "people on my team have confided that they cry every night because the higher-level management keeps screaming about the project not being done" like I've heard at from folks, say, certain big social media places...
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Food is not meant to be enjoyable, it's meant to nourish. But by a fortunate coincidence it may also be tasty. Now imagine replacing ice cream, or steak, or fresh berries, or whatever you enjoyed eating, with something like Soylent or Huel with a side of puréed kale. Your nutrition may actually improve, but something would be lost, won't it?
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Don't many blue collar workers (miners & house builders) do actually take immense pride in their work? There are woodworkers out there whose hobby is also woodworking.
So does that mean we should make work even less enjoyable still?
Then they should take up less of our lives.
> You are completely discrediting the joy humans derive from actually -doing- the work, and not just, telling someone else to do the work.
But humans (or at least some of them) get joy from that too. A lot of people enjoy being supervisors, team leaders, managers, executives - even though that’s largely deciding what to tell other people to do rather than directly doing it yourself
> There is a reason artists hate AI, its because they enjoy the actual act of painting
"AI" never stopped a painter painting.
Just selling.
Some painters can't paint if they can't sell.
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you can’t climb to the moon, you need rockets for that. In the hands of great researchers, AI will accelerate and propel human knowledge far beyond what we could achieve with pencil and paper alone.
> In the hands of great researchers, AI will accelerate and propel human knowledge far beyond what we could achieve with pencil and paper alone.
Who needs researchers when you have great AI.
Soon we will all be Wall-E fat people with AI that's there to do anything we can be bothered to think of.
True, but many of us have grown identifying ourselves with the kind of work we do, the discoveries that follow from our hard work. Even in the case of rockets, we designed the rockets! Here, I've to let the oracle take care of things while I'm robbed of that delight of discovery.
> In the hands of great researchers, AI will accelerate and propel human knowledge far beyond what we could achieve with pencil and paper alone.
Did you ever think that the pursuit of knowledge might be not just producing it but discovering it as a collective human effort? Putting to much mechanization in it kills the joy of it.
> you can’t climb to the moon, you need rockets for that.
We don't live for rockets or the moon, but for ourselves. Anywhere we can go to only at the price of our despair we have no business going to.
I think you replied to the wrong comment.
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> Taking a helicopter to the top of Everest is not as rewarding as climbing the mountain.
I don't think this is a fair comparison. New tools take you higher. I'll never climb Everest. A good comparison is:
- Climbing your local mountain
- Helicopter to the top of Everest
- Spacecraft to the moon
If a helicopter just saved you a trip up, you'd be right, but it can take you places you wouldn't otherwise go.
I created a new field of mathematics just yesterday, coincidentally. It wasn't a very good field of mathematics, though.
> Taking a helicopter to the top of Everest is not as rewarding as climbing the mountain.
Flying from Atlanta to New York is not as rewarding as walking there. You are right, but if we would be walking everywhere, we would still be stuck somewhere in ancient times.
> Taking a helicopter to the top of Everest is not as rewarding as climbing the mountain.
If you’re on the top of mt. Everest and you need medicine, would you care if it reached you via helicopter or via some guy climbing while having a lot of fun?
This has nothing to do with the content of my comment.
But you can still try to climb Everest even if helicopters are available, and likewise you can still try to do maths even if LLMs can do it quicker.
Absolutely you can, just don't expect to make a living out of it anymore.
"like... programmers enjoy the act of typing lines of text into a file on their computer"
ehm, no!
Yes exactly, that jumps out as a strange thing to say. The enjoyable part of programming is the puzzle, the act of figuring out how to solve the problem elegantly and well.
Although I can't speak for artists, surely the joy of painting is in the creation of a piece of art they can be proud of?
Enjoyment in work is generally about taking pride in the end result, not in the repetitive mechanical part.
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People also take joy and pride in model building and model babysitting too.
You wanted to say: Removing the last bit of joy, anything humane from creating.
Funny thing about diffusion systems: they can't paint.
You're not talking about the joy of painting, because no machine is here to take that away. That still exists, it is still joyful. Likewise, exploring mathematics for oneself will still exist. It will still be joyful and surprising.
What you are discounting is what the article actually admitted with all the job talk. What you're saying here as well: "if we structure society around compensated labor and machines are better at the labor than my high status job is about to be farmed out to a machine."
Firstly, yes. Welcome to the proletariat? Secondly, maybe this isn't a reasonable principle to organize society around. Maybe if the only jobs left are "one of the 95 ultra wealthy tastemakeres" or "spiritually destitute model babysitter" then we should consider an alternative organizational strategy.
This is not to say I'm yearning for neo-Stalin to unmake the data center. I'm yearning for a world closer to one where labor for survival is a historical lesson.
> You are completely discrediting the joy humans derive from actually -doing- the work
This sort of intellectually dishonest ad hominem is so tiresome. They did no such thing.
> There is a reason artists hate AI, its because they enjoy the actual act of painting
AI hasn't stopped anyone from painting.
> Every single knowledge worker is going to face this kind of crisis. It will be worse for people who cared deeply about their craft, but the crisis will have the same shape.
Normally I'm very sympathetic to the plights of those socially affected by AI, and rarely pass up the opportunity to clown on institutional actors papering over these plights with glib cliches. But in this case, I really feel like this is a case of monkey-brain overriding mathematician-brain.
The greatest accomplishment in my life is my math PhD, earned before AI got useful. I do math-heavy work for my day job, and I care deeply about every craft I practice, to the point that I am almost certainly on the unhealthier end of the spectrum of perfectionism. Yet I both acknowledge rather than deny the impending death of mathematics as we have engaged it for the last couple centuries, and am far more excited than aghast.
I would have to write a whole essay in order to communicate this in a way that is appropriately sensitive, but in a nutshell: We have always been in the business of discovering and understanding math, have we not? Are we going to call it a tragedy rather than a blessing now that the floodgates on both are bursting, just because it makes us feel less special, unique, valuable? It's such a self-serving aesthetic on the beauty of math to me. The author claims there is something profound and spiritual about math, and I agree; it exists prior to and above all of us, human or AI. Whatever way we can tap that beauty is incredible, full stop. This is what I believe.
From the article:
> These developments have triggered some deranged thoughts in me. I have wondered if it is the express goal of these companies to make me kill myself. Am I alone in this paranoia?
The severity of this line caught me off guard. I think the author is genuinely having an emotional-social crisis, and I feel terrible for them, but at this moment they may be having a hard time separating their trauma from their intellectual aesthetic for what math is all about.
> We have always been in the business of discovering and understanding math, have we not?
And the way we understand the maths is to do the maths. You can't outsource the maths to AI and continue to understand it. I don't believe we can have it both ways.
You can't remove the humans entirely and still be said to be in the business of doing math. On that I fully agree. We should still be spending the same number of hours on math, just with different tools (you might even call them oracles) at our disposal.
> The greatest accomplishment in my life is my math PhD, earned before AI got useful [..] Yet I both acknowledge rather than deny the impending death of mathematics as we have engaged, it for the last couple centuries, and am far more excited than aghast.
The "yet" should be an "so obviously", since you have your greatest accomplishment behind you.
And the article isn't denying anything, it is criticising something.
> We have always been in the business of discovering and understanding math, have we not?
I'd say that we have been in the business of not being alienated from ourselves and our work, and that that is more important than what the work is. Math, just like anything else, won't prevent the heat death of the universe. Supercomputers or wooden sticks, same outcome. So it really doesn't matter how you spend the time as much as as what, e.g. if you're an alienated cog or not. The behemoth machinery itself isn't on a journey anywhere, ultimately, anything that goes up will come down; so none of these fantasies about a point or destination can make up for the here and now.
> The author claims there is something profound and spiritual about math, and I agree; it exists prior to and above all of us, human or AI.
First off, the phrase in the article is "I am suffering a profound spiritual crisis due to these developments.", and you continue that by agreeing to something nobody said and that isn't true.
"I'm hungry :(" "Oh yeah, I also am always on the lookout for new cool bands to check out! We're on the same page here." "WHAT?!"
Doing math may be a spiritual experience, "Math is is spiritual" makes no sense, and math pre-existing is flat out wrong, it ultimately rests on axioms that are simply accepted as given. Even I as a layman know that.
> The severity of this line caught me off guard. I think the author is genuinely having an emotional-social upheaval, and I feel terrible for them, but at this moment they may be having a hard time separating their trauma from their intellectual aesthetic for what math is all about.
You just turned a profound spiritual crisis into math being profound and spiritual, and now you accuse them having a trauma that makes them unable to see something you claimed that isn't even true. And that's the overall pattern I see everywhere, those who object are misrepresented or outright ignored, I never see any facing of what people actually say. So even just based on that it seems deeply anti-human, because one side in this debate isn't even showing up, hiding behind some supposedly inevitable "future" that can just be established as fact without debate.
> First off, the phrase in the article is "I am suffering a profound spiritual crisis due to these developments.", and you continue that by agreeing to something nobody said and that isn't true.
Ahem. From TFA:
"There is something about mathematical discovery (progress, advancement, creation) which is vital to the spiritual, experiential quality of doing mathematics. The creation (or even the pursuit) of novel mathematics is one way that humans have historically accessed the ineffable and encountered the divine and mystical."
And in the comments he writes
"I am drawing on the subjective accounts of many mathematicians and my own experience. If it helps, my intuition is that the ineffable, divine and mystical are immanent and not transcendent."
> Doing math may be a spiritual experience, "Math is is spiritual" makes no sense, and math pre-existing is flat out wrong, it ultimately rests on axioms that are simply accepted as given. Even I as a layman know that.
I tend to agree, but many professional mathematicians don't. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_Platonism
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> Every single knowledge worker is going to face this kind of crisis.
Yeah as a software developer I've already been going through a version of this for the past 8 or so months.
Less acutely than the OP I suppose (the idea of killing myself certainly isn't something I've considered) and without the mystical/spiritual overtones, but I can relate to the overall feeling of loss being expressed as someone who was always deeply passionate about hand-crafted software solutions.
> The way through is to change the way you relate to your work, and to appreciate the fact that you can now produce far more output.
I can't speak for the OP, but this doesn't comfort me much. A lot of my favorite parts of the work are still being stripped out, and producing more output doesn't actually benefit me in any way. As with most productivity gains since the 1970s, the value of more output is not likely to be captured by the majority of the people doing the work. If anything AI will likely vastly accelerate the productivity vs wages divide.
I accept that It Is What It Is and there's no point in trying to hold on to the past, but at the same time on an individual level something real is being stripped from us very quickly in a way that some "Live, Love, Laugh"-esque motivational appeal to perspective change won't fix.
> But you will still be directing the research and involved in the creation.
Somehow I doubt it.
Maybe there won't be a need for you to be involved at all.
Maybe the AI will perform even better if you're not there to slow it down.
Maybe there will be people involved, but not as many.
Maybe there will be so many people involved that their salaries will be depressed to the point they can't afford to do it anymore, and only the rich will know such joys.
We live in interesting times. This is the age of anomie. Anything could happen. There is no set path to success anymore. The world only gets more and more illegible with every day that passes.
> The way through is to change the way you relate to your work, and to appreciate the fact that you can now produce far more output.
Yeah, just like artisans enjoyed being turned into assembly line workers in the industrial revolution. There was a movie starring Charlie Chaplin about how awesome that was.
If AI is truly useful for knowledge work, that will mean a huge downgrade to working conditions for knowledge workers, whose skills are no longer as valuable. And these workers will be alienated from their craft, just like artisans were.
The way through is to change the way you relate to your work, and to appreciate the fact that you can now produce far more output.
I currently, emphasis on currently, feel like I can leverage LLMs in a very satisfying way to a deeper overview and more data about fields I'm already familiar with and that's pretty cool. I can produce more for some value of "more".
But can I be sure that what's output will continue to be what "I produce", either in terms of the thing going entirely beyond me or in terms of now having a spin different from what I'm after? I mean, mathematicians would have mostly the problem of feeling useless. Economists, say, could have the problem of both feeling and feel their viewpoint is excluded if not what-becomes-the-mainstream.
I don't understand. Can't you just ask LLMs to do the same and collaborate with other LLMs?
> appreciate the fact that you can now produce far more output.
... and then what?
now you have more output and it still sucks
I think the only one appreciating that fact, would be if you had a boss above you
and I don't mean the output sucks, I mean the experience
like imagine someone who spent decades learning the intricacies of playing guitar in a particular style
now you hand them a box that allows them, but also anyone else, to do it without practice. it happens to be slightly worse but everyone around you doesn't seem to care or notice
progress?