Comment by boothby
17 hours ago
I was pretty depressed when I read about what happened with Navier Stokes this morning. The Clay Math prizes were a significant motivation through my math career, and I know a lot of computer scientists and physicists that feel similarly. I didn't think I was gonna resolve P vs NP or the BSD conjecture, but I did really research that felt like I was working towards something incredible. What is the younger generation left with? Hey kids betcha can't resolve the Collatz conjecture, our superintelligence can't either! Still pretty depressed about it, to be honest. Intellectualism is dead. We can return to happy agrarianism, I guess. At least the AI doesn't wanna eat my snap peas.
This is no time to despair. It's the time to take a stand. If you don't want to see your discipline go the way of the dodo, then do something about it.
I don't know what you should do because I'm not a mathematician. But superintelligence schmuperintelligence. We didn't stop running because we have cars or playing chess or Go because there's chess and Go engines. Even more so than chess there's no point in maths unless it's people doing it, for other people. AI maths makes no sense, like AI art makes no sense, because those are things that people enjoy and can do pretty damn well ourselves so there's no point to automate them away. We gotta stop that bullshit, and we can stop it. And if we don't, if we just sit around and wait for OpenAI and Anthropic to destroy society then that's not their fault but ours.
Sorry, I'm not great at pep talks. Those are brave men. Let's go kill them!
> AI maths makes no sense, like AI art makes no sense, because those are things that people enjoy and can do pretty damn well ourselves so there's no point to automate them away.
There are people who appreciate and have use for math and art, but don't or can't produce. Those same people are now given tools to produce works that they enjoy and can do pretty damn well at.
> Those are brave men. Let's go kill them!
This is a horrible perversion of the quote. Aside from it's questionable use in this context (as it can be construed as a violent call to action), Tyrion made the battle cry for self-defense against a threat to their lives. Generally, AI reducing the dependence of one human on another's work is incomparable to this.
I don’t think this will happen, but it’s possible for humans to adjust our philosophy of mathematical work so that we deprioritize “egotistical” (this is a bad word for what I’m going for, but I mean the desire and economic necessity to associate novel work to your name) discovery and prioritize learning; I’ve never really learned something well without lots of personal insights along the way.
If this is not possible it does make me question whether mathematics ever had any value except for economic or industrial reasons. I do believe it does however, so it must be possible.