Comment by robotpepi
9 hours ago
I don't see any meaningful analogy with your cites of Baudelaire. First of all, Baudelaire discusses art, which is very different to science. Several new forms of art have emerged, and then slowly integrated, despite the strong opinions of some. Here, Tao's letter discusses mainly practical aspect of scientific research. It is not about what a "failed mathematician" would do, or if "LLM can only record what already existed"; in fact, it ackowledges that LLM could become a central tool. If you want me to be even more precise, what they're saying (without saying it out loud) is that tech companies have too much power and are being irrespondible with it because they don't even think about the externalities.
> It is not about what a "failed mathematician" would do, or if "LLM can only record what already existed"
This is what I was alluding to:
I wrote recently about how the collection of good, fruitful open problems is now being mined in a non-renewable fashion, leading to the potential scenario of these problems becoming scarce [0]
[0] https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/117237320796901560
I still don't see the analogy, can you care to develop?
Of course there's a meaningful analogy. The poster wants to make Tao sound unreasonable and against "progress" while ignoring the very real concerns Tao has.
It's what fanatics do when they want to enforce their view on the world, they have to attack anyone with a reasonable viewpoint because they can't imagine a world where someone tells them they don't like what they're doing.
I do not want to make him sound unreasonable. He is a brilliant man. But I also think that he is a bit shell shocked, much like other luminaries in the past have been when confronted with rapid technological development, so I wanted to highlight some historical similarities, imperfect as they can only be.
As for the rest of your comment, I hope you have a great day.
Tao is quite the opposite of what you describe. He's had an ongoing dialogue intellectually with the challenges created by ai for mathematicians for some time (years) now and his viewpoint is quite balanced. He is not alarmist but rather correctly addresses the real problems ai advances create for mathematicians traditional way of working.
He’s not shell-shocked. He’s had an extremely consistent narrative for years now. You are experiencing a bias where you project your own views onto others, probably because you are not very informed on this.
> But I also think that he is a bit shell shocked, much like other luminaries in the past have been when confronted with rapid technological development
You're locked into that idea, but provide no real argument. The dangers they describe in the letter are real.