Comment by simianwords
1 day ago
This pattern of argument keeps repeating in every place.
Pro tech people: technology removes bottlenecks. Sometimes we use those bottlenecks as a side effect to build muscle and so on. But removing bottlenecks gives us much higher degrees of freedom. It is up to us to coordinate and make use of the technology.
Anti tech people: bottlenecks are fundamentally useful. They should remain and technology shouldn't remove those so easily. Humans cannot coordinate as well when the bottlenecks are removed, so lets not remove them so quickly.
I can only suggest reading the letter with open mind and literally, without uncharitable bias towards the authors or conspiracy mindset.
FWIW it didn't sound accusatory to me, it made me think the anti tech people might have a point.
It’s not even anti-tech though. Terence Tao signed it. The commenter above reduces the conversation to a false dichotomy.
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Its not a conspiracy. Its 25 fields medalists who think exactly like how I put it. Ideally, they can just take whatever the technology gives as soon as possible and use it. They don't want it because they don't think the community can rearrange and coordinate such that they can make use of the new found degrees of freedom.
That's literally all there is to it - they don't believe in the rearrangement.
I can only envy the insight you have into thought processes of 25 fields medalists. Wish I could have that.
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>It is up to us to coordinate and make use of the technology.
1) Coordination is hard, and 2) "us" is a hopelessly nebulous term that appears inclusive but is almost always exclusive.
I think people would have said the creation of social media platforms like Facebook was neither good or bad, but rather it was "up to us to coordinate and make use of".
But did our society really have a say over how Facebook and other social media sites were able to embed themselves in our everyday lives? I would argue the answer is no.
Counterpoint: I'm not anti tech at all. In fact, I sell an AI harness for legal.
I think you've set up a false dichotomy. I'd propose to you the middle ground that a lot of us are concerned that VC-backed AI slop is "solving" problems in indigestible ways that hollow out the core. This applies in OSS as well as mathematics.
Please help me understand this and I'm asking this in good faith.
Why can't OpenAI publish whatever it wants. And the math community can use it or not use it. Fundamentally OpenAI's solutions are high signal - they are incentivised to not deliberately mislead people. Let the individuals in math community choose to read it or understand it? If OpenAI wants to publish something, let them do it in the current channels using peer review using whatever time is required.
What's wrong with this? The math community thinks this will destroy previously unwritten ways of prestige allocation and remove incentives that used to exist. I say that the community can rearrange and allocate prestige and time in different ways to maximally use the technology.
They can use the new proofs as foundations for future proofs.
But many folks just won't be motivated to attack or help digest solved problems because there's less extrinsic value in doing so. Tao and others argue that it's this human effort that finds human-relatable abstractions which spurn further investigation. Take the humans out of the loop, and they'll stay there, is the argument as I understand it.
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>community can rearrange
You're describing an improvised surgery on a living organism. Developing a complex system involving humans that is productive and doesn't collapse is extremely hard, so if it ain't broke don't fix it.
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The Math community can "not use" a proof? How would that work? It's a little like coloured functions (async etc) - you have 'human proved' vs 'machine proved'?
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>Why can't OpenAI publish whatever it wants. And the math community can use it or not use it.
The "math community" is not an isolated entity that is free from the confines of society. It's made up of lots of people who coexist in a system that requires you to assert your right to live.
Furthermore, the "math community" is overwhelmingly supported by outside donations to keep it running. That's not to say people don't practice math for the fun of it, but that if you're researching problems like Navier-Stokes, you almost certainly are being paid by another party to do so. But those parties may hold new forms of technology over the professional mathematicians head in the name of "productivity", or they may even believe in light of this tech that paying a human to practice math is no longer worth it.
Therefore, mathematicians find themselves coerced by the market to adopt new tools in order to get by, even if the mathematical community largely finds it distasteful.
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