Comment by encyclopediai
1 day ago
The last days we are served these high goals about understanding, "digestion" and so on.
But if you look at the practice of present mathematics, in the last 20 years it is all about publishing solutions to problems.
There are famous problems to be solved, there is a hierachy of conjectures to be solved. A quick search here on HN gives pearls like "Theory building papers are dime a dozen and don't get published in high tier journals unless they solve a problem".
And all of a sudden it turns out that problem solving can be automatized.
So then what will problem solvers do? Well, from now on they will "digest" problems solved by AI.
In a way or another they will find a way to stay on top.
That's the goal, at least, but mathematics as a living practice does not have much to do with these games of power.
With hammers do we build our mud huts more easily and sit back to rot? Or do we build more complicated structures and do it more quickly?
“You are right. There is nothing in yesterday’s mathematics that you can prove with exterior algebra that could not also be proved without it. Exterior algebra is not meant to prove old facts, it is meant to disclose a new world. Disclosing new worlds is as worthwile a mathematical enterprise as proving old conjectures.” Gian-Carlo Rota in “Indiscrete Thoughts”
The issue here is not AI--it's academic papermill culture and paywalled journals.
AI gives us greater freedom to "stop and smell the roses", explore hidden structures, etc in mathematics. It is a dream come true for curious minds.
Yes. AI is a useful tool and we are going to adapt and use it.
The phd student will be forced to publish 10 breaktrough articles, the university department which does not offer "free" access to AI (for its members) will see the its ratings going down, when compared with the other universities.
It will be "use AI or perish" for academic management so on the side of academic management the ones with vision will thrive and the ones without will perish.
But what about the publishers? In the last decades the academic research was made into a feeder for publishers. The main goal of a researcher is to write articles, which are later sold back to other researchers.
This economic system is under big stres now, because for a while at least the academic management and publishers will have contradictory goals.
And that is why this scare which is induced by those who profit the most from the present system.
Academia can work fine with open access conferences and Arxiv preprint as machine learning and computer vision and other computer science fields show.
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