Comment by TeMPOraL
17 hours ago
It's more like, "don't just casually destroy our hobby / career field", without letting us participate even a little.
The picture I have in mind is OpenAI running their most advanced model in a loop over all the open mathematical problems they can find, just to verify that the model is indeed very smart. Neither the company nor the model actually care about the problems, it's just a cheap exercise machine for them, but the problems get solved and mathematicians don't even get to participate.
Like, even those who accepted the "centaur" thinking, man + machine, won't benefit because by the time they get their hands on good enough models, everything is already done.
It's an emotional thing first and foremost - people who care about the thing can't do the thing, because it's already been done by those who couldn't care less about it.
And before someone goes "poor mathematicians", a food for thought: this is just an early instance of what looks like our shared destiny.
I said here before: given the economics of progress in AI and robotics, it's obvious what the natural division of labor is: computers do the thinking, humans do the menial, manual labor. AI will do politics and philosophy, so you have more time to fold laundry and scrub the toilet.
So what is mathematics then? A fun hobby akin to chess or sudoku?
Are we gonna get the same pushback from medical researchers if the models cure xyz diseases?
I absolutely understand the emotional connection to their work and the heartbreak, but mathematics doesn't exist for their pleasure, it exists to provide tools to solve humanitie's problems.
> So what is mathematics then? A fun hobby akin to chess or sudoku?
Some of it, yes. Much like physics. Both have a track record of producing technological breakthroughs every now and then, but it's not why people are doing it.
> Are we gonna get the same pushback from medical researchers if the models cure xyz diseases?
For better or worse, yes. We already are. In my country, there's a big spat between radiologists and cardiologists right now, that boils down to the progress of technology allowing the former to answer questions that, before, involved a procedure that was a big money-maker for the latter.
What you say reminds me of medical schools in Tunisia.
The general body of research points that more doctors lowers all cause mortality ( with diminishing returns) but Tunisia is still far lower than the Eu average.
Yet Doctors and med Student unions do lobby very heavily against expanding admission to the public uni or allowing private unis.
So we have the weird situation where people go and study in Romania ( making Tunisia lose hard currency that it really needs).
These doctors have taken an oath and the direct consequence of their lobbying is literally more deaths.
USA is the same. Even worse, the doctors guild writes the rules for creating new doctors. It got so bad that we now have 2 or 3 other alternate/adjacent categories of doctors and nurses to work around the bottleneck. Of course then they formed guilds to continue the cycle.
Dude, doctors are humans just like rest of us. They want careers, money, safety, raise children in best way possible, fun in life and so on. I see this unspoken expectation over and over - why are they not infallible, how could they do mistake XYZ, why are they not working themselves to the (early) death for benefits of us all and so on. They have no obligation to stay at place Q just because some folks would consider it convenient. They have no obligation to stay in some place thats not suiting them just because they swore Hippocratic oath, lives can be saved elsewhere too.
Obviously this is often coming from folks who act in same ways as they criticize and usually don't contribute even a fraction back to society compared to doctors. Folks who do mistakes in their lives all the time yet thats fine since we are all humans or similar, right.
So please stop this cheap framing and accusations. If Tunisia wants more doctors and keep them there are ways to do it, society as a whole needs to decide what they want and act upon it. Otherwise, smart skilled folks will keep going for better lives elsewhere, just like everybody else.
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>but mathematics doesn't exist for their pleasure, it exists to provide tools to solve humanitie's problems.
The risk here is that this does do fundamental long-term damage to mathematics as a viable field.
Virtually no one is going to want to take on the risk of PhD-level math work, studying a narrow problem for four years or so to arrive at an impressive incremental result, when there's a sword of damocles hanging over their head every day that an internal system held by an oracle they don't have access to may scoop their results and turn those four years into dust.
To some extent, that sword of damocles always existed in a de minimus sense in the form of other mathematicians. But everyone was playing the same game, coming to the game with the same arsenal limited by human cognition.
If the game board becomes irrevocably tilted, new entrants have no incentive to play except as a hobby. But few hobbyists can devote years of work to understanding and pushing the frontier. It could well mean existential damage to mathematics as a field.
Whether that might undermine math's ability to solve humanity's problems in the long term is almost an economics problem, not unlike the question of whether and when the existence of monopolies ultimately restricts long-term economic growth. Much probably depends on whether intellectual monopolies or oligopolies are being created that will supplant the existing mathematics "economy".
> The risk here is that this does do fundamental long-term damage to mathematics as a viable field.
All the commotion evens out: It's much easier to learn maths than ever before; you don't need to go to lectures any more; you don't need to learn from a specialist (advisor, lecturer) any more; it all costs much less than it used to.
So mathematics will continue to advance, albeit differently from before. The social structures will not survive however.
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> Are we gonna get the same pushback from medical researchers if the models cure xyz diseases?
Lol. As long as the process aka trials is respected not many would complain.
The feedback loop required to make progress is very different in medicine compared to math.
The trials process is the moat. There's already founders using AI to treat their cancers, and it's all about skipping trials and jumping straight to "I consent, I'll fund it, let's try it". The general public might get access to this in 10 years, but employees at AI companies will have access much much sooner.
https://sytse.com/cancer/
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Trudging into the technicalities of the example still doesn't undo the question of "What is the point of mathematics? To find answers or to be a hobby?"
It's tempting to say "both", but that misses that AI is now forcing us to pick one.
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> mathematics doesn't exist for their pleasure, it exists to provide tools to solve humanitie's problems
Who decreed that? Mathematics predates capitalism and publish-or-perish by a couple of millennia. Euclid’s Elements were not written to benefit the weapons or medical industry.
Who decreed that they are entitled to get paid for that?
Maybe this hurts more than it should do because of publish-or-perish.
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“ AI will do politics and philosophy””
Incredibly delusional and disconnected from the vast majority of people who are voters.
"AI will do politics"
If only.
They certainly can't do them worse than humans.
Politics is for humans, it's not meant to be automated.