Comment by WarmWash
17 hours ago
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.
Is this not greed?
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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.
Certainly it'll result in a boom for hobby mathematics, and it'll be a hobby at a much more advanced level than before. Whether those hobbyists can continue to push the actual frontier, particularly if AI models operating along that frontier are not made accessible to hobbyists (either via corporate/AI lab gatekeeping, via pricing, or via significant time lags) is a different question. I'm a little more confident in a future where hobbyists push the frontier in applied mathematics than in pure mathematics.
There's probably a loose and deeply imperfect analogy with computing: via democratization hobbyists have made a big impact in applied operating systems development (Linux/OpenBSD) but have been less successful/impactful in OS research (whither Hurd...) or in cost-heavy fields like microprocessor design.
> 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/
I don't necessarily see a problem with it: if people want to try experimental therapy on themselves and can fund it, then as long as it's expensive, let them - that speeds up research. The problem with allowing anyone to opt out of safety trials is that it then creates pressure from doctors and family members to try, and then it becomes non-consensual in practice.
Yeah it's more like personalized therapy - often the only hope for rare diseases.
While AI has definitely helped quite a bit I am wondering how much all this research and treatments cost. Not sure the current health systems could sustain this for _everyone affected_. If ai enables it all the better.
What's the success rate there?
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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.
The AI is not forcing us to pick one, it already decided for us.
As 'ogogmad said upthread:
> mathematics will continue to advance, albeit differently from before. The social structures will not survive however.
What if the point of mathematics is to be mature enough to study and teach math to help humans understand it, without the ego stroke of being the first to solve a problem? Bad communicators are upset that a robot is better than they are solving problems.
I'd definitely say both and the cultural component is becoming more and more important to keep up as AI capabilities increase.
> 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.
Mathematicians have been unpaid for centuries. The problem at hand is much deeper then just deciding who gets the taxpayer money.
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