Comment by schrodinger

Money doesn't work that way though. There are plenty of jobs people would like to get paid to do, that doesn't mean someone needs to psy them to do it.

I'm well aware that if at some point AI is good enough to replace me as a software engineer then I won't have a job. I don't expect a company to continue to pay me simply because I enjoy it if there are cheaper options out there.

Math is no different.

This is really the critical thing: the fun is the incentive. (Or at least the dominant incentive in math, historically.) As economists like to say, the overarching lesson in economics is that incentives matter. Reduce the incentives and participation will decrease.

Perhaps that won't matter if we enter an era where AI participants are the main participants who matter for discovery-level mathematics. But it would likely be what economists would see as a market failure if only a small oligopoly of AI participants, closely held behind closed doors, is able to fill that intellectual role.

"A junior engineer who has only ever used LLMs to write code and create architectures does not just not have that experience but also won't acquire it."

My ego tends to agree, that how can they be ever competent, if they have not endured the same hardships as I had crunching trough problems and getting allmost lost in the details.

But I rather suspect, they will turn out fine. I know LLMs are great for me to learn and I think the young generation will learn what they need to learn to get the job done.

If a modern Gauss, Von Neumann, and Ramanujan appeared and started dropping proofs from the sky, would people be saying the same things? And if they could live forever, so they wouldn't need to train their replacements?

The only thing potentially stopping these models from also outputting new theories along the way is the goal they were given.

I have to assume OpenAI is only prompting to solve problems, presumably they could also prompt to not interesting new theories or paths of research found along the way as well.

I don't know about you, but my job has become a lot more fun ever since it's become a lot more back-and-forth with the robot. It does all the tedious things for me. It gathers data. It creates prototypes. It makes the mechanical code changes that I want. It allows me to talk with it for a design discussion, and then my design simply appears. I ask it for monitoring dashboards and they simply appear. It records what we talked about, which is something that I never do.

Largely I thought that this is what you do once you're established in math (or any field) anyway. You have some ideas, but the details are kind of too tedious for you to work out, so you give it to grad students/postdocs. Senior engineers have some ideas, but the details are tedious to work out, so you give them to junior engineers.

Now, obviously in the meantime, there's the question of how do we train the next generation? Or do we need to train the next generation? And maybe while we work that out the answer becomes more shadowing/apprenticeship instead of farming out easy tasks.

I think that's where people hope some kind if UBI or "universal high income" will save the day. Just don't think too hard about how it would actually be paid for, or how we can all have high income when that's a relative measure and we're all given the same amount of table scraps.

Then work part time, and enjoy your higher wealth to have fun in free time. Don't demand to have your cake and eat it too.

If someone gets the answer sooner than you, that doesn't inhibit you developing your understanding of the answer privately the same way you would have done if they hadn't got the answer. I don't see how anybody loses by the answer being discovered sooner.

While I don't disagree, I think any justification for why we should fund mathematics and why we should protect the work they are doing from being solved without them should be grounded in results.

Similarly I wouldn't expect a good argument could be made that AI tools should be prevented from creating art because we want to continue funding artists.

If the goal of said funding is just to let them spend their time doing it then it doesn't matter that AI is doing it as well.

On the contrary, I found it a nice piece of rethoric to reflect on how misaligned incentives can overrule each individual's preferences in order to induce the group to take the opposite path.

It's done in jest but I think I am accurately pointing out the interesting parallels between what these companies say they are doing (aligning models) and what they are not doing (aligning themselves).

If you listen to them, and you don't have to listen very hard to hear it, basically everyone at these labs is telling us that this technology is extremely dangerous and should be slowed down or paused entirely. Yet, they, the only entities with the power to actually do anything about it, are not acting AT ALL as if that's the case. They are all barrelling forward as quickly as possible. RSI, THE number one risk according to these guys, is being adopted at breakneck pace up and down the stack, from designing silicon, to training, to inference.

It's ridiculous and insane and I believe can be accurately summed up as, they are being assholes, because if they are actually right about this we are all gonna die. At the very least, and far more likely, every fun creative expressive human thing that is machine legible will be replaced by a torrent of machine slop. It's not "benefiting humanity." These mathematicians are telling you it's not benefiting humanity. It sucks.

Alignment problem.

Not our field? Most of us are programmers here.

It is clear to me that any competent person with a little patience can now build software better than what I used to build by hand.

> Think about how many sheldon-equivalents insist on being called Dr. (non medical)

Why do physicians insist on calling themselves Dr. (medical)?

Well, they do they?

Whole sections of the economy are being upheaved by AI, and there is no reason to make a special case for the mathematicians anymore than for the illustrators, developers, translators, HR, etc.

I actually really like math and I can't wait for the day LLMs not only solve difficult problems but can also explain the solutions to me.

Mathematicians do a terrible job here. They use inconsistent symbols they don't even explain. They often obfuscate the main idea just to make the paper longer. If you are not part of a small club you are not meant to understand it. I think this is a terrible approach and I am eagerly waiting for AI to do a better job!

But won't new humans take their place that will be the ones who enjoy deciphering AI solutions?

It just seems that this class of mathematicians is being "disrupted".

The field is changing and a new class of mathematicians will take their place.

This happens all the time in fields as technology disrupts them.

A new class of individuals, with different motivations, take the place of the old guard.

I'm sure the motivations of individuals involved in designing and manufacturing cars changed as Henry Ford introduced the factor line.

But that old crop of humans either adapted or retired.

But, plenty of humans took their place with new motivations and automotive technology continued to progress.

I personally feel math will indeed move faster as a result of these breakthroughs. And the humans that take the place of the old guard will have different passions and motivations than the current group.

Maybe the new group will be productivity motivated rather than motivated by the love of tinkering with a single problem for years.