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Comment by markus_zhang

16 hours ago

I'm wondering what's the impact on human Mathematicians, and especially would-be Mathematicians -- master students, if they HAVE to use AI in their daily life?

Would that impact their own ability of solving Mathematics problems? I mean as a programmer I'm already seeing that impact on the programmers -- sure the best of us can leverage AI to achieve unimaginable things, but many of us are simply vibe coding.

Of course we can assume that it is only the best of us that really matters, and the rest of us are not going to produce anything substantially useful ANYWAY, it might as well to replace the rest of us with AI, but my worry is -- does that really have ZERO impact on the human specie's ability to produce "the best of us"? After all, they don't grow on trees.

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markus_zhang

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jboggan  7 hours ago

It's a grand experiment isn't it? Us senior programmers are pretty good at using AI (or so we think) because we have decades of grinding and problem solving to inform our intuitions. Is that really necessary? The next generation of programmers certainly will not have that level of desk-head interface. Maybe they'll be fine? Maybe the models will get so good it won't matter? Open question.

I imagine the same will be true of AI, but I'll say that in the short term AI is going to make mathematicians better because it solves the breadth problem. Again, I feel like this Barnette conjecture got solved (if it is solved) because of some clever partition function sums which are intellectually tractable but simply too far out of anything I'd seen before (I see the apparition of my GT combinatorics professor intoning gravely that "everyone knows that, Jake, you're an idiot"). Maybe AI will help identify common threads far greater than Google and journal search.

I think if I had ChatGPT when I was 20 and working on this problem for the first time I might not have solved it, but I would have learned every angle and facet of it far more quickly. But then again I would not have spent so many late nights staring at the Országház across the Danube and letting my mind drift and bump against the problem like spilled cargo in the river.

  • markus_zhang  7 hours ago

    I have been thinking about this, too. Take Mathematics as an example — it’s probably safe to say that only the top 1000 contemporary Mathematicians really matter to the human specie, or perhaps even less. And if you do not show the potential to be one of those when you reach the end of your graduate studies (actually probably already too late), you are 99.999% sure to just push out papers no one reads and such, and an associate professor in a no name school is going to be your lifetime high watermark. Like, the human specie doesn’t care whether you existed or not, from that perspective.

    Now if we can prove this, expand it to the whole spectrum of academic studies, and somehow convince 99.99% of us that they are basically garbage and we don’t care about them — sure the elites will throw UBI around but that’s it — then maybe AI is very positive to the human specie.

    Oh we better pick up the speed of cloning and artificial fertilization quickly, because people who are told to be garbage probably have no interests in boring children, and it is still a myth how genies are born and grown. We need that diversity.

    BTW the whole scheme reads like the background of a Chinese net novel 赛博英雄传.