Comment by ekjhgkejhgk
6 hours ago
If you're considering an individual, maybe this makes sense.
But if you're consdiering a community, this falls apart. The maths community has universities, has professors who are paid, has students which are getting their degrees for varying reasons, it has conferences, has publications, papers, projects etc etc, all of which will get some negative impact some AI.
You know that line "when a measurement becomes a target it ceases to be a useful measurement". This line holds up to different degrees for various measurements and targets. For maths it holds up very well. The goal is "contribute to make the world better by increasing humanity's understanding of maths" and the measurement, which by evaluating an individual on it we're turning into a target, is "how much does the individual publish new findings". Measurement turned target holds up great. It's almost impossible to publish new findings and not contribute to humanity's understanding of maths. But with AI these two are being decoupled. You can produce lots of new findings, but the community is saturated and they don't get assimilated into humanity's understanding. Why do individuals use AI then? Because you've made the target "how much does the individual publish new findings" and they have to compete or lose.
If a coal miner or car mechanic would say something like this, they would be called a luddite by the same science people.
Its different when your own job is on the line.
When human manual arts were being automated away it was supposed to be not only acceptable but any complain and you were told you were a progress blocking luddite.
Now that mental labor is getting automated, the response to automation is very different.
This isn't about physical labour vs mental labour, it's about the dynamics of delivering a product vs contributing to a community.
For example, a software engineer is like a car mechanic or a coal miner. None of those are anything like a mathematician.
The person you're rallying against isn't me, it's an imaginary hypocritical person which exists in your mind. I do mental labour, I welcome AI developments hard, and I still think TT is 100% correct.