Comment by crypto420
2 hours ago
I kind of see their point.
For thousands of years mathematics had this aura of being at the pinnacle of human thought and was one of the things that separated us from other species. People like Euler, Gauss, Euclid, Hilbert, Erdos had this aura about that them that they were on the noblest of pursuits - trying to solve problems that had no immediate practical use, and largely needed focused thinking over extended periods of time with the occasional spark of creativity.
Then comes along AI, a mass extinction event to the entire field. It turns out LLMs can think for longer without stopping, have better recall and working memory. What we're seeing now is a 5000-year old set of institutions facing an existential threat because they no longer require humans to be the sole source of labor.
I find the closest analogy to be automobiles displacing the horse-carriage industry in the early 1900s. Horses couldn't protest and rapidly went out of a job, but horse-carriage owners and that industry certainly did.
https://ghostsofdc.org/2018/07/16/horse-dealers-claim-automo...
>People like Euler
You met the chap?
Jokes aside, and regardless of how anyone perceives their field or industry, I feel pretty much every thought-based industry is up for an existential threat to some degree. Given a bit of time, manual labour fields are looking a bit shaky too.
The real question is not "are we impacted?" but rather "to what extent, and how do we integrate it?"
Are they?
The problem to be solved was not to spew out maximum lines of text containing some greek letters per hour.
It was to write down iterative progress in conceptualizing, modelling and consistently explaining difficult questions - in a way that advances human understanding. If nobody bothers to read through 50 pages of gibberish that may or may not be containing some insight, then the total problem solving remains zero.