Comment by bananaflag
4 days ago
As a mathematician, I will never understand how my colleagues had never foreseen this. Okay, maybe you can believe in a plateau but at least accept as a possibility that there won't be one. This applies to every other human endeavour.
I am also sad, but my sadness is, in a way, priced in.
It was really quick. I stumbled across a comment from KConrad on MathOverflow on how useless AI was for research. That comment was from 2024. When it disproved the unit distance conjecture in May, the solution involved a breath of knowledge of the literature that it made sense it took a computer to make the connection. It only took 5 months for it to advance to the point that it was better than humans at almost everything. Even if you expected it, the mind boggles at how fast it was.
Also, it's impossible to really know how you're going to react to something until it happens to you. When ChatGPT came out, I already thought "in the long run they're going to automate almost everything humans love to do". Despite having 4 years to brood about it, I did not really know what it would feel like until it happened to me directly.
> It was really quick.
That's how the singularity works. It's going to keep getting quicker, incomprehensibly so.
I like to call it the great incoherence.
Even before LLMs it was feeling like the design of society wasn't really for people any longer, instead it's more and more designed for corporations and their convenience. In the US at least. Same with how the internet has stopped most people with socializing the same way they did in the past.
Now we have a new layer that will be optimized for these digital entities. We see it in writing all over the internet. There will be tons of other places they show up and doing things that don't make sense to us.
I think what makes it hard is that it's quick, but not sudden. I understand constant-rate improvement. I understand what it's like to be in a car crash. What I can't understand, emotionally, is the constant acceleration. Even now, if I look at an OpenAI solution in isolation, I can understand the big picture, so if things froze where they are I could adjust. Intellectually I know I'm not going to get that chance, but emotionally I don't.
I don't see how this is possible. There are constraints on the speed at which information can move and the number of steps required to compete a given task. The improvement cannot continue, let alone accelerate, indefinitely without bounds.
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I saw it coming since reading Kurzweil in high school and it's still heavy.
I just had a chance to flinch first.
It's not really a profound insight. Back in the 1980s when I first started writing BASIC programs I remember thinking "well, if someone invents a program that can write programs, there will be no more work for programmers"
It's easy to have that thought, and eventually you'll be correct. One thing about technology is that it only improves. It's always building on top of what already exists. The only uncertainty is the exact timing, not the ultimate outcome.
This is it.
The people struggling right now - they were told. 30 years ago. They really should have come to terms with it by now.
But these are also the people who refused to believe it, for whatever reason. Their heads were in the sand. So I do feel bad for them... but... this is somewhat self inflicted.
No. They might have better braced themselves for the hit, but the wound was not self-inflicted.
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