Comment by gradus_ad
4 days ago
I really can't empathize with treating mathematicians as some sort of AI refugees who need coddling and support. AI is a tool, and competent mathematicians should learn to use it like everyone else. I find it hard to believe that AI doesn't represent a net potential benefit to human understanding of mathematics. Yes it can be misused, but any tool can be misused. Just don't misuse it...
> can't empathize with treating mathematicians as some sort of AI refugees
They may be a vanguard.
> find it hard to believe that AI doesn't represent a net potential benefit to human understanding of mathematics. Yes it can be misused
Have you read Tao’s criticism of AI in mathematics? The concern isn’t mis-use, it’s ecosystem collapse.
A good analogy would be offshoring. If AI causes higher mathematical thought among humans to stop happening for a generation, we could wind up in a state where the field stops progressing because AI is unable to generate new interesting questions or cross-link findings into practical applications.
More directly, the risk is that happens in America but not in a more-thoughtful country.
But it's entirely up to humans whether or not higher mathematical thought ceases due to lazy over reliance on AI.
Just because AI is capable of churning out vomit inducing prose, doesn't mean we need to surrender to a future filled with it. Humans who actually care about what they're doing will use AI when and where it should be used. I trust the intelligence, curiosity and tenacity of mathematicians to learn to work with AI. I don't understand the sky is falling worst case scenario Tao and others seem to be taking as the most likely future.
> it's entirely up to humans to allow higher mathematical thought to stop happening
…yes. That’s why the human mathematicians are having this debate. How to keep the human mathematicians and their founders motivated to keep doing math, potentially more productively with these new tools.
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This reprioritization of math would release a tremendous amount of human capital to do other more productive things other than posing yet another abstract puzzle which may or may not have an use in a few hundred years. It's not even clear if the human race can survive until then nor is it justified to spend that resource researching that far ahead instead of just when we need it.
> reprioritization of math would release a tremendous amount of human capital to do other more productive things other than posing yet another abstract puzzle which may or may not have an use in a few hundred years
We don’t know this! We might just have no more American mathematicians because folks who aren’t mathematicians don’t understand that we’re turning mathematical breakthroughs from just a couple decades ago into real, working technology.
> It's not even clear if the human race can survive until then
It’s pretty obviously clear the human race can survive for hundreds more years…
> It's not even clear if the human race can survive until then nor is it justified to spend that resource researching that far ahead instead of just when we need it.
"Climate change is going to kill everyone in 50 years so we'd better work fast if we want to burn all this coal by then"
Wouldn't that be developers?
> Wouldn't that be developers?
Not in the same extinction-class event way. In large part because hiring developers is still profitable.
Also, not remotely as well organized or proactive as mathematicians anpparently are. So maybe less vanguard than the cannon fodder at the front.
To merely wish for others not to misuse a powerful tool is a bit naive?
You have to actively design society to accommodate for the dangers it poses.
Of course everybody should "learn to use AI", but the real questions here are wildly different: can everybody use AI? Do the big US companies succeed in capturing the system, effectively shutting out every competitor and how do you imagine to benefit from that? Etc.
one issue is that the tool is wielded both by the user and the provider - each time we augment our skill with its capability, we are improving its capability with our skills.
knowledge workers are building their own gallows and it probably can't be stopped.
yeah its egotistic bs because they built an identity about being attributed in a journal instead of just focusing on the advancement. they collectively rationalize it by saying that the answers aren’t as important, the path to the answers are, despite the answers being what everyone considered them to be using taxpayer and other funding for, and the distributed time used.
they’ve only had a few weeks to deprogram so I’ll let it shake out just a little longer
Uhm...I fear you may have made the mistake of just reading the comments here rather than the article. Normally that works out OK but this thread has attracted the highest density of terrible comments I've ever seen on an HN thread.
The point of the initiative in the article is to help do the things you say mathematicians should be doing. Mathematicians recognize AI has reached the point that it can make significant advances, and are now trying to figure out how to most effectively use it.
This isn't coddling — it's bribing key people to use AI and blog about it.