Comment by caaqil
10 hours ago
> Without humans who understand mathematics, there is, quite literally, no human mathematics—a fundamental part of human culture. If we agree that we should not abandon mathematics because poorly understood machines bruise our anthropocentric vision of it, then society will need more mathematicians, not fewer. Like… a lot more.
This is just incoherent. Even if we "agree" (we don't but...) not to "abandon" math, how does it follow that "we need a lot more mathematicians" exactly?
Even if you reject the idea that AI can displace the current top quartile/percentile of human mathematicians, wouldn't it be reasonable to assume that it will at least displace some parts of math so that there'll be less demand for mathematicians overall, not more? The mental gymnastics are astounding here.
Unless AI can do everything involved in math, their greatly accelerated production of certain parts of math should increase the demand for people to do the remaining parts.
Recursive self-improvement, which is underway will crush anything that is verifiable. The only place people have for now is non-verifiable work which is harder to find in maths than other domains.
> greatly accelerated production of certain parts of math should increase the demand for people to do the remaining parts
So the pie just gets larger? Large enough to outpace the displacement? I am gonna wait for this to generalize then, looking forward to AI giving us more software developers, mathematicians, etc. The economic laws have been broken. It's an infinite money glitch, as they used to call it.
It is a largely romanticised idea that pops up here now and then. Meanwhile Anthropic just put up a post saying they are getting closer to replacing people in their own company. That's the objective.
I wonder how many mathematicians even truly understand any of the latest research which is only going to increase in output. It will be impossible to keep up unless you slow AI down (not happening).
Edit: Anthropic blog https://www.anthropic.com/research/employment-at-anthropic
3 replies →