Comment by jacquesm
8 hours ago
I get that Tao is a mathematician first and I respect the fact that he stays 'in his wheelhouse' (he didn't write the post but he did post it on his blog). But I think it would be fair to extrapolate and to wonder about this question not just for mathematics but for all of science. Keep in mind that scientific knowledge can be hoarded or used to patent stuff and that there is plenty of evidence that OpenAI, Anthropic and possibly others are going to go after other sources of income[1] than just selling access to their AI inference engines.
I can imagine a future where these companies become the new Zaibatsus[2] holding patents across a wide variety of subject and with mutually re-inforcing silos of proprietary technology created by in-house AI that the rest of the world financed but does not have access to.
[1] For instance: https://www.reuters.com/world/anthropic-quietly-sets-up-biol...
Intellectual property laws never totally made sense to me in the first place, but they make even less sense in the age of AI.
Who's "intellectual property" are we protecting, exactly, when a machine generates the knowledge?
I hope we can update before it's too late to matter.
Intellectual property laws - like most laws - favor those with a lot of money and that's why you see this asymmetry between say artists, consumers and labels/record companies. The latter simply have far more money and besides they get to optimize their efforts because they are essentially immortal.
AI and AI companies have a similar pathway open to them where they will take a lot of information already out there and then gatekeep the synthesis based on that information (obtained without compensation in most cases) as well as to harvest all of the latent knowledge underneath. This is a bad development in my opinion but I'm sure that their shareholders believe it is great.
This. Maybe AI will help make it clear that strong IP law was never about the starving musician or the heroic author who wrote his award winning novel under candle light. It is about mega property pools that will do anything in their power to maintain that property forever.
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The purpose of intellectual property is to give an incentive to produce new knowledge (and art) by giving the inventor a way to monetize their work. Arguably this does not particularly work; but if you accept the argument then it seems to generalize fairly cleanly to AI. It's giving people an incentive to point their AIs at problems they're familiar with, and do the work to publish a solution for everyone, not just a hacked-up fix for themselves.
If certain inventions become very easy for AI models to discover, i.e. the discovery bound to happen, then in these areas it becomes a game of land grab.
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It's already been decided that generated content is not copyrightable
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See also: Monkey selfie copyright dispute
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50094694
(The validity of the concept of patents is a separate question, of course.)
> If a genetic algorithm comes up with a unique design and I patent it, that's okay, right?
That depends.
To what degree was your input decisive?
Did you come up with the genetic algorithm?
Is your patent written in a way that it tries to stop others from generating antennas using genetic algorithms?
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Good thing we have open source models from China, famous for ignoring copyright...
Whereas OpenAI and Anthropic…
Lobbying others being banned from using AI for this kind of stuff due to bioterrorism etc is an excellent anticompetitive move.
Or even, a golden age or a dark age for human society?
I mean, a society devoted to enriching all humans in multiple ways will want mathematicians. A society that aims to just suck all the value it can out of a given human wouldn't need and so wouldn't have mathematicians, if the answers they give can be provided by a machine.
Do we not see a path forward where the humans are further informed, don't need to do so much heavy grunt work, and thus can think on deeper questions? I really don't see the final outcome being knowledge work for humans completely disappearing. In fact having something that potentially can do it better and faster will make keeping up with that knowledge all the more fascinating won't it? This whole conversation feels like what someone with an abacus would say when they saw the first digital pocket calculator.
I agree with you. If we ever want to invent warp drive, a machine that lets us do it much faster ought to be a god send. If there are scientific solutions to our biggest problems, this should be a blessing.
But the risk is of course that the benefits will not be distributed but concentrated to the elite.
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> something that potentially can do it better and faster will make keeping up with that knowledge all the more fascinating won't it?
Yes, but it won’t be work anymore, in the sense that you won’t get paid for it, if machines can do the knowledge work just as well or better. We aren’t there yet, of course, but this future seems quite possible and might not be that far off (possibly within our lifetime). So you could explore deep questions (that machines can explore much faster and more thoroughly) as a leisure activity, like sightseeing on vacation.
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What makes you think that humans will be able to keep up with all that knowledge in the future?
Do we see a society where the market will value humans over AI without, like, any specific thing impelling the market to do that?
I mean, a combination of political and economic factors from 1930s to 1960s forced the wealthy to return a portion of the returns of automation to the remaining working people. Then from the late 70's till now, those in power have clawed back all those gains.
Of course, any further gains from automation will go to the very wealthy unless things change.
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Why would it want mathematics, id the math could be found faster without them? And even if you accept the argument that math is about human understanding (I don't buy that, it feels a lot like cope), why would anyone be a mathematician when the job consists of un-sloppifying a mountain of proofs, without the capability of meaningfully contribute to their creation?