Comment by joe_the_user
8 hours ago
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.
That's just fantasy.
3 replies →
> 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.
> like sightseeing on vacation.
Or like musing while you are plowing your field by hand wondering how many of your kids will survive the coming winter.
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.
> 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.
The credible threat of communist revolutions put the fear of god into the capitalist elites. So they had to share a larger share of wealth with workers, beyond mere subsistence wages, to keep them peaceful. With the downfall of USSR, communist revolutions stopped being a credible threat, and elites clawed back productivity gains, pushing workers toward subsistence wages again.
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?