Comment by asaddhamani
1 day ago
I mean, I could not understand 95% of all the math out there due to skill issue, and it’s still valid. If machines can understand the math and humans can’t, we can’t validate it, but that doesn’t make the math itself invalid.
It could be logically valid but irrelevant? Allowing for the atrophying of all our skills is dangerous? While simultaneously building ever more complicated edifices that control our lives? Not a doomer but you really just want to shrug and say it ain't no thing?
Perhaps humans have peaked due to the fundamental biological nature of our brains and AI will eventually surpass us in mathematical intelligence.
That has been the ultimate goal of creating AI -- not to simply match human intelligence but to surpass it. If it surpasses us, does that make it irrelevant? Everything around us is powered by mathematics, most of it I don't understand, and soon perhaps everything will be powered by mathematics that everybody doesn't understand.
To what end?
“Hey guys, the human condition can be experienced by these machines more efficiently than we are able to! Now we can finally die off!”
Why are we enabling a world that outpaces us? Is this going to lead to anything other than displacement in the long term?
Do you ever stop and ask why we’re building the world we’re building?
To what end does a world we cannot comprehend or rebuild from first principles serve us?
6 replies →
@bonitochips
They killed your comment, but you should know that you've posted it on the world's #1 AI propaganda site, where literally trillions of dollars are at stake and ROI depends on the correctness of the discourse running among the meat LLMs foraging or lurking here.
3 replies →
> If machines can understand the math and humans can’t, we can’t validate it, but that doesn’t make the math itself invalid.
How can humans tell whether machines understand the math if they themselves don't? Math is a human language for quantitative reasoning.
If large sectors of the population decline in their ability to read and write <natural language>, how will they be able to evaluate machine-generated <natural language>?
Perhaps, but two things: 1. most people don't understand this level of maths either 2. math, unlike most natural language, can be (dis)proven without a person understanding.
The second one is very important. While it is a matter of pride that some do understand, and (given enough time, in my opinion) will continue to understand, it is sufficient to be merely correct even if one does not understand why. This is a nice feature of math: it remains true regardless of understanding.
The obvious caveat is the machine needs to prove it in the end, even if we can not.
Does math already exist and is discovered? Or is it a thing invented by people?
The underlying tautologies always existed. Making them accessible to us as truth and usable for one or more functions is what's invented by people (and potentially by AI) via insightful proofs and narratives.
I think the nuance they are pointing towards is that we cannot with any certainty say one way or another, as this is an unsolved problem in mathematics, and may possibly remain unsolved forever.
Your opinion is a possibility but it is not grounded by any proof, as such it is nothing more than an assumption. I think the more intellectually healthy approach is to list out the possibilities and figure out what they entail, rather than to throw all your eggs in one basket blindly, which amounts to a leap of faith or a retreat to commitment.
But that's just my two cents, take it or leave it.
2 replies →