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nritchie5 hours ago | parent | context | favorite | on: There's never been a better time to go into math (... I'd like to believe Grant but I find this assault on mathematics to be dehumanizing and demoralizing. AI has destroyed a major source of "life's meaning" for many people who pursued mathematics. Imagine waking up one morning to find that an alien technology has solved the problem you had dedicated your life to (and many more to boot.) Not another mathematician but an alien technology. As a scientist, I don't want to end up as a laboratory assistant to an AI. I can take not being the smartest human in the room, but I'm pretty sure I don't want to spend my life serving a silicon master. help 
howunfortunate4 hours ago | next[–] > Imagine waking up one morning to find that an alien technology has solved the problem you had dedicated your life to I'm sympathetic to mathematicians but this does not paint them in a good light. If your primary purpose is SOLVING the problem, you should be ecstatic! If your primary purpose was rent-seeking so you could play with puzzles*, you'd be very upset. * I find this characterization overly harsh, but if you're mad about your problem being solved, maybe you weren't in it for the right reasons reply andersource1 hour ago | parent | next[–] I really don't understand such takes. Extend this to every problem in every profession, which seems to be both the trend and the intent (if still far off), and you vaporise the meaning from a lot of people's lives. Sure, they can find other sources of meaning - assuming having their job automated doesn't leave them constantly scrambling to make a living. This would require major social restructuring that nobody's really talking about. Many people pursue careers based on the intersection between their interests and what society considers valuable. Being upset when what they chose to spend their lives doing either loses value or changes so much it becomes a wholey different job is understandable, and calling it "rent seeking" is very unfair, in my view. reply Marha0127 minutes ago | root | parent | next[–] > and you vaporise the meaning from a lot of people's lives If the meaning of your life is to obtain a solution to a given problem, then getting the solution would "vaporize the meaning of your life" in the same way as when someone that claims his meaning of life is to raise their children would "lose all meaning of life" when they finally move out and start to successfuly live on their own. Yes, there could be some nostalgia in both cases, but if you are psychologically well-adjusted, the pros would still far outweight the cons, the happiness would outweight the sadness. reply andersource10 minutes ago | root | parent | next[–] I don't think that's the same. Would you let robots raise your kids if they provably did it better than you? These people knew someone else could solve the problem. Presumably they figured there'd still be meaningful work for them to do - exploring ramifications, new frontiers opened by the solution. Other problems, at worst. Now it all seems far from guaranteed. I agree about well-adjustedness, but what do you propose these people do to get paid if the number of researchers with grants reduces significantly? Reskill to something that pays less, they like less, and might be automated too? Can you frankly say this wouldn't be a moral blow to anyone, well-adjustedness and all? reply adastra2237 minutes ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] My purpose in life is solving problems in various domains. Having those problems solved for me would be a Champaign problem. reply Guestmodinfo2 hours ago | parent | prev | next[–] Link about plagiarism by OpenAI on solving Navier Stokes's Theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navier%E2%80%93Stokes_priority... Let's just say that The math problem that got solved, I was working on it for many years but some company people used my knowledge my prompts and "solved" it without giving me any credits or money. Firstly they plagiarised the books and research papers and then they plagiarised the prompts by the mathematicians. Yes AI can make art and has caused many artists finding work difficult but AI art is always souless and worthless, same thing will be for math it will become souless and worthless because when humans who are experts in their fields invest their ingenuity then art becomes alive but if ordinary people like me will just prompt into the machine then souless things will come out that will be very worthless and disposable. reply dvt22 minutes ago | root | parent | next[–] Non-mathematicians talking about this (especially in a cultural battleground like Wikipedia, yuck) will never be productive. Citing it here on HN does everyone a disservice. For those uninitiated, OpenAI used a fundamentally different method (without forcing in the Euler case) and the idea that the proof was plagiarized (other than the completely kosher strategy of using prior art, of course) is a complete fabrication. In fact, the proof is such a mess, nobody really understands how it works. Which is becoming commomplace with these permutation machines where we can come up with something that passes some tests (e.g., a proof checker), but we have no idea wtf we did to get there, which doesn't really seem to do much to push human understanding forward. It seems like such a dumb hill to die on, too. OpenAI literally stole the entire Internet (including copyrighted works), and we're arguing about a silly math puzzle. reply spongebobstoes2 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] the claims of plagiarism are not convincing, and gatekeeping knowledge is a bad look reply staplers1 hour ago | root | parent | next[–] gatekeeping knowledge is a bad look Unless a corporation does it? reply nearbuy18 minutes ago | root | parent | next[–] But the AI companies didn't gatekeep knowledge. They released all their math results. Unless you mean they're charging money for a product that contains knowledge. But that's not gatekeeping, just like selling a book isn't gatekeeping. Gatekeeping is when a group tries to prevent others from participating in a field or activity. reply Marha0126 minutes ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] > Unless a corporation does it? Nope, in all cases it is a bad look. reply bombcar1 hour ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] Tom Leher had it down pat, they're just mad that computers are better at it than they are. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXlfXirQF3A reply jacquesm3 hours ago | parent | prev | next[–] If we play a game of chess and I move the pieces to the final position on the first move and declare victory you might feel that something was missing, even if I'm right. This is not quite like that but the feeling I get from it is much the same. Mathematicians are first and foremost busy with understanding math, not with 'solving' math though they are solving individual problems within the domain of math. The journey towards that understanding requires specialization and often lots of studying. To quote Douglas Adams: "If 'metal nose' here is going to give you God's phone number then the philosophical question of whether there is a God becomes meaningless." It is the journey and the questions that matter as much or more than the answer does. And with math being a branch of natural philosophy I can see why they would be a tad upset at this shortcut because it strips the collective efforts of a large number of people of their prestige and feeling of time well spent. Imagine your life's work reduced to a short string of bits, and worse, that short string of bits was created by a machine that effectively is still a toddler. reply olalonde2 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] > It is the journey and the questions that matter as much or more than the answer does. Selfishly, as someone who enjoys programming, I feel the same way about the journey. But let's face it: for everyone else, the outcome is what actually matters. Mathematicians argue that their journey may lead to novel insights, but are those insights really valuable? Are they going to help the LLMs solve more problems? And are we sure that the LLMs can't deliver those same insights? reply jacquesm2 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] I think that ties in with the 'who will train the juniors' angle: if the ladder consists of nothing but the top rung because the AI combine stripped away the rest of them then a lot of fields will be looking at zero new entrants. Nobody wants to compete with a machine for their living and sense of self value. I know I don't, and obviously I can't speak for anybody else but society has pretty much programmed people to tie a good chunk of their identity, success in life and general well being to their skills and ability to put bread on the table. You can't just toss that in the bin for 3/4 of the current crop of professionals (I'm seeing the mathematicians as simply the first (and probably not even the first) of many). I don't know if you have kids or not but I have two kids in high school and keeping them motivated through the AI revolution is a serious challenge and some of their classmates have already all but given up. The next generation down the line is going to grow up with the same kind of attitude towards thinking that you might have towards the skill of map reading. And I think we'll all be poorer because of that, not richer. reply cagz56 minutes ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] Exactly. As a software developer, AI has given me more time to tackle higher-order problems. The actual architecture, optimisation, and user experience. Mathematicians could: - Continue working on philosophical aspects of the solution and not bothered by whether the solution is known or not. It is not a movie that gets spoiled when the ending is known. - Or better, demand from AI labs, how they would like to see AI helping them on philosophical aspects. reply byzantinegene2 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] they probably do deliver insights, just not in a human-readable form, so at some point, human progress stalls. reply _heimdall1 hour ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] > It is the journey and the questions that matter as much or more than the answer does. That only makes sense to me when its what someone chooses to spend their time doing. When they expect someone else to pay them for it, its the end result that matters. Maybe its a fundamental flaw in capitalism or money itself, but we can't expect to be paid for the sheer love of the game. Others will only end up paying us if the expected output is worth it. reply lanstin1 hour ago | root | parent | next[–] Well we have been paying people for the pure pursuit of knowledge for its own sake since the scientific revolution, which is kind of the material base for capitalism, so I don’t think your argument holds much water. Why knowledge and following curiosity facilities general prosperity is maybe an open question but that it does is inarguable. reply _heimdall56 minutes ago | root | parent | next[–] Capitalism incentivises paying people to pursue more capital, not the putsuit of knowledge. And to be clear I don't say that as a good thing, it may be a flaw in capitalism, but we don't psy people simply to chase knowledge for the sake of the chase. reply massung2 hours ago | parent | prev | next[–] On one hand I agree. I’d also add that there will be no end of math problems to solve. That some were solved will only lead to new ones. That said, I think what has mathematicians… upset is probably two things: 1. These are hard problems. Hard enough that solving one could take decades of work. And there’s tons of collaboration involved. Pivoting to another - and making progress - isn’t exactly something you wake up tomorrow and start doing. 2. I think motivations matter to some. And the AI companies doing this aren’t doing it for the betterment of math or even society. They are in an arms race to prove their product is superior and any careers that are damaged collaterally be dammed. reply airstrike1 hour ago | root | parent | next[–] Turning hard problems into easier problems is a good thing. reply haickernews1 hour ago | parent | prev | next[–] Men have sex to cum. If I hand you a bucket of cum and you don't feel ecstatic, you might've been having sex for the wrong reasons. reply v3ai15 minutes ago | root | parent | next[–] Close, men have sex to orgasm, if i hand you a bunch of orgasms and you don't feel ecstatic you might have been having sex for the wrong reason. reply tarpitt3 hours ago | parent | prev | next[–] Why should we be estatic that some signifigant math problem was solved by machine rather of a human being in a language only the machine understands? Don't you know that problem was solved by a space alien a million light-years away a long time ago in a galaxy far far away? Makes no difference from the meatbag perspective: both claims are untestifiable. In fact you should be estatic that in a paralell universe all math problems have been solved, so there's no reason to pursue math at all (we did it reddit!). When your job is automated and you're living in the streets, just remember that you should be estatic that the job is finally being done more efficiently by a robot. Like, we did it. We finally did the job right. The job was never about wealth distribution, self actualization, dignity or any of that crap it was always about getting some stupid task accomplished for an industrial system that exists for... what exactly? What is the end goal of all of this? Who does the system serve in an economy of no consumers? What is the point of solving niche mathematical problems if no living person can comprehend the solution? reply howunfortunate3 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] > The job was never about wealth distribution, self actualization, dignity or any of that crap it was always about getting some stupid task accomplished for an industrial system There are still a whole lot of people, the vast majority of people actually, who's job involves something completely unglamorous and practical like unclogging your sewers. To these people, it sounds like a cruel joke that people get paid 3x their salary, and after AI can do their job we learn that apparently the only purpose of their was their own self-actualization. I don't actually believe that about math, but that's what a lot of people in this thread sound like. reply whatshisface2 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] I thought technology was supposed to liberate us from the fields, but it turns out that's what wealth is for, and the wealthy want us back in the fields (no more escape through special training or skill). reply tarpitt2 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] >There are still a whole lot of people, the vast majority of people actually, who's job involves something completely unglamorous and practical like unclogging your sewers. I know, I have that job! And I enjoy it. But the robots are coming for me too. reply dextrous1 hour ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] We’ll put IMO. This expresses well the way I’ve been thinking about “the mathpocalypse”. I feel sad and even a bit forlorn when I think of jobs that provide purpose, meaning, motivation, and satisfaction (not to mention $$) to human beings being lost to servers in racks and soulless machines. I think many people feel similarly. However, I do believe that when a couple problems get solved that massively benefit all of humanity — e.g. a massive cancer breakthrough, etc — a tipping point will be reached and public opinion will reverse and enthusiastically embrace AI, and will accept not only diminished personal meaning but outright technocratic rule. This would be a huge mistake, but I really believe it would happen. And as we know, solving interesting math problems is a leading indicator of big practical results to come. reply hackinthebochs34 minutes ago | root | parent | next[–] >However, I do believe that when a couple problems get solved that massively benefit all of humanity — e.g. a massive cancer breakthrough, etc — a tipping point will be reached and public opinion will reverse and enthusiastically embrace AI, and will accept not only diminished personal meaning but outright technocratic rule. Is solving cancer worth ceding human meaning and human autonomy to the machines? I haven't seen anyone ask this question but it seems the central issue of this revolution. Personally, I don't think it is. Perhaps machines will lead to a perfectly homogenous society completely absent of negative valence whatsoever. But if every experience is also devoid of any personal meaning, what's the point? The optimal human state is not one of peak hedonism, or wholly absent of suffering. reply Marha0120 minutes ago | root | parent | next[–] > Is solving cancer worth ceding human meaning and human autonomy to the machines? I haven't seen anyone ask this question but it seems the central issue of this revolution. Personally, I don't think it is. Solving cancer alone? Perhaps not.. Unless you have cancer.. Solving all diseases and aging? Well... I would rather be alive and live like an AI's housecat than dead and free. And I suspect that many people who publicly disagree are just performative, and would actually make the same choice when push comes to shove, and they have to actually choose between "diminishing their autonomy to the machines" and imminent death. reply noosphr3 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] >Why should we be estatic that some signifigant math problem was solved by machine rather of a human being in a language only the machine understands? Why should I be ecstatic that someone solved a problem using Hilbert Calculus when I can only understand Sequent Calculus? [0] [0] This is a joke. No 'real' mathematicians do systematic proofs. What gets posted in math journals is the equivalent of architecture diagrams. reply tarpitt2 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] You shouldn't. Maybe you should learn Hilbert Calculus so you can appreciate it. It's like asking if what someone wrote a beautiful poem but it's in japanese. Maybe hearing about it motivates me to learn japanese, or maybe it doesn't. But as a non-speaker it makes little impression on me. reply noosphr2 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] If you're writing Japanese poetry instead of solving maths problems expect to get paid Japanese poetry wages. reply xpct37 minutes ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] > in a language only the machine understands I wouldn't even grant that. It's a very one-directional problem solving approach where it's unknown to what extent it can build on its own findings. reply alecst2 hours ago | parent | prev | next[–] I’m seeing this perspective expressed a lot lately, but (so far) only online. Understand that there’s more than one way to prove something, that there’s an art to making something understandable, and that humans tend to take the most understandable paths (to humans.) Models often don’t do that. But in solving, or claiming to solve, important problems, they nevertheless remove a lot of the excitement and incentive towards working towards a solution humans would naturally find. Plus, a lot of these problems really don’t have any critical applications at the moment. They’re done for the love of the game. Does that bother you? That your tax dollars pay people who do math out of curiosity? reply Davidzheng2 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] But then you can start with a solution and try to make an understandable one. reply rbongers4 hours ago | parent | prev | next[–] There is a difference between the process of solving a problem and a problem being solved. If I solve a problem myself, I understand it, I find out something new, I get to try lots of things. It's engaging and fun. If I tell you to go solve a problem, I can learn it afterwards but I miss out on the entire process. Personally, I enjoy the process of solving problems. I do not enjoy wrangling unpredictable AI agents. reply _heimdall1 hour ago | root | parent | next[–] For a personal experience I 100% agree. Where I'm not sure where I land is when the problem solving is a job people are paid for. I wouldn't expect someone to be paid to enjoy the process of solving a problem, I'd pay them to solve it. There are plenty of things I enjoy doing, but I try to do them as often as I can for the love of it rather than because someone is paying me to enjoy the process. reply lanstin1 hour ago | root | parent | next[–] You never hired someone to find something useful to improve or fix? There a lot of people who are really good at that and really bad at just doing the things you tell them to do. reply _heimdall55 minutes ago | root | parent | next[–] I've never hired anyone only to enjoy the process of trying to solve a problem. Imagine hiring a plumber that never solves your plumbing problem but had a hell of a time enjoying the process of trying to understand it. Would you want to pay them for that? reply youoy0 minutes ago | root | parent | next[–] I would want to hire a plumber that does both, because his/her solution would be better and higher quality 100% of the times. tdeck1 hour ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] This is pure math research we're talking about here. It's not exactly lucrative and people looking for commercially applicable results ASAP weren't funding it anyway. reply _heimdall53 minutes ago | root | parent | next[–] It sounds like your argument is effectively that it isn't an economically viable pursuit. People have been getting paid for it, and hopefully that can continue if they enjoy it, but why should we want them to be paid only to chase theoretical math if it has no valuable output, or if the value is in the pursuit rather than the output? reply tdeck21 minutes ago | root | parent | next[–] My point is that this was already the case, i.e. math research was already not a "dollars go in, useful proofs come out" field. The people lamenting the future of mathematics are largely not focused on the economics, they're focused on the fact that anything they might apply their efforts to could get sniped by a frontier lab at any moment. That is obviously demotivating. But reading the threads here on HN, in response to people saying "this sucks", AI boosters would rather redirect the conversation into economics and feign outrage that people are being paid to do mathematics at all. Suddenly folks seem to be both in contempt of the idea of solving abstract puzzles without practical application, and certain that they want a higher efficiency of abstract puzzles solved per dollar (again, puzzles they probably don't care about). reply hackinthebochs27 minutes ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] The ideal human society is not one where people are narrowly focused on creating widgets or increasing efficiency, narrowly construed. An ideal human society includes intellectual pursuits. Some of these pursuits do not suit dabblers, they take deep expertise that can only happen from a lifetime of directed effort. We are collectively better off when some value is spent in ways that isn't aimed at maximum efficient allocation. It's funny, the justification for accelerationism is that people can be paid (UBI) to pursue their passions. On the other hand, we have those that are asking why anyone should be paid for work that isn't economically viable. I suspect we're being sold a load of bullshit. reply _heimdall18 minutes ago | root | parent | next[–] I don't support a UBI, for what its worth. The idea is nonsensic from my vantage point, if there's a certain minimum level of good people should have access to it makes more sense to give it to them rather than to give them some level of cash that can on theory buy it. More importantly, I'm curious how you define an ideal human society. How do you land on what ideal is, or what it would take to get there? reply hackinthebochs4 minutes ago | root | parent | next[–] >More importantly, I'm curious how you define an ideal human society. How do you land on what ideal is, or what it would take to get there? The question is in what context does the human psyche thrive? We find meaning in personal struggle and overcoming obstacles. We're happiest when we're striving for something out of reach but seemingly attainable. We're much less happy when we have all of our needs met but have no source of meaning or fulfilling struggle. Our evolutionary history is one of struggling against hardship and finding personal meaning in the process. This is a core feature of our psyche and it is to our detriment to eliminate it. This isn't to say we should all be struggling for our next meal. Much like cats, our core drives can be exercised and satiated through a simulacrum. There are many ways it can be satisfied, but strive we must, against something with inherent meaning. The problem with AI fully realized is that it takes away most avenues for human achievement, thus the struggle loses all meaning. jimbokun3 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] Yes howunfortunate probably also thinks AIs doing a student’s homework is just as good as the student doing the homework himself or herself. I mean the only thing that matters is the answer right? reply noosphr3 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] Homework is not usually something you get paid to do. reply LoganDark2 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] You get paid in exposure! reply doug_durham3 hours ago | parent | prev | next[–] It seems like everyone presumes that the currently proofs which are difficult to parse will stay that way. LLMs are really good with language. There's no reason that the next wave of proofs won't be accompanied by very literate explanations that mathematicians can generate understanding from. reply StilesCrisis1 hour ago | root | parent | next[–] One real limitation is context size. 1M tokens is enough to do a lot, but the Lean graphs they are making are way too big to fit, so an LLM will never have the complete picture. reply v3ai8 minutes ago | root | parent | next[–] Would a human be able to see the entire picture? reply tdesilva2 hours ago | parent | prev | next[–] The primary value of math has never been about producing "solved problems" (is there any practical value in "solving" NS in itself?). The primary value of mathematics has always been about "machinery for thought", i.e. the abstractiosn and methods that produced the solution. I think there is a little too much pessimism of the "math is dead" sort. As long as there is a need for humans to think there will be value in doing math. reply jimbokun3 hours ago | parent | prev | next[–] It’s math. Math is nothing but solving puzzles. Mathematicians usually care nothing about application of their work. Working on interesting problems is their only motivation. Practical applications are almost always happy accidents. This goes back to the hope that robots would do the laundry and the dishes and the cleaning up so we could write and play music, create art, and solve mathematical problems. Instead the AIs are doing all of that leaving humans with only the dishes and the laundry and the cleaning up. reply Anon10962 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] As of this comment you have 26 comments out of 206 total on this comment section, more than 10% basically all spreading FUD to try and make other people as miserable and pessimistic as you. I'm not sure what your motivations are but I'm glad we have people like Grant on the other side trying to keep a positive outlook on life and the future, and I hope all you eternal doomers who constantly try to bring others down with you find joy as well. reply jimbokun1 hour ago | root | parent | next[–] Your naivety is charming. reply howunfortunate3 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] If math is nothing but solving puzzles for fun then I think a lot of people should be very pissed off that they are doing hard labor while being taxed to fund a puzzle hobby group. Of course I don't believe that math is just fun puzzles. But if it were, then it would deserve to die as a career, AI or not. reply tdesilva2 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] If people weren't interested in solving puzzles for fun we'd still be banging sticks together in a cave somewhere. reply jimbokun2 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] Sure. Those people will also be pissed that people get paid to make music or art or literature or poetry and all such frivolous things. reply bigmadshoe41 minutes ago | parent | prev | next[–] What, in your opinion, is the point in solving these problems if no human is there to witness it? This is like suggesting we have AI watch movies for us and read its summary afterwards. In fact, why do anything anymore? Yes, much of pure mathematics is "playing with puzzles" to the end of the joy and beauty revealed by a human solving them. reply ves16 minutes ago | parent | prev | next[–] This is an awful and really ignorant take. The manner in which the problem is “solved” matters a lot, and these AI solutions are about as poorly-done as possible. That a solution exists closes the door on almost any sort of support for finding another, better one, which is the real problem. If this continues, we wind up with a field with no open problems, no practicing mathematicians, no future mathematicians, and no way to come up with new problems (this latter being much more important than solving existing ones, in the main). reply eddieplan94 hours ago | parent | prev | next[–] I suggest listening to "Math Vs Machine" [1], which has a much more nuanced take. It clearly lays out two types of use of AI in math, one that helps humans have better understanding, and one just bulldozes problems without helping us get any insights. It also touches on the topic of "does it matter if the machine does things in ways humans cannot understand". [1] https://radiolab.org/podcast/math-vs-machine reply ericd3 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] After it bulldozes the problem, can you not then use the LLM to help you understand the solution, bit by bit? reply jimbokun3 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] Not clear. Mathematicians are saying the current papers are pretty inscrutable and use terminology unfamiliar in the math sub fields in which the models are generating proofs. reply zer00eyz1 hour ago | root | parent | next[–] Cause it looks like it's mining one subfield for a pattern and applying it to another. (The take from the few math folks I know who have looked into items of their interest). Computing has the same issue. If we swapped a PLC programer with your average SV software engineer for a week both of them would have a really bad time. reply ericd1 hour ago | root | parent | next[–] Good thing LLMs are really good at translation tasks? reply hackinthebochs47 minutes ago | parent | prev | next[–] Only those that aren't in a field and see its existence justified for purely instrumental reasons can think its value is merely in its practical output. Personal meaning and fulfillment come in many forms. For mathematicians, part of that value is through solving problems, but it's also partly about the struggle itself, gaining understanding, expanding the frontier of human achievement, being a part of a community that values these things, playing a valuable role in the progress of humankind and making a career out of it. Having all that swept away overnight will lead to an existential crisis for anyone who is on the wrong end of this process. It's quite bizarre how many people feel so personally affronted at the existence of a rather exclusive intellectual community that they take glee in seeing it decimated overnight. But make no mistake, AI is coming for the things you value as well. reply doc_ick2 hours ago | parent | prev | next[–] “ if you're mad about your problem being solved, maybe you weren't in it for the right reasons”, politicians/financial advisors/military members/etc… would like a word with you. reply lz4004 hours ago | parent | prev | next[–] A lot of people went into maths because they liked not only the results but the process of research and discovery. That has been taken from them. No matter how you feel about AI, I think we should all pause and at least think about this and validate those feelings. Look at the most upvoted comment on that thread: ----------- I feel like the point is still being missed, and it's very similar to the way software engineers are trying to cope. The argument you are making "Well yes now this part of math we will not need to do again, but now we can do this instead" however the issue with most people just don't want to do that.... Like who are we kidding, the type of nerds who were attracted to math and software were into it because we saw it as an art-form, it was a craft, it was being the only one in your city to be able to solve a complicated math problem, it was immortalizing yourself because you discovered a proof and added to the ever expanding human knowledge. Imagine a leather workman who's life passion is making insanely high quality handbags, who takes joy in knowing everything he touches will last someone a lifetime and give them joy everytime they use it. And then not gradually, but almost overnight someone comes to his door and tells him we can make bags 50 times better than you at 1/tenth the price. But don't you worry, you can make more money overseeing the factory, or selling people on how good this bag is, and explaining that to them. I mean, ok, that just is not what I wanted to do with my life. I never wanted to be a manager, I never wanted to be a salesman, I never wanted to be a writer. A craft I enjoy doing has been taken away from me, I should be allowed to mourn, I don't care that I can do something else since I never liked doing it in the first place. I enjoyed solving problems and writing code, I don't care if people say "well thats never what programming was about it was actually about becoming a manager all along" I never wanted to be a manager, I never wanted to manage, I never wanted to be a proof reader. I just hate this existence. reply odyssey74 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] I think it might be a result of shock to believe it’s been taken away - you have my sympathies. Mathematicians got a new toy. It’s up to them to pick it up, play with it, and figure out what it can and cannot do. While I cannot guarantee it will stay this way indefinitely, there is still plenty that AI cannot do that humans still can, and asking the right series of questions remains an art of its own. There is still plenty of original work to be done. As Arnold Schoenberg stated in the 20th century, “there is still plenty of good music to be written in C major.” The search space is vast and today human judgement is still required to really navigate it usefully. No LLM has yet written anything like Shakespeare that has superseded Shakespeare in any culturally meaningful way. Although programming is supposedly just about solved, I expect to see numerous billion-dollar startups emerge over the coming decade, rather than all of the innovation running out at the speed of tokens. reply jimbokun3 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] There is no reason to believe AI won’t master those fields faster than you can become an expert or even useful contributor to them. reply ndriscoll3 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] > Like who are we kidding, the type of nerds who were attracted to math and software were into it because we saw it as an art-form, it was a craft, it was being the only one in your city to be able to solve a complicated math problem, it was immortalizing yourself because you discovered a proof and added to the ever expanding human knowledge. No, I think it's just super cool. One of the things I hate about it is that you can't really explain what you find cool about it; others just have to see for themselves (in some sense it's like a self-induced trip to sit there and work out analysis/topology proofs in your mind's eye, visualizing little nested blobs doing their things), which of course nearly no one you will ever meet has any interest in doing. I wish more people wanted to talk math/physics with me lol. I just want to know more. There are infinite rabbit holes. Like in uni and for years after, I wanted to know why convolution should be so important. Was I disappointed that someone else had already figured that out (that it's what you get when you form the vector space over a group and define multiplication as group multiplication) long before I was born? No way! I was stoked to finally have a satisfying answer! I wish they'd find a way to stuff that into applied analysis for engineers because it's cool and engineers should get to see cool math. But then I went into software (partly because it was a hobby of mine anyway, and partly because it pays well), and learned a long time ago to leave any notion of artisanship or nerd crap at home. Java programmers spent forever arguing against type inference, Python/Ruby programmers think static types are a hindrance, and Go programmers spent a decade saying generics make things more complicated. Metaprogramming is generally synonymous with "too clever." It's cool that the relationship C^(A+B) = C^A C^B (or generalizations) says that the way you handle an enum type is to pattern match/provide a handler for each constructor, but I'm not going to burden my coworkers with that nonsense. reply jimbokun3 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] AIs are currently reducing human knowledge and cognitive capabilities, replacing it with machine capabilities instead. It’s going to destroy both academic funding for people wanting to learn more through research and salaries for people currently doing cognitive work in corporations and an irresistible crutch for students using AI to do their work for them. reply ndriscoll2 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] It will probably reduce most people's cognitive capabilities, but most people aren't interested in learning. If you don't want that for yourself though, it's great. You now have your own personal professor available 24/7 to answer questions about whatever topic you're learning. Take a picture of a page with your phone and ask it something you're confused about, or to check your understanding. Get immediate feedback. It's awesome. Similarly, at work, it's never been easier to have data to make decisions with. Or to just try stuff out. Really great. Gets rid of what would otherwise be massive amounts of tedious "thinking" that drains your brain but isn't actually challenging in any way. It's early yet to see what effect it will have on research. Experimental science is full of interesting, cognitively engaging topics as well though. Or maybe they end up like me and do boring engineering work for pay, and read cool stuff that the AI has figured out in their free time. It's not all that bad. reply jimbokun2 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] You casually included “at work”. But if the AIs replace all the jobs? reply voidhorse1 hour ago | parent | prev | next[–] Many people don't seem to understand that pure mathematics is not a practical applied science, nor is it in the business of inventing things. Pure maths is much closer to philosophy or art than practical problem solving. Yes, we're extremely lucky that mathematics also happens to be a fantastic formalism for solving practical and scientific problems, by the practical problems are not remotely the subject matter of pure math. Of course, many mathematicians did advance theory in order to solve specific practical problems, but the pursuit of theory for theory's sake is also an important human activity. Historically, this freedom from practicality has been important. It allows mathematicians to explore purely theoretical issues that have no practical bearing today but that might well have relevance in the future. We don't know. Carving out dedicated resources in society for that activity, though, has proven very beneficial for other sciences. You have no computer, you have no neural nets, you have no AI, without at least some results from pure maths. Maybe keep that in mind before you crap on mathematics for its lack of immediate practicality. Not all good things in life arise as solutions to concrete and immediate material problems. reply irjustin2 hours ago | parent | prev | next[–] > I find this characterization overly harsh, but if you're mad about your problem being solved, maybe you weren't in it for the right reasons Then I'm in programming for the wrong reasons. reply hresvelgr4 hours ago | parent | prev | next[–] I'm not entirely sure this is fair. My belief is that mathematics exists in the intersection between art and science. I don't believe in progress for its own sake, so I'm inclined to say those interested should undertake it for the art, or to "play with puzzles." The rent-seeking argument and "weren't in it for the right reasons" is the same argument as calling musicians sellouts when they start making money. Making money doesn't make you a sellout, but it can. reply odyssey74 hours ago | parent | prev | next[–] Mathematics is more akin to art or a sport to many — philosophy, too. I don’t see that as a bad thing. But there’s always a risk that someone in an adjacent domain makes a breakthrough that completely reshapes the research landscape overnight. It’s happened before AI and it will happen at some point again in years to come. Grief is understandable, but this isn’t the first time or the last time. reply rubikscube0956 minutes ago | root | parent | next[–] the scale is just incomparable though. especially when everyone has a phone in their pocket that can do it. reply xpct42 minutes ago | parent | prev | next[–] What? Why are we nullifying so many human factors in one stroke? Humans strive to contribute to their community and to be recognized for it. We aren't machines, we have social and financial needs, and enjoy competition. Math being solved would mean part of humanity losing these parts of their lives. reply simplesocieties4 hours ago | parent | prev | next[–] > If your primary purpose is SOLVING the problem, you should be ecstatic! If your primary purpose was rent-seeking so you could play with puzzles*, you'd be very upset. I'm not a mathematician but I find this framing to be rather non-pragmatic and frankly, pointed. In the process of Leonhard Euler's "rent-seeking" so he could "play with" bridge crossings he invented a completely new branch of mathematics that is the basis for things like Google Maps today. The process of working with these problems is just as important if not more, than just solving them. reply cs_throwaway4 hours ago | parent | prev | next[–] I wonder how many math professors think they were actively working on well-known unsolved problems. Is it just a small elite club, or is it every tenured / tenure-track professor in all R1 schools? reply 0c3ca834 hours ago | parent | prev | next[–] If your primary purpose is learning, why would you be ecstatic? reply pfdietz3 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] Because there will be so much more to learn? reply 0c3ca832 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] Do you really want to spend your career cleaning out the Augean stables instead of advancing the state of the art? Seems miserable. reply callc4 hours ago | parent | prev | next[–] Don’t forget about emotions. There’s something here about the journey not just the destination. Press a button and problem solved is not too fun reply im3w1l4 hours ago | parent | prev | next[–] It's completely natural to be attached to the process of your job, rather than the outcome. It's not a phenomenon restricted to mathematics. We can say it shouldn't be like that, but it is. reply randerson1 hour ago | parent | prev | next[–] There is more to life than outcomes. Would sports teams have as many fans who enjoy their games, if all the humans were replaced by robots? Your team may win, so I'm sure you'll be happy with the outcome, but maybe something got lost? I for one have always felt inspired when reading about remarkable human achievements. To think that those might be coming to an end, replaced by AI, takes the humanity out of those stories. reply Dig1t1 hour ago | root | parent | next[–] How is your argument any different from the classic Luddite argument? Why is doing math different than making textiles? Why does math deserve special protections when other types of workers do not? There will be human achievement no matter how much automation and robotics we have. There’s an entire universe to explore and colonize. Plus people still want to see other people do things like perform music or play sports. reply rubikscube0952 minutes ago | root | parent | next[–] no one wants to see anyone do math lol. reply Dig1t35 minutes ago | root | parent | next[–] Well sure, but people do still want to watch videos like 3blue1brown in-depth explanations, and they do still want to learn math for its own sake. People can still do math and derive enjoyment from it. reply epestr37 minutes ago | parent | prev | next[–] I find it interesting how a mathematician enjoying theory-building or playing with ideas gets recast here as rent-seeking. It sounds much like certain right-wingers complaining that kids these days don't want to work, just stay in university studying useless things at the taxpayer's expense. reply throwaway274481 hour ago | parent | prev | next[–] > If your primary purpose was rent-seeking Incredibly nasty stuff to serve on the rent-seeking forum. Doubly nasty to levy at people who actually like being alive, like mathematicians. If capitalists had their way we'd all be slitting our wrists on day two of existence reply flowerlad4 hours ago | prev | next[–] >Imagine waking up one morning to find that an alien technology has solved the problem you had dedicated your life to But it could be another human that did that, and the impact would be no different. As a software engineer this is part of my life, and always has been. I may have been working on a software product for the last 3 years, and suddenly one morning I find out that another company has released a similar product, and selling it cheaper, now the value of my work is slashed by 90%. I may even have to drop my project and find something else to work on. This is a normal part of life. reply odyssey73 hours ago | parent | next[–] In research, there is always the same risk, that some adjacent field will completely change your field overnight due to some breakthrough. Still, I have sympathy for the people who are grieving right now. With the software industry, you kind of know what you’re signing up for, so you have some emotional preparation. However, this might be one of the very first truly disruptive innovations many mathematicians have ever seen in their fields in their lifetimes. Should they have better prepared emotionally for a black swan event? I’d argue that the answer is no, but even if the answer were yes, the grief that many are experiencing is still worthy of sympathy. reply flowerlad3 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] I am confused why this is considered a black swan event. Does AI take the joy out of mathematics research? Yes. But universities are not laying off mathematicians just because OpenAI has released some proofs. The proofs were never the point of mathematics, it is the understanding behind the proofs, and applying that understanding to solve real world problems. Now consider a computer science major in college who knows that he won't get a job when he graduates. Consider fresh graduates who thought they would have lucrative jobs but had to take up jobs as Uber drivers. To them AI is a black swan event. That's who I have sympathy for. reply odyssey72 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] Black swan events aren’t necessarily negative. For example, the original black swans who were found by the Dutch mariners neither attacked, injured, nor robbed those mariners. reply rubikscube0951 minutes ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] it's just started in math, only a few months. it's been happening for years in CS. Give it time. reply jimbokun3 hours ago | parent | prev | next[–] No matter what you choose to work on now, the AIs will get there first. That’s the nature of exponential improvement, which humans are incapable of. reply gnabgib3 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] Your comments are grim. What's your estimate on self replication? Sustained energy? Trigger fingers? Oh, nvm you made it clear 8m later: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50147638 reply jimbokun2 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] Give me an argument for not having a grim outlook given current AI trajectories paired with a political apparatus incapable of action. At least in the US. reply _heimdall1 hour ago | prev | next[–] I've never quite understood this sense of meaning. The goal could never have been to see these problems solved or to further understand how the universe may work. The goal was the chase itself, or the sense of pride for being the one to crack the answer. Also its worth noting this technology isn't alien. I don't personally want us to invent AI, AGI, ASI, etc but they aren't alien - humans are very much making the choice to invent these things here on earth. reply esafak54 minutes ago | parent | next[–] That's not what people mean by alien. It means that we can't rely on human intuition to predict how they will behave. Their intelligence is not like ours. reply _heimdall52 minutes ago | root | parent | next[–] That isn't alien though, IRA just different. I wouldn't consider my cows' intelligence as alien its just something I can't always intuit. reply tu26muwu2 hours ago | prev | next[–] I don't get it. I have a research degree in physics, and if AI made major progress towards the big open questions (e.g. nature of dark matter) or managed to come up with a much cheaper way (or any way at all) to test a theory of quantum gravity, I'd be super happy. At the moment the research frontier in high energy physics looks pretty bleak in that it appears like the scale of construction and energies required are too high to reasonably achieve many more big breakthroughs in my lifetime. What makes mathematics so special that the entire field is distressed when their big open questions get resolved? reply vlz1 hour ago | parent | next[–] > I have a research degree in physics So, I take it you are not working in the field? Take whatever field you are working in and whatever you like the most about it day to day. Imagine having it taken away from you and no prospect of getting it back. Then people on the internet yell at you: You should have never wanted that in the first place, stupid. reply FrostKiwi2 hours ago | prev | next[–] That's literally the 7.3k Upvoted top comment and I also think Grant didn't chew this one through appropriately. I was kinda offended at 17:10, where OpenAI paper dumping proofs "takes all the wind of [mathematicians] sails". But it's so much more than that. He did go more into it at 30:00, where he accepts that something is lost here. Or as Terence Tao said, the "age of heroes" in mathematics is has come to an end. I think Grant's points on funding and maths having a strong future are true. But I still think the dehumanizing part wasn't properly honored. But then again, this is supposed to be positive push into the future, so dwelling on it is not something Grant wanted to do. reply zaptheimpaler4 hours ago | prev | next[–] I'm sympathetic to the mathematicians and don't like what AI is doing. Every other profession that relies on knowledge or thinking should be watching the mathematics community as a portent of the storm to come. OpenAI has extensively thought about and planned their disruption and chose mathematics to start with for a reason - small community, verifiable to some extent, can be used to improve model training, not seen positively by many average people etc. The AI companies are going to come for every field one by one. reply Marha0134 minutes ago | prev | next[–] > Imagine waking up one morning to find that an alien technology has solved the problem you had dedicated your life to (and many more to boot.) I would be thrilled! My only worry would be how to sustain myself financially if my expertise is no longer needed - worries like this I can definitely understand. But the simple fact that the problems I care about are getting solved? Awesome, more of that please! reply vovavili16 minutes ago | prev | next[–] >Imagine waking up one morning to find that an alien technology has solved the problem you had dedicated your life to I would be ecstatic. reply qwertytyyuu5 hours ago | prev | next[–] I as a non maths person am not sure what you mean. Isn't AI solving lots of problems advancing the field? I understand that that maybe demoralising, but otherwise what do you mean by "assault on mathmematics"? reply stouset5 hours ago | parent | next[–] Solving problems and advancing the field are two related but separate endeavors. Nobody has solved the Riemann Hypothesis, but it has been highly fertile ground for new mathematics. Answering the question is of far less value than the question itself. reply hansvm4 hours ago | parent | prev | next[–] Mostly no. 1. One view of the field treats Maths as directly solving real-world problems. Under that lens, yes, solving problems is directly advantageous for the field. Even so, it's not necessarily a good thing for the participants. Suppose the incentive structures require tackling hard, long problems, the field attracts people who enjoy that sort of thing, it's hard a-priori to tell a hard problem from an aggrandized brute-force proof search, etc. Even if directly producing proofs is the desired output for the field, a capricious machine occasionally solving 40% of the big problems the field is working on is still demoralizing. On a human level, if a society has organized around producing 100yr+ problems and bestowed on you the privilege of tackling a few of them having the last 40yrs of your work solved by a fancy calculator is never going to feel good. Sure, that means that in retrospect that was a problem we could have waited to devote human effort toward, but you couldn't possibly have known that at the time. You worked hard, made locally correct decisions, and later found out that the work was worthless. Beyond that, I haven't seen any model of "Maths 2.0" produced where that issue goes away. We still want people to devote their lives to hard problems. The machine will still advance and solve a moderate fraction of them at random, killing many of the field's life's work. What motivation do you have in that environment to pursue those challenges in the first place? Why not pursue adtech or fintech and make the world a worse place instead? Solving 40% of the problems isn't +40% throughput; it's -60% as the rest of the field leaves for greener pastures, -inf when nobody's around to construct the right problems in the future.. 2. "Solving problems" isn't directly the point of most of the field. That's true both from the perspective of most problems requiring many intermediate results (solving one useful thing requires solving many less useful things) and from the perspective of building the machinery capable of solving problems being much more important than the solutions themselves (a properly presented proof leveraging clever, new techniques is infinitely more valuable than whichever thing it proved -- indeed, the Millennium Prize problems were chosen precisely because it was assumed they would create such techniques, and for the human-solved ones they did -- without new techniques, eventually the field caps out at whichever frontier of knowledge we're currently stuck at). 3. A third view of the field treats it more like art. A machine producing behind your back the painting you were envisioning, or at least a close enough simile to fool the masses, doesn't advance "art" in any meaningful sense. It's extremely demoralizing when flaky cast tools are passed off for proper forged variants (your work is better, and it's sad to see people choosing a wrench they'll later snap in half instead), and when at a creative level people are accepting mediocrity instead of something objectively better. reply jimbokun3 hours ago | parent | prev | next[–] Only in the same way that having an AI complete your homework advances your education. reply shadowgovt5 hours ago | parent | prev | next[–] So there's an interesting question about what mathematics is that the AI solution space is driving a wedge into and cracking wide, where previously the cracks were visible but could be ignored. When is a problem in mathematics "solved?" There's an old joke in math and computer science about a huge leap of logic in a proof either being flagged as "left as an exercise for the reader" or "trivially shown." The problem being that things are only trivial if you have all the context to know why they're trivial. We can claim a problem is solved if there is one paper explaining the solution with airtight logic that is understood by five people on the planet. And that is the kind of solution that LLMs can kick out (by basically, to hand wave a lot of details that I will admit to not fully understanding, doing a search across the whole problem domain with vastly more capacity than most human beings to do the symbolic manipulation that makes up the mechanics of mathematics). But what does that really mean? To have something "proven," but only to the comprehension of five people on the planet? 3blue1brown is making the interesting argument that perhaps mathematics practice shifts from a frontier that AI might actually be better at exploring than humans, to the process of digesting the output of that exploration and making it sensible and comprehensible to the billions of mines that could take advantage of that knowledge... If it were shaped in a way that could stick in their brains. That's a kind of creativity that AI is not likely to be good at in the near future, because AI doesn't really "understand people." reply forlorn14 minutes ago | prev | next[–] Isn't it the same with software development? I kind of feel that way too. reply jjulius1 hour ago | prev | next[–] >AI has destroyed a major source of "life's meaning"... Ah, but that's precisely the beauty of life, that there is no meaning. Life just "is". reply deepwoods1 hour ago | parent | next[–] A lot of people derive their worth from something external. AI brings the emptiness of that worth into sharp relief, but it was always empty. It used to be easier to ignore, though. The obvious retort is "that's cold comfort to people losing their livelihoods!" But that's not the discussion, and (at least at this point) we're not at risk of mathematicians going hungry. It is obvious that AI will have a profound impact on what mathematicians do. It is not obvious that we won't need them anymore. reply haickernews1 hour ago | parent | prev | next[–] So fucking true, man. hits bong reply onlyrealcuzzo4 hours ago | prev | next[–] > Imagine waking up one morning to find that an alien technology has solved the problem you had dedicated your life to That seems like a glass is half empty attitude. For one, the problem is solved. You should be glad. That's what you wanted... Typically every solved problem opens more doors than it shuts. We're pretty far from knowing it all. It's like someone saying the field of Math died when we got calculators and computers and spreadsheets to make it easier to do calculations. Now you can use AI to help you. Sure, if you refuse to use it, then you're screwed. That's a you choice. Not inevitable. The only things in life that are certain is change and death. Not any different than some Amish person being annoyed that s/he can't contribute to the field of Math because it's too hard to do all the calculations by hand on paper... You can spend your whole life crying that one day we'll all die, or you can enjoy the time you have. reply tarpitt3 hours ago | parent | next[–] The glass is a whole lot less than half empty. The pessimistic attitude is a rational response to our environment. The only way change this situation so that it comes out positive is to enjoy being a slave, but hey thats a you choice. >Typically every solved problem opens more doors than it shuts. >We're pretty far from knowing it all. Open doors to whom? AI or mankind? We have never been farther from knowing it all. The information knowable by people will become a sliver of the total relevant information in the world. >It's like someone saying the field of Math died when we got calculators and computers and spreadsheets to make it easier to do calculations. In that instance, the busywork was automated and challenging work remained. What we are talking about here is the reverse. It's the automation of all of the cerebral thinking. Imagine that all of the cerebral and beautiful aspects of math were automated first, but for some reason humans were required to specialize into number crunching instead. Now open your eyes. >Not any different than some Amish person being annoyed that s/he can't contribute to the field of Math because it's too hard to do all the calculations by hand on paper... The thing about amish people is that they own their own land and grow their own food and are independent within a governmental system that respects their property rights. The rest of us renters and feeders operate within industrial society-work or die. The disposition amish people have towards technology has been ahead of the curve. >You can spend your whole life crying that one day we'll all die, or you can enjoy the time you have. I would also encourage my peers to enjoy what little time they have left. What we are witnessing is the end of history, and I am honored to experience it. However I get the impression your nature is to go out with a wimper. reply jimbokun2 hours ago | parent | prev | next[–] Have you been living under a rock? The whole point of current AI is to replace ALL human contributions, in every field. Collaborating with humans is not a consideration, as shown by OpenAI leaving practicing mathematicians completely out of their process. reply hochstenbach1 hour ago | prev | next[–] I fear the same thing will happen as what I see in software developement. The volume of proofs that can be generated by anyone will be so big that it will overwhelm the system. Currently I really don't have the time anymore to check if all the bright results in computing projects make any sense. And not only in software developement. In general, I see preprint servers getting overwhelmed by article submissions, AI generated articles. I don't recall a wave of CAD generation in the past. reply tropicalhunter1 hour ago | prev | next[–] Back when CAD programs were going mainstream in companies in the 70's and 80's, civil/elec/mech engineers were in an uproar because they thought that CAD was going to replace engineers. What ended up happening was that draftmen became a profession. Not saying that we stick our heads in the sand and say AI will just generate jobs, because the cost there will most likely outweigh the benefits in the grand scheme, but there is definitely a world where mathematicians hand down direction to grad students utilizing such tools for research or some other framework that just doesn't resemble what we think of today. reply okanat1 hour ago | parent | next[–] It is not the same comparison. CAD produces exact same drawings as handwritten ones. It purely makes engineers more effective. It just took the menial side of the work. You still had to care about every single detail and tolerance. You still followed the same way of manufacturing things. You still do the smallest parts of it. Just like word processing vs handwriting a book / letter. You still have to type every single letter. You still think every sentence. AI is the complete opposite. It takes away the thinking part. When people use AI, they tend to offload a lot of thinking part to it as well. I use it because company policy. But if you care about every single if case and every single variable name, writing by hand is faster unlike CAD. reply myegorov31 minutes ago | parent | prev | next[–] You'll be surprised to learn that the opposite is true today (as of 2015 when I last worked in a licensed engineer capacity). CAD has near eliminated draftsmen, similar to how automated testing has eliminated QA. Engineers are performing all of analysis, design and drafting today. Similar to how programmers are responsible for testing. reply lnsru1 hour ago | parent | prev | next[–] History repeats itself. Now it’s the moment of weaving machines. AI is the new weaving machine. It needs couple guys for the maintenance. The other 198 guys were freed from the hard work. It’s not the CAD moment. reply tdeck1 hour ago | root | parent | next[–] Before the industrial revolution weavers worked from home in a relatively peaceful environment, set their own hours, and made a respectable living. After the industrial revolution they worked 14 hour days in a thunderously loud textile mill, so full of airborne lint that you could hardly see. The pace of their work was set by machine, which frequently caused serious injuries, and their wages often weren't enough to live on. reply epistasis5 hours ago | prev | next[–] I'm not sure that's a fair summary of the situation though. If the machines understand math but humans don't, we're going to be in a bad bad bad spot. We need humans to help guide all this, need to learn all we can. I agree with Sanderson that the opportunity seems larger than in the past. The challenges are quite different, but if somebody loves math, loves learning about it, like I do, I see so much opportunity. There's going to be so many more connections to evaluate, so much work needed for unification and simplification and pedagogy, and above all there's going to be intense demand for mathematical taste. reply stouset5 hours ago | parent | next[–] > If the machines understand math but humans don't, we're going to be in a bad bad bad spot. With potentially plummeting value for human involvement in these skills, I think that’s precisely what many people are worried about. reply epistasis5 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] Well that's the point, there's immense value for human involvement in these skills. More now than in the past. If you can do more with math, additional funding avenues open up. Jane Street will be using tons of AI in math, but boy are they going to need a lot of humans to try to keep it all under control. reply soniczentropy4 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] And we're all just supposed to suck up the fact that our chosen career morphed into "Babysit a machine" no matter what it is? What a swell timeline reply epistasis4 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] It's exactly the opposite of babysitting, from my point of view. reply jimbokun2 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] No, they won’t. The entire point of AI is to eliminate human involvement. reply andai4 hours ago | parent | prev | next[–] > If the machines understand math but humans don't, we're going to be in a bad bad bad spot. To generalize beyond math... how many bits of working memory do you have? How about a transformer? reply epistasis4 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] I'm not sure I understand the point of your question. Of course any recent LLM has memorized far more than I or another human could. reply jimbokun2 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] So what exactly are you going to offer beyond what near future LLMs will be able to do? reply epistasis2 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] Agency and control, the most important. Even if LLMs could somehow assimilate all the knowledge that's not available in their training datasets that's essential to all aspects of our current economy, which they can't they don't know human desires. reply jimbokun1 hour ago | root | parent | next[–] Their training data contains nothing about human desires? reply jacquesm2 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] That is the point. reply pbohun3 hours ago | prev | next[–] This reminded me of a moment from Star Trek V: "I don't want my pain taken away. I need my pain!" ~Captain Kirk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ABLYnvpAso reply pj_mukh1 hour ago | prev | next[–] Wonder if this is how G.H. Hardy felt reading Ramanujan's "proofs". I figure the real work begins now, the fact that a machine "showed the way" may become irrelevant 10 years from now. reply jlos4 hours ago | prev | next[–] How is that any different than another kind of automation? AI will make mathematics so much more approachable, comprehensible, and applicable as more problems gets solved. If the costs is a handful of PhDs tenure track, so be it. Academics didn’t much to seem to mind when that happens to blue collar workers. Nothing stopping anyone from studying mathematics here. reply jimbokun2 hours ago | parent | next[–] No. AIs will do all the math with zero human involvement whatsoever. reply runarberg4 hours ago | parent | prev | next[–] I keep hearing these “AI will make this” and “AI will become that”. Boosters are always making these claims for years now, but whenever AI becomes more powerful everything just sucks more. I don’t buy these claims anymore, and haven‘t been for a long time. I think you [as in you boosters; not you specifically] are full of shit. I don‘t think you know what AI will become, you just dream up some scenario where everything becomes better by some magic, but it won’t. It will become worse. People loose their jobs, people loose their tenures, and instead we get just more and more slop, more and more span, energy becomes more expensive, our planet becomes more polluted, our internet becomes more polluted. Our servers become overrun by bot traffic, our gaming machines become too expensive, etc. etc. I just want you to stop making things worse. I just want you to stop training more AI. It sucks, I hate it, and I want it gone. reply jlos1 hour ago | root | parent | next[–] AI helps me learn math now, what are you talking about?? I don’t waste time on unfamiliar notation, it provides me with context, suggests things I wouldn’t have thought of. And connects it to fields I wouldn’t have thought of. We have personal tutors with PhD level knowledge for basically free if you know the questions to ask. There is no waiting, results are here. reply akoboldfrying3 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] AI has already made mathematics better in the sense that it has greatly advanced what we know to be true (theorems). The only way that it hasn't made mathematics better is in the sense of human mathematicians' career prospects -- and in this respect, it is identical to other forms of automation that the world, and especially computer programmers like us, have participated in in the past without complaint. reply jimbokun2 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] So AI is only bad for HUMANS, which is exactly the point being made in the post you replied to. reply akoboldfrying2 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] It's "worse for humans" in exactly the same way that first the Industrial Revolution and later computer programming made things "worse for humans", but the post you're referring to only notices that it's "worse" when they are the victim. reply jimbokun1 hour ago | root | parent | next[–] It’s “worse for humans” in exactly the same way the Industrial Revolution was bad for all the horses that weren’t needed anymore. reply akoboldfrying1 hour ago | root | parent | next[–] I agree with this actually. All of these things were good for some and bad for some, and these groups overlapped. All were good for (most) humans-as-consumers, and bad for (some) humans-as-producers, and the IR was also bad for horses. reply nntwozz4 hours ago | prev | next[–] "Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while, a great wind carries me across the sky." — Ojibwe proverb reply loveparade1 hour ago | prev | next[–] That sounds more like a religion than science. Why not be happy that there is a new technology that helps solve (presumably) important problems that can have positive effects? reply StilesCrisis1 hour ago | prev | next[–] > Imagine waking up one morning to find that an alien technology has solved the problem you had dedicated your life to. Pretty sure everyone on HN can relate to this. reply hartator2 hours ago | prev | next[–] If you don’t care about the solutions, maybe you never cared about the issues themselves? Math has practical applications that hopefully will improve lives. reply dolebirchwood24 minutes ago | parent | next[–] Yes, imagine when cancer becomes a solved problem, and oncologists react online by lamenting the end of their life's work. They'd be viciously scorned and ridiculed. reply moscoe4 hours ago | prev | next[–] The egos of these mathematicians is not what is important here, and they should get over themselves. The goals and values should be about advancing mathematics and, by proxy, humanity. It’s not about them. That said, change is difficult for most. Let’s give them grace and have patience as they work through the stages of grief. Once they come to accept this new reality, let’s hope they can learn to embrace this new technology to continue the work of advancing the frontier. reply jimbokun2 hours ago | parent | next[–] How do you advance humanity by eliminating the humans? reply khazhoux52 minutes ago | prev | next[–] "My friends in cancer research are terrified they'll wake up one morning to find out that an AI cured cancer." But more seriously, this was an inevitability for math, no? The brain has an upper limit on how many concepts it can recall, recombine, and synthesize. We're all finding out now what happens when every single concept in math can be perfectly held in memory. reply eejeqq217 minutes ago | prev | next[–] Sorry but this is ego. Many people are working with machines and doing dull jobs. Are you special…? reply ekianjo2 hours ago | prev | next[–] > alien technology. its not an alien technology, its a direct application of... maths. reply vlz1 hour ago | parent | next[–] You are right, it’s not alien technology. But this is how it feels like. reply Barrin924 hours ago | prev | next[–] > AI has destroyed a major source of "life's meaning" for many people who pursued mathematics. I studied mathematics and don't agree with this at all, for several reasons. For one the entire point of maths is that it describes a formal system in which one can 'shut up and calculate'. Mechanizing maths goes back to Leibniz and Hilbert. Nobody should surprised that the big formalism with explicit rules you invented is the first thing to yield to automation, that's why it exists. Secondly research, including maths for a long time has been a collaboration of people, institutions, machines and processes, even maths does not consist of Faustian heroes in caves having revelations. And thirdly just because a machine produces a 500 page proof doesn't mean your job is done. Science produces knowledge. Knowledge is information made legible to understanding by people. So there will be endless work for humans to go over machine proofs and turn it into something we understand. Just like chess computers ultimately expanded human chess. reply not_kurt_godel4 hours ago | parent | next[–] > So there will be endless work for humans to go over machine proofs and turn it into something we understand I'm not convinced humans will be better at this than LLMs. Frontier models are quite good at handling even deliberately lazy/ambiguous eli5 prompts on complex topics IME. reply Barrin923 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] >I'm not convinced humans will be better at this than LLMs. they don't need to be. Any scientist is already surrounded by tools that are better than they are at anything. A scientist from 200 years ago would have the same existential shock if they see how a modern scientists works. But that's to misunderstand what science is for, which is to expand human knowledge. And a tool by definition can only ever change how you do this, not that you do it because you understanding it is the point. When people say learning to program is now useless, what they really mean is it might not make them any money, or using the AI is faster as an instrument. But if you care about programming itself, about you understanding programming, nothing has changed, it never can. And the smartest AI in the world can always assist you, but only that. reply not_kurt_godel3 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] > But that's to misunderstand what science is for, which is to expand human knowledge I agree ideologically and aspirationally but I don't believe it's the economic reality of how and why most science is actually funded (and I think you agree based on your comment about not making any money). > But if you care about programming itself I'm...not so sure I do any more? At least, not any more than I care about using Java over Python, or C++ over Java, or C over C++, or ASM over C, or machine code over ASM, or an abacus over machine code. > nothing has changed, it never can We now have programs that can write any program 100x faster and better than even the best humans and solve the hardest math problems known to humankind that have stumped the greatest minds the planet could produce for decades. That, to me, is a change with profound implications for understanding the nature of programming. reply shadowgovt5 hours ago | prev | next[–] I find myself sometimes wondering if the folks on Star Trek would consider themselves laboratory assistants to an AI, seeing as how the ship computer kind of works like an LLM: interprets voice queries into actions and takes actions, queries the database for answers, can extrapolate when asked to depending on how the writers are feeling... That kind of thing. reply jimbokun2 hours ago | parent | next[–] It’s interesting that Star Trek AIs were far less advanced than what we’re seeing now. They had warp drives, but only starting to get human level intelligence four centuries from now in the form of Data. reply jacquesm2 hours ago | parent | prev | next[–] > if the folks on Star Trek would consider themselves laboratory assistants to an AI I think the word you are looking for is 'peripheral'. reply jimbokun3 hours ago | prev | next[–] What would the AI even use you for? reply m3kw94 hours ago | prev | next[–] AI solve my problem where I have to hand code all the time. I'm happier than ever. Math's analogy is they now get to find problems instead of solving them, then get LLM's to solve them or solve them together. I've been saying this, numbers go up, and LLM makes the amount of problems to solve go up, not less. reply ericd3 hours ago | parent | next[–] Right, I didn't get into this to make money, I got into this to make things. This stuff is amazing for that. reply talon86354 hours ago | prev | next[–] I don’t have to imagine, I’m a software developer lol reply aeve8904 hours ago | prev | next[–] Alien technology? What are you talking about. reply lukan3 hours ago | prev | next[–] " As a scientist, I don't want to end up as a laboratory assistant to an AI." The idea is, that the AI is your assistant. Apart from that, I would also say get over yourself. We all have to. Arcane computer knowledge I was proud of having, that made me feel special can now be replicated by anyone with access to a LLM. I still know how to build things and that is what I am doing. Just faster than ever before. reply asdf889903 hours ago | prev[–] If you find your source of meaning in slowing down understanding and knowledge, you were never it in for the mathematics and some questionable motives. Find the solution within. reply
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