Like most of us I go back and forth between sheer optimism and fear for the future that AI may usher in. Recently I started vibe coding a fun video game with my ten year old. The experience is different than my work because it’s been such a joy to basically have a personal genie in a bottle help me make some personal art with a loved one regardless of either of our skill sets. The concept the author of this post is arguing now resonates with me more than it would have a few weeks ago. The sheer surface area that AI can create in our intellectual life is limitless and needs humans to explore. There can never be enough of us in that sense. Whether it’s as validators or creators.
It would be nice to have more mathematicians, but we don't need more. Once AI math goes so far beyond human abilities, any human involvement is like an ant trying to understand quantum physics
Once AI math goes so far beyond human abilities, any human involvement is like an ant trying to understand quantum physics
This makes no sense whatsoever.
We need more, because there will always be far more difficult problems yet to be discovered and solved, and that means, we certainly need expert humans to define and verify them.
If you cannot even explain the problem you are facing, not only you don't understand it, but you certainly would not be able to know if the AI solved your problem correctly.
I don't understand how to make a modern CPU. I'm not involved in the manufacturing of it. From my perspective, there may as well not be any human involvement. I can still use the resulting chip (in an larger system of other things I can't make and wasn't involved in) to argue with you on the internet.
It becomes another abstraction, really. As long as we can use it for something useful, it's still valuable.
There was this old TV series 'Fame' when I was a kid, there was a piano player that was at the school, he didn't want to perform though - he just wanted to play the most intricate complex music, the professor rightly pointed out what good is music if no one else can her it. Isn't AI math the same (assuming it gets to this point, yet to be proved) what good is it if no one can use it - just the AI's showing off to each other, if that does happen we'll need more mathematicians to show the rest of us what they're going on about. I find it an exciting time, imagine if we can accelerate a few hundred years into 20, wow, the one problem is capitalism won't work, so sad, we'll figure out something else.
Need? We don't need lots of things, including computers. We did well without them for hundreds of thousands of years.
We want to understand. Quantum physics, mathematics, how stuff works. Ants don't.
That want is not a given, not all of us have that drive. In fact, very few of us have it. So far though, it seems multiple disconnected civilizations learned to keep that trait going instead of suppressing it and focusing only on practical ant-like activities.
Russell once remarked that all of mathematics would be trivial to a sufficiently intelligent being. It builds conceptual tools for limited minds, that lets them understand far beyond their natural reach.
In a world with ASI, having that capacity is vital.
Like most of us I go back and forth between sheer optimism and fear for the future that AI may usher in. Recently I started vibe coding a fun video game with my ten year old. The experience is different than my work because it’s been such a joy to basically have a personal genie in a bottle help me make some personal art with a loved one regardless of either of our skill sets. The concept the author of this post is arguing now resonates with me more than it would have a few weeks ago. The sheer surface area that AI can create in our intellectual life is limitless and needs humans to explore. There can never be enough of us in that sense. Whether it’s as validators or creators.
Certainly humans can enjoy exploring such things, but will they really be needed?
What does needed even mean? To produce shareholder value? Maybe not. To explore thoughts and ideas humans have for fun? Certainly
It would be nice to have more mathematicians, but we don't need more. Once AI math goes so far beyond human abilities, any human involvement is like an ant trying to understand quantum physics
This makes no sense whatsoever.
We need more, because there will always be far more difficult problems yet to be discovered and solved, and that means, we certainly need expert humans to define and verify them.
If you cannot even explain the problem you are facing, not only you don't understand it, but you certainly would not be able to know if the AI solved your problem correctly.
And this will be true for how long? 3-4 months?
As long as there are problems to discover and solve, which is forever.
The risk of liability is a social problem that is far more difficult to be solved with technical solutions even with AI.
Even if that happens, what’s the point if there’s no human involvement? AI doing math for math’s sake? And doing what with it?
I don't understand how to make a modern CPU. I'm not involved in the manufacturing of it. From my perspective, there may as well not be any human involvement. I can still use the resulting chip (in an larger system of other things I can't make and wasn't involved in) to argue with you on the internet.
It becomes another abstraction, really. As long as we can use it for something useful, it's still valuable.
There was this old TV series 'Fame' when I was a kid, there was a piano player that was at the school, he didn't want to perform though - he just wanted to play the most intricate complex music, the professor rightly pointed out what good is music if no one else can her it. Isn't AI math the same (assuming it gets to this point, yet to be proved) what good is it if no one can use it - just the AI's showing off to each other, if that does happen we'll need more mathematicians to show the rest of us what they're going on about. I find it an exciting time, imagine if we can accelerate a few hundred years into 20, wow, the one problem is capitalism won't work, so sad, we'll figure out something else.
Need? We don't need lots of things, including computers. We did well without them for hundreds of thousands of years.
We want to understand. Quantum physics, mathematics, how stuff works. Ants don't.
That want is not a given, not all of us have that drive. In fact, very few of us have it. So far though, it seems multiple disconnected civilizations learned to keep that trait going instead of suppressing it and focusing only on practical ant-like activities.
This is an unfortunate example to choose because it is entirely confounded by the canonical illustration of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality.
Russell once remarked that all of mathematics would be trivial to a sufficiently intelligent being. It builds conceptual tools for limited minds, that lets them understand far beyond their natural reach.
In a world with ASI, having that capacity is vital.
Life is all about tradeoffs. Mathematics have no tradeoffs. We need more engineers.
Life is all about purpose. Mathematicians are instead concerned with meaning. We need more philosophers.