Why would it excite you, rather than terrifying you? The better LLMs get at math, the closer the expertise you spent your whole life building is to being worthless.
Along with all the rest of what humans find meaningful and fulfilling.
Why would it excite you, rather than terrifying you? The better LLMs get at math, the closer the expertise you spent your whole life building is to being worthless.
Along with all the rest of what humans find meaningful and fulfilling.
Because for many people who pursue these fundamental truths, the reward is not necessarily personal fame, fortune, or even personal understanding. Advancing humanity's total knowledge (even if that knowledge is by proxy through AI) is reward enough.
I think when your work is no longer required, you will probably come to regret this sentiment, not that it matters.
I think by that point humanity will having some pretty fundamental discussions about the nature of work and money.
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That’s definitely not your actual principle. I can conjure several reductios that demonstrate various scenarios you’d prefer to not happen that involve a massive “advancement of knowledge”.
It’s completely trivial. 20% more knowledge except an orphan is killed per 0.001%.
Let’s try to think posts through.
Have you considered that utilitarians actually exist?
If 20% more medical knowledge would save more lives long term, there are actually people, probably some browsing this website right now, maybe the person you're responding to, that actually think killing people up to the expected number of lives saved is justified.
I would personally call that evil, but it is thought through.
You can make literally any position sound awful by saying that orphans will be killed as a result. Let's try to think posts through.
At least from my perspective, these sorts of tools could have the possibility of allowing us to reach post-scarcity (I guess a skynet future is another possible outcome, as is just grimdark industrial hell). If we reach that point, then anybody could (in principle- in reality utopias don't exist) pursue anything they wanted.
This is just an application of the philosophy "automate yourself out of a job every 6 months"- I've been doing that for a long time, and the outcome is generally a more interesting job.
I spent years grinding to learn mathematics because it was the language I needed to solve problems that excite me. If the tools I need to do so change, I can change too. Research training is not so rigid that it can only applied to the single set of skills I developed it in the context of. I can learn this too.
Moreover, truth be told, I don't really see myself doing any less math and requiring less from my skills. At least from the moment I've begun incorporating LLMs into my research workflow to now, the demand I've had from my own skills has only grown. At least in an era prior to Lean formalization.
Mathematics is a bridge to what Neoplatonists call the intelligible world. Currently, mathematicians navigate that world on foot. It's exciting to see that soon we will have cars and trains in that world so we no longer have to walk everywhere painstakingly on foot.
If one only found meaning in life through external factors like work (no matter how "intellectually rewarding") then it seems like a life destined for eventual disappointment.
Does it terrify you to look at children?
Not so many years from now, some of them will surpass you. A few years after that all (that survive to that point) will surpass you.
Does that terrify you just as much?
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What's happening is the verbal/linguistic equivalent of the invention of calculus. No intellectual field will ever be the same again. Who wouldn't find that exciting, and want to experience it?
People who enjoy thinking. Ya know, the "intellectual" part.
Why would having more thinking companions stop you from thinking? Knowledge compounds.
This is the beginning of thinking, not the end...
The so called "progressives" prove that they were the same ones crying after the printing press, automobile, calculator, washing machine, etc
You made up a group in the past and you made up things they say and then draw the inference that a different group in the present is somehow morally disadvantaged by obvious inference.
Perhaps your name-calling is not actually as logically grounded as you think. It definitely seems to depend on unfounded leaps.
I'm not sure I grasp the analogy to the invention of calculus. Calculus helped us solve new and interesting math/physics problems. Repeated for emphasis: helped *us* solve.
This technology is solving interesting math/physics problems for us, which is completely different.