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.
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 when your work is no longer required
i wonder if this is physically/mathematically impossible: the mere act of living involves processing energy, and therefore doing work :)
And there is a lot of energy to be processed in this Universe before the heat death...
I think by that point humanity will having some pretty fundamental discussions about the nature of work and money.
I think you are blinded by an unprecedented optimism the rest of us simply cannot afford to entertain.
There's an unstated assumption there, which is that you'll have some reason to continue to want your work to be required.
In the (probably unlikely) event that AI use results in a post-scarcity economy in which there's no need to work to survive, a lot of people wouldn't regret sentiments like the ones in question.
On the contrary, it would mean they could work on whatever they please, including potentially standing on the shoulders of giants - the AIs - and seeing even further.
If we actually worked to create a society that work for the benefit of all its members, there would be a lot less reason to worry about developments like these. Much of the worry arises because for various reasons - none of them really good ones - we've ceded control of these developments to the people least suited to manage it.
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The parent poster isn't saying "advancement of knowledge" is some kind of universal goal for humanity at the cost of all else - and I would agree that it shouldn't be. They're suggesting that as an individual studying pure mathematics, the discovery of new truth is a self-consistent good.
Even taking a purely Kantian interpretation that would scale this beyond mathematicians - and that itself is a logical leap! - making a universal law out of "a discovery can be beautiful regardless of whether created by humans or AI" is is much more specific than the straw extrapolation you've created.
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.
They didn't say "advancing human knowledge regardless of the cost". That's a conclusion you jumped to because of your biases.
"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.