> Mathematics produces not only a body of results, but also understanding, clarity, and judgment among the communities of mathematicians who have shaped them, often in the context of their own autonomously guided research. This expert knowledge is essential, both to effectively use mathematics, and to continue to articulate new and significant research questions.
In a word, the job of the mathematics department is not only to produce mathematics, but mathematicians.
Similarly, the output of programming is not only a program, but also a programmer. It is you.
Outsourcing the work deprives you of who you become by writing it.
The foundations of a great our mathematics came from landed gentry who enjoyed the work and were not paid for it. Today we prosper in our technologies and algorithms (not talking about recsystems) because of them. If math should once again become the pusuit of the curious and free but with even greater "skills", that does not seem to be an issue for math, or for those of us who benefit from math. An issue for people as a concept and for mathemeticians, yes. But that's a separate topic, like the anguish of not getting into the Premier league.
>>Similarly, the output of programming is not only a program, but also a programmer. It is you.
This can be said about pretty much any job on earth.
By that definition nothing should ever be automated.
Everything thinks they are special, actually no one is. You become special by being rare. Find something that can be done by no one or only a scant few.
> This can be said about pretty much any job on earth.
That isn't really true. After push button elevators with floor-logic relays eliminated the need for "elevator operator" to be a job, nobody needed to be an elevator operator anymore. The equipment could do 100% of the job and if the equipment was out of order then you call a repair technician or install a new elevator rather than needing to find an elevator operator to pull out of retirement, since knowing how to repair or install elevators was never part of their job to begin with.
The trouble with AI-generated code is that it can't do 100% of the job, so you still need a programmer to do the parts that it can't, but then you need the programmer to understand how to do the parts that it can't, which in turn requires them to also understand how to do the parts that it can.
>By that definition nothing should ever be automated.
Many things shouldn't. Understanding is one of them.
> Everything thinks they are special, actually no one is.
That sounds very nice, but isn't true. Most of the people I know, myself included, don't consider themselves special broadly. They're special in their own community, but not globally.
Yes, but we've already painted ourselves into a corner by almost a century of moving all that work onto computers.
Why would we want to sever this last thread of human control? What is there to gain from it? I don't think I have to convince anyone how much there is to lose.
The situation being created with an overdependence on AI is looking much more like the burning of Alexandria, and less like a utopian dream or even the oft-warned-about authoritarian hellscape. The AI hype is over and revealed to be delusional and politically motivated.
>>Why would we want to sever this last thread of human control?
Trust me a fair bit of boomers and the generation before lost jobs to computer automation in the 1990s through the 2000s. And they used pretty much the same justification, every bit of work, take for example designing something like a machine spare that was earlier done through painstaking process of bringing the thing to life from the meticulous work on the drafting board till machining was now in the domain of computers.
In India alone, banking jobs were considered those commanding tremendous prestige and income potential, got automated through computers. Tax consultants, accountants, postal services etc etc. The list is endless.
AI is some what like that for us in this generation.
For many of those automations, we're worse off for them.
Like not being able to get some actual human when you call support, and talking to some fucking automatic system.
This includes many of the " 1990s through the 2000s" ones, and earlier ones too. Sometimes what was lost was an added layer of attention and quality that was previously required, but it was sacrificed away for efficiency.
That really depends on who is the one that benefits from automation. Companies automate support systems in order to keep their support staff small, because apparently for many of them it is more profitable to frustrate their customers with crappy support than to pay more support staff to do a better job.
In addition to your last paragraph: lots of things that we used to do the less efficient way had side-benefits that were not immediately obvious, probably because they compounded over time. Now that we're not doing them anymore, we notice all kinds of widespread societal problems (in particular among young people) that come up that were never there before.
> Outsourcing the work deprives you of who you become by writing it.
Just because AI can do something that resembles work should not mean outsourcing work to it. Mathematicians should not outsource their work to AI just like programmers should not outsource programming to AI.
Humans working with AIs in a tight loop means intellectual work becomes more high-level and creative, but a human should always own the work, validate it and stake their reputation to it. Simply ban any humans who produce low quality work using AI.
I don't think that is possible. Humans have always taken the path of least resistance, especially when it comes to work/school.
The idea that we just "trust everyone to carefully check and learn from AI output" as our barrier to human skillsets eroding is never going to work.
There is an Anthropic engineering post on HM front page that addresses this exact issue:
"... supervise the agent’s behavior via a human-in-the-loop. Claude Code previously protected against agents taking unintended actions by asking users for permission at each turn. Theoretically that works, but we’ve found the approach to be fallible. Our telemetry showed users approved roughly 93% of permission prompts. The more approvals a user sees, the less attention they pay to each, becoming over time much less diligent in their supervision. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance
Yeah I'm seeing this with the attitude towards AI. Especially as the economic benefits increase, we will justify increasingly reckless approaches. (Probably until some major catastrophe. That seems to be how these things go.)
While it is human nature to minimize energy expended on doing things, progress has always come from the minority who prioritize disciplined thinking and action.
While minimizing energy spent worked well in historic periods where survival was hard, in this era of abundance and a complex, interconnected and fragile civilization, the same instinct becomes harmful.
> Mathematicians should not outsource their work to AI just like programmers should not outsource programming to AI.
There is a huge difference between the two. Mathematicians work on discovering fundamental truths of the universe that go into the corpus of human knowledge forever. Programmers create utilities.
I know a PHD in math that claims math is invented by ourselves and not any universal true. So well, depends who you ask. Also some of these programming utilities may outlive some math proof. Time will tell
Of course they are universal truths. We may have made up the rules/abstractions/symbols to represent the underlying but a proof will hold in any part of the universe. Infact, math will hold in any universe. You could change every fundamental physical property of the universe and those proofs will still hold.
Those are wild claims that you can't possibly prove. They are typically assumed to be the case to the extent that we even think about them but in the end are largely unanswerable philosophical questions.
It’s not a claim, it’s a pretty self apparent fact. To wrap your head around this, as the simplest example 2+2=4 doesn’t change anywhere or under any different physical law. It’s as universal as you can get. There’s nothing philosophical about this.
It is a claim, and you can't test it. If physical laws varied between galaxies you wouldn't know unless we were able to measure it. So the current bound on physical phenomena is whatever the resolution of our observational data is, coupled with our models that match it.
How are you going to get observational data for a different universe? Does such a thing even exist? What is its nature? You're operating well outside the bounds of human knowledge.
What you are actually saying there is that you can't imagine 2+2 being anything other than 4. That's perfectly reasonable but it's not the same thing.
There is no circumstance where 2+2 does not equal 4. It is a literal fact.
At the most fundamental level, you can only have a discreet or a non-discreet universe. If it’s discreet, there are countable things and 2+2 = 4 is true. In a non-discreet universe there are no countable things, but the universe itself is countable. If the universe were non-discreet and infinite, you could still count the infinities so it’s still true.
You are making a number of assumptions there seemingly without realizing it even after I explicitly called it out. I'm not sure what to say other than to suggest that there's an entire field, analytic philosophy, concerned with such matters.
You literally can't prove that you aren't a brain in a vat so I have no idea how you expect to make sweeping claims about the fundamental nature of reality. It is certainly convenient and practical to take certain basic assumptions as fact in order to go about higher level tasks but that does not make them so.
Sure, technically you are correct, i cant prove that im not a schizophrenic hallucinating everything including 2+2=4 and including this discussion. But starting from a reasonable point of beliefs that we accept it is fair to say 2+2=4 will just hold universally when counting discrete things.
Even if you were a brain in a vat this would be true. Even if the simulation disallowed the number four or groups of four it would still be true. How are you not getting this? What does philosophy have to do with anything. Pretty much everything in this universe is debatable and can be questioned, except this. Anyways I’m dropping out of this. You don’t come back with anything except a sense of wonder and a wide eyed gaze.
Noticeably you still have yet to defend any of these wild claims you're making. You've now resorted to personal attacks rather than engage with what I wrote.
If you are so certain of your claim then why are you seemingly incapable of defending it using logic and reason?
> What does philosophy have to do with anything.
If you took the time to look up the field of analytic philosophy to see what it's about, particularly with regards to metaphysics, that would presumably answer your question. There are literally treatise on the underlying nature of numbers and mathematical concepts (among other things) and you will find that there are multiple competing views on the matter.
When someone says "hey it seems like you're unaware of thing" and you think "WTF even is that" it is at that point generally a good idea to think to yourself "hey maybe there's something important that I don't know here" and then at least perform a topical check of the thing.
> 2+2=4 doesn’t change anywhere or under any different physical law.
How about python3:
or if you insist:It only means that you have no imagination.
I'd also prefer journalists not outsource their writing to AI and doctors not outsource their diagnosis to AI etc etc
I want doctors to outsource their diagnosis to AI if and only if the AI’s accuracy of diagnosis has surpassed that of the doctor.
While you are right in a way, I think you miss the point. In the past "computer" was a job description and mechanical power came from serfs. They surely developed skills we are lacking today but I'd argue that overall the world is a better place with digital computers and electrical motors. It frees up these people to do something else, something of higher value.
Sure, the world is a better place with fewer serfs in it, but what exactly is of "higher value" than being a research mathematician? It's already a profession that consists essentially of exercising our highest and most distinctly human capacities: creativity, abstract reasoning, and passing the results of those on through a distinctive language and culture. I don't think the comparison with serfs is useful.
I'm sure most research mathematicians would like more freedom from some of the drudgery of their work (grading, admin, etc.), just like the rest of us. But we should be aiming for a world that allows more people to become mathematicians, not fewer.
Sure, recreational mathematicians. Just like people that like to ride horses for fun.
Constant recreation may be the ultimate purpose of humanity.
This but unironically
Put another way, wage slavery is not the ultimate purpose of humanity.
> But we should be aiming for a world that allows more people to become mathematicians, not fewer.
Yeah. UBI. We'll probably be seeing that in the next 15 years.
(In Europe, at least. In America the culture may not be able to stomach it, and I see even odds of a massive fake jobs program instead.)
We argued that AI would free us to explore the arts. Instead it first came for written language and images. So what's left when it can write all the programs, drive all the cars, and AI sensors on farms can monitor and distribute nutrients. I remember watching TED Talks about how AI weapons need to be carefully studied, and instead we see them autonomously picking targets. I'm not seeing any higher values, instead I'm seeing how we're on a path to assured destruction.
I see that point of view but there's another that I've recently been thinking about.
Many of the fields that were traditionally considered for "smart" people (STEM etc.) are the ones that are being really hammered by AI. Whereas, things which people considered lightweight often involving social relationships and interpersonal skills are still beyond the scope of AI (much of it even theoretically beyond the scope although perhaps robots might have an effect there).
There used to be a sysad T-shirt from the BOFH days "Go away or I'll replace you with a very small shell script" which pushed the idea that whatever could be replaced by a computer was something trivial. Now we find that the things which we thought were only for "smart people" are the very things being replaced by computer programs which is telling. Perhaps what we considered tough and smart really wasn't.
This is actually a very old AI insight, acknowledged at least as early as the 80s, let me see if I can find the quote.
Found it:
> Rodney Brooks explains that, according to early AI research, intelligence was "best characterized as the things that highly educated male scientists found challenging", such as chess, symbolic integration, proving mathematical theorems and solving complicated word algebra problems. "The things that children of four or five years could do effortlessly, such as visually distinguishing between a coffee cup and a chair, or walking around on two legs, or finding their way from their bedroom to the living room were not thought of as activities requiring intelligence. Nor were any aesthetic judgments included in the repertoire of intelligence-based skills.
Brooks is weirdly sexist, but it's unsurprising that (higher) "intelligence" should mean things that are hard, not things that are easy.
Moravec's paradox:
> "it is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec's_paradox
But the hard things are things a child can do.
The things like proving complicated theorems are things that are acquired by education within a lifetime, and that's why they're easy for AI.
The things a child can do are acquired through millions of years of evolution. While they don't require much explicit education, that doesn't mean they're easier.
Fair enough but even thing acquired within a lifetime have a hierarchy. Many societies, for example, assume that the kids who are good in Math are smart but the ones who write well or are exemplary in "co-curricular" subjects simply aren't that bright.
As an example, the kid who can solve Math problems has less of an edge over AI than the kid who automatically becomes the captain of the neighbourhood football team but older human beings often assume that the former is smarter.
I'm a guy and stereotypes exist for a reason.
Also, who do you think were the vast majority of AI researcher in the 50s, 60s, 70s?
> I'm a guy and stereotypes exist for a reason.
What reason is that?
A neural network is a machine for detecting patterns in data.
A plunger is a tool for dislodging turds and detritus in a toilet
I've always found that weird, do people really use plungers for that?
The toilet brush is a much better tool for unclogging the average toilet.
The plunger is actually meant to unclog sinks as far as I can tell, since it can attach much better to the sink and through its action can create pressure to unclog the much smaller sink drain pipe.
If the clog involves toilet paper, I'd rather not put a brush in that. Here's how I use a plunger effectively: Submerge it and then angle it to swap out some air for liquid, so you have more mass to push into the pipe. Tip it back upright, then slowly push down, relax and let the bell fill back up with water, and repeat, finding a resonant frequency where the pushed water doesn't just jet out the sides (due to imperfect seal) but because there's a pressure-wave action the clog gets moved in and out repeatedly until it breaks down enough for water to scoot by. Then one more flush to clean the plunger.
> Brooks is weirdly sexist, but it's unsurprising that (higher) "intelligence" should mean things that are hard, not things that are easy.
Way to miss the mark (and also shift the discussion to woke conversation points on a comment from 4+ decades ago).
The point of his entire comment is that it seems like the "hard things" (aka abstract science) will be a lot harder for AI than "easy things" (a 5 year old or a dog understanding their environment in great detail, from depth perception to smells, sounds, etc, etc).
Your comment looks like it was written by exactly the kind of man Brooks was mocking.
Thanks. Is this quote from a book?
https://archive.org/details/robotfutureoffle0000broo/mode/2u...
AI has autism. To emulate the normie is an impossible task.
Picking vegetables is still really tough for robots.
Pick and place robots, or humanoid robots that can fold laundry, are still a lot tougher than automating knowledge workers and a lot more expensive to the point it's questionable if they're worth it.
We may not be on a path to assured destruction, we may be on a path to becoming livestock.
When I was a child, I lived in a neighborhood. Every week a garbage truck picked up the house hold trash.
5 guys were on that truck. 1 driver and 4 guys that actually lifted up various shaped trash cans and dumped them into the truck.
Today I live in an apartment complex. 100 families take their trash to the compactor. 1 guy in a garbage truck comes once a week to collect the compacted refuse.
I wonder what happened to the other 4 guys. 80% of the garbage collecting labor… freed up to do something of higher value.
Maybe they cured cancer.
The cancer of p50 users having comfy housing, 2 cars and a life. Almost all of the efficiency gains move to the 1%.
They were already available to do something of higher value. Automation frees them up to do something of lower value.
I wonder too, could you maybe actually check your theory?
My sarcasm wasn’t thick enough.
L
On the contrary, only your sarcasm was thick, not the substance behind it. Kind of what I'm yapping about if you'd be kind enough to notice.
What you propose makes fine rhetorical sense, and I can assure you it did reach me, it's just that a (very) cursory search yielded me no significant employment rate changes or drastic layoffs in the related sector over the decades. Instead, it suggested that people have been reshuffled to do waste sorting and other related activities rather, and that the field actually grew, directly contradicting your smug, sarcasm-laden, willfully demagogue framing. Traits that are not exactly the hallmark of epistemic rigor to begin with, nor do they further it, even if the given narrative did hold up.
It's so easy to be asinine and make up a story, especially when one feels morally justified in doing so, and considers the base facts & analogy to be "obviously correct". I don't think that setting people up for failure by feeding them correct sounding lies - or sending related discourse into a nosedive in quality just to get in some cheap zingers - would help the cause a whole lot though. Do you?
Put differently, it helps if the example provided actually holds up as an example for the topic discussed. Especially if that example is as dramatic as 80% of a given job disappearing, and the people involved just plain losing their livelihood supposedly.
> In the past "computer" was a job description and mechanical power came from serfs.
Serfs, all right, but in what world do you live where "computers", people who did manual computing (i.e. mechanical additions/multiplications/... with very large numbers) are the same as actual research mathematicians, who are basically pure logicians?
The only perspective where it makes sense to root for mathematicians to go away is if you're a misandrist that thinks humanity should be replaced by robots (for reasons...). Or isn't logic something that's a defining human trait, and one of the main reasons we became the dominant species on the planet?
I don't think that "root[ing] for mathematicians to go away" is the problem. The problem (if there is one) is that the process by which that occurs is economically determined. No amount of complaining will stop AI from being useful in mathematics or erase the incentives to make it better. It's automatic process, like photography sidelining painting or shoe factories sidelining cobblers. We go through this with every technological advance and the outcomes are pretty much determined. No cheerleaders are needed.
Nothing in history is inevitable.