Every single knowledge worker is going to face this kind of crisis. It will be worse for people who cared deeply about their craft, but the crisis will have the same shape. The way through is to change the way you relate to your work, and to appreciate the fact that you can now produce far more output.
Mathematicians should realize: instead of spending decades on individual theorems, you can now create whole new subfields of mathematics. Of course, you won't be doing the creation directly, in the way the mathematicians of old did; that's just not the name of the game anymore. But you will still be directing the research and involved in the creation.
> Every single knowledge worker is going to face this kind of crisis. It will be worse for people who cared deeply about their craft, but the crisis will have the same shape.
Normally I'm very sympathetic to the plights of those socially affected by AI, and rarely pass up the opportunity to clown on institutional actors papering over these plights with glib cliches. But in this case, I really feel like this is a case of monkey-brain overriding mathematician-brain.
The greatest accomplishment in my life is my math PhD, earned before AI got useful. I do math-heavy work for my day job, and I care deeply about every craft I practice, to the point that I am almost certainly on the unhealthier end of the spectrum of perfectionism. Yet I both acknowledge rather than deny the impending death of mathematics as we have engaged it for the last couple centuries, and am far more excited than aghast.
I would have to write a whole essay in order to communicate this in a way that is appropriately sensitive, but in a nutshell: We have always been in the business of discovering and understanding math, have we not? Are we going to call it a tragedy rather than a blessing now that the floodgates on both are bursting, just because it makes us feel less special, unique, valuable? It's such a self-serving aesthetic on the beauty of math to me. The author claims there is something profound and spiritual about math, and I agree; it exists prior to and above all of us, human or AI. Whatever way we can tap that beauty is incredible, full stop. This is what I believe.
From the article:
> These developments have triggered some deranged thoughts in me. I have wondered if it is the express goal of these companies to make me kill myself. Am I alone in this paranoia?
The severity of this line caught me off guard. I think the author is genuinely having an emotional-social upheaval, and I feel terrible for them, but at this moment they may be having a hard time separating their trauma from their intellectual aesthetic for what math is all about.
The creation is the actually enjoyable part.
Taking a helicopter to the top of Everest is not as rewarding as climbing the mountain.
You are completely discrediting the joy humans derive from actually -doing- the work, and not just, telling someone else to do the work.
There is a reason artists hate AI, its because they enjoy the actual act of painting, like mathematicians enjoy the act of proving theorems and programmers enjoy the act of typing lines of text into a file on their computer.
We are intentionally deleting all of the enjoyable high agency jobs and replacing them with "model babysitting".
you can’t climb to the moon, you need rockets for that. In the hands of great researchers, AI will accelerate and propel human knowledge far beyond what we could achieve with pencil and paper alone.
> In the hands of great researchers, AI will accelerate and propel human knowledge far beyond what we could achieve with pencil and paper alone.
Who needs researchers when you have great AI.
Soon we will all be Wall-E fat people with AI that's there to do anything we can be bothered to think of.
> you can’t climb to the moon, you need rockets for that.
We don't live for rockets or the moon, but for ourselves. Anywhere we can go to only at the price of our despair we have no business going to.
True, but many of us have grown identifying ourselves with the kind of work we do, the discoveries that follow from our hard work. Even in the case of rockets, we designed the rockets! Here, I've to let the oracle take care of things while I'm robbed of that delight of discovery.
I think you replied to the wrong comment.
Jobs are not generally meant to be enjoyable (although that is a benefit if so), they are meant to get work done. It's funny seeing office workers here on HN have this sort of opinion and contrasting that with blue collar workers, ask a miner or house builder how fun their job is.
> There is a reason artists hate AI, its because they enjoy the actual act of painting
"AI" never stopped a painter painting.
Just selling.
Some painters can't paint if they can't sell.
> Taking a helicopter to the top of Everest is not as rewarding as climbing the mountain.
If you’re on the top of mt. Everest and you need medicine, would you care if it reached you via helicopter or via some guy climbing while having a lot of fun?
This has nothing to do with the content of my comment.
> But you will still be directing the research and involved in the creation.
Somehow I doubt it.
Maybe there won't be a need for you to be involved at all.
Maybe the AI will perform even better if you're not there to slow it down.
Maybe there will be people involved, but not as many.
Maybe there will be so many people involved that their salaries will be depressed to the point they can't afford to do it anymore, and only the rich will know such joys.
We live in interesting times. This is the age of anomie. Anything could happen. There is no set path to success anymore. The world only gets more and more illegible with every day that passes.
I don't understand. Can't you just ask LLMs to do the same and collaborate with other LLMs?