> 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 greatest accomplishment in my life is my math PhD, earned before AI got useful [..] 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.
The "yet" should be an "so obviously", since you have your greatest accomplishment behind you.
And the article isn't denying anything, it is criticising something.
> We have always been in the business of discovering and understanding math, have we not?
I'd say that we have been in the business of not being alienated from ourselves and our work, and that that is more important than what the work is. Math, just like anything else, won't prevent the heat death of the universe. Supercomputers or wooden sticks, same outcome. So it really doesn't matter how you spend the time as much as as what, e.g. if you're an alienated cog or not. The behemoth machinery itself isn't on a journey anywhere, ultimately, anything that goes up will come down; so none of these fantasies about a point or destination can make up for the here and now.
> 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.
First off, the phrase in the article is "I am suffering a profound spiritual crisis due to these developments.", and you continue that by agreeing to something nobody said and that isn't true.
"I'm hungry :(" "Oh yeah, I also am always on the lookout for new cool bands to check out! We're on the same page here." "WHAT?!"
Doing math may be a spiritual experience, "Math is is spiritual" makes no sense, and math pre-existing is flat out wrong, it ultimately rests on axioms that are simply accepted as given. Even I as a layman know that.
> 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.
You just turned a profound spiritual crisis into math being profound and spiritual, and now you accuse them having a trauma that makes them unable to see something you claimed that isn't even true. And that's the overall pattern I see everywhere, those who object are misrepresented or outright ignored, I never see any facing of what people actually say. So even just based on that it seems deeply anti-human, because one side in this debate isn't even showing up, hiding behind some supposedly inevitable "future" that can just be established as fact without debate.