> My physicist friend once asked me what the point of doing research was if someone like Terence Tao could have figured out everything in my dissertation in a tenth of the time. I answered by pointing out that Terence Tao didn’t. Terence Tao did not find a small open problem posited by my advisor and publish a bite sized result making incremental progress. He has only so much time and so many other fish to fry.
This reminds me of a post I saw recently, although I can't remember the platform. It said something along the lines of assessing the limits of AI by finding the dumbest questions it can't solve. I think that pairs well as an additional way to view meaning through one's work.
The linked post points out constrained attention as a way to bring meaning to novel work that no one else took on. With AI, this can still be applied to compute.
I'm just wondering if there are a class of problems that humans, at least in the short-term, where humans need to be in the loop to solve more efficiently.
I have just started reading this Gates Notes about reserving some jobs for humans:
https://www.gatesnotes.com/a-turbulent-ai-era-and-critical-c...
> what the point of doing research was if someone like Terence Tao could have figured out everything
A similar question is now being asked: what is the point of doing research, etc. if something like AI can figure out everything?
The question betrays the parochial way in which many people think about knowledge. For them, knowledge is merely an instrument or an effect. It does not occur to them that knowing is a valuable thing in itself, that understanding is valuable and desirable. Yes, some knowledge has merely practical value, but theoretical knowledge is primarily sought for its own sake, because we desire to know reality.
So, even if Terrence Tao, an AI agent, or who or whatever arrives at some bit of new knowledge, it doesn't benefit you as a knowing subject unless you understand it yourself and make it your own.
'All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them'
If knowing was the valuable part, then nobody would need a PhD. You could know more by just reading textbooks. Research mathematicians research, everybody else just learns.
Yes, I think we will continue to have hobbyist learners as we advance AI, but it's going to be a niche, and not a commercially viable one.
Do you think commercial viability will continue to be viable?
Who knows. I hope we figure out how to align the AI so that there's a sustainable economy for the majority of humanity, but I'm not in a position to influence that. I can just do my best to make myself less likely to be crushed.
This is why I still like solving software problems on my own. Because those solutions now live in my head, rather than being spit out by some agent and then disappearing from the Dixie Flatline's memory once the session shuts down. And they deepen and enrich my life, and my life deepens and enriches them.
A brief example: When I was a teenager I had the most profound crush on a girl, as teenagers do. Gorgeous and gregarious, she was often surrounded by a circle of friends and acquaintances, and I noticed the peculiar way in which she would give attention to each in turn. She would exchange a few sentences with them, and then maybe her head would turn a certain way or her eyes would glance elsewhere, and that's how you knew your time was up and she had moved on to the next. To continue the conversation you had to hold onto the state in your head and wait for the next go around.
From her I learned a lot about how multitasking works, and how task schedulers distribute little quanta of time for each task to do some work before moving onto the next, and how this was achieved in cooperative multitasking by mutual communication between the task and the scheduler.
Would a vibe coder be able to have that insight? Maybe, but would they have been able to elaborate it into a working implementation? Perhaps, but I suspect with more time and difficulty than I did, because both the initial insight and the elaboration of detail that let me show that it worked lived in my head, not in some ephemeral AI context.
They might be able to have that insight, but I highly doubt they would be able to have a profound crush on her. Which might matter more.
> My physicist friend once asked me what the point of doing research was if someone like Terence Tao could have figured out everything in my dissertation in a tenth of the time.
That's really mean thing to say
It's actually a really dumb thing to say and OP's response is the best one because it's a microcosm about how the world works. For every Terence Tao there's probably 20 more people cranking out high-quality work that's just a little less inspired. Their work is valuable and important, and asking that question is devaluing the entire endeavor of human knowledge. It's essentially positing that nobody else can contribute anything if it's not on that same level. It's like asking "why bother competing in marathons if you haven't won any?" Well that's not the point.
Very true but you can go even further than that. Advancing knowledge is a community endeavor. Consider where the field of mathematics would be if everyone except Terrence Tao and a handful of other luminaries stopped doing math research. It would die.
Exactly. It's like saying "why would you bother driving your Honda Accord over there, when I could drive my Corvette there in half the time?"
It still gets this person to somewhere they weren't.