There's never been a better time to go into math (by: 3blue1brown) [video]

Soon enough instead of Millennium Prize Problems we will have a list of problem AI has not been able to solve, with even bigger reputational reward for humans

I'm not here for the money, I'm here for the love of the game.

Changing the game, even if the money increased (it won't) makes the industry worse in my eyes.

Well, this person was discussing their own feelings. You're accusing them of... projecting their own feelings on themselves? This is a very strange comment.

Underneath a lot of this is just an identity crisis, as a large portion of white-collar workers are facing the harsh reality that who they are was ultimately defined by what they do between 9-6pm.

Citation needed...

Sounds like you are bitter you failed to achieve said mastery, and now are glad that those who did might be also getting pushed aside. If you think that success only depends on initial external factors and personal effort is something to be frowned upon and by striving for mastery you strain the society or drag others down with your lifestyle... man I don't know what to say to you...

If you think AI as currently lead by it's owners will equalize the field for the unfortunate ones... Well you might be right in some sense, but it might not be the way you envision it.

Computers, phones, cars - all of this fits this idea.

I'm not an introvert and have worked under plenty of bad managers, I don't want to be a manager and wouldn't be a good one - I make stuff with code.

That argument was not made.

Completely incidentally, reasoning and reading skills are a use-it-or-lose-it deal.

Like I see a hole in a firmware and I want to dump the firmware, but then I start hitting the bland stuff like what is the ABI for this hole, how should you compose payload without watchdog kicking me out. Oh this datasheet is garbage. This reference manual makes no sense. Ok that's because it is for a same processor, different lockstep. Why am I fighting with stack on this processor? When you should use star and ampersand for manipulation of pointers in C? Oh writing a linker script a little frustrating horror. No ld we don't have RO data, only code, stop inserting it. Now let's strip it and I have payload.

This would take me days to get through while with AI I can make dozens of iterations in matter of one day.

Can we not just agree that, as with everything else, the type of person who falls into this career also falls on a spectrum.

I don't see it as mutually exclusive that both type of engineers exist and both are equally deserving of their takes on the situation.

I have trouble imagining you misread the comment you were replying to, that badly, accidentally.

Coding since 12, pretty introverted as a teenager and went the usual compsci route. Spent a lot of my free time hacking on OSS projects.

Then got into engineering management, similar to you I’d o enjoy mentoring and the more strategic aspects of the role.

But I dislike using AI for coding, it really ruined the fun for me. That fun being entirely eroded made it easier to commit to the management path (I did the IC-Management pendulum for some years).

No, introverts write, design, prove and generously release the open source software that talkers like you exploit.

I bet you have never written anything substantial, much less open sourced it and stuff your LinkedIn with that fake resume.

What do you think why guilds were created? Most of the professions are about doing something not everybody can do. That’s not the way to depression that’s human nature. Find something where you are good at and get paid for it.

I think you misinterpreted the writer's intention. Adding to the ever expanding human knowledge is teaching the whole humanity including people that aren't born yet.

Do elaborate. I feel I'm getting this idea, but maybe not the same way you meant it...

But... it did? It's not like there are lot of horse carriages out there or, for a more recent example, plenty of Cobol developers. Or for a closer example, there used to be plenty of shoemakers when I was young and yet now I know of exactly one.

> The process still exists as-is in its prior form, like the woodcarvers of yesteryear. Nothing that you desire (the process/journey) has been lost. It still exists.

At the risk of stating the obvious: just because I can be a woodcarver as a hobby it doesn't mean it's the same as making a living out of woodcarving because doing something I consider enjoyable for a living is not the same as doing it exclusively as a hobby. If I fire a Cobol programmer knowing full well they'll have to work at their local supermarket until retirement, telling them "you can still program in your free time" will not bring them comfort.

Agree, I don't buy the notion that mathematics is a craft, it's a pursuit of knowledge. A better analogy might be cartography where people spent a lot of effort mapping unknown regions and now we can take pictures from space. This is both faster and probably more accurate and there are basically no unknown regions left so there's less motivation to do it anymore.

That said, there's nothing stopping anybody from mapping out an area today if they get a kick out of it. The gripe with mathematics is less about the loss of a craft and more about a superior solution replacing the old approach as the best option; the old approach very much still exists though.

I'm confused. Your comment's shitty tone implies you're overwhelmingly in favor of LLMs. That's copy-pasting not just on steroids, but on crack cocaine. So what point are you trying to make?

Also you should bear in mind, adaptation is a young man's game. Retraining is possible, but companies typically don't hire trainees in their 40s/50s, so your willingness may not be the deciding factor. My dad ended up as a postal worker when he left his career as a humanities academic at 55, no highly skilled jobs would take him (he did prefer it though haha).

I'll leave looking up the authorship of the quote as an exercise for your LLM-fu.

Mathematics is a fundamentally cooperative match vs reality. Many mathematicians, AFAICT, saw their key skill in manipulating a wide range of highly abstract notions. Now machines just got too good at this skill, and they can work 24/7. This may feel terrifying for some. Others would bet that machines coöperating with humans will be more successful than pure machines, so they feel empowered. What's beyond doubt is that the entire field is being shaken.

We can and should have it as something that people do in the future because we have the resources for everyone to do so.

They haven't had influence over their future since before they were born.

But I think a more likely scenario is that we don't solve "general intelligence" and AIs remain these incredibly capable "tools" that can solve navier stokes but completely lack sense in other situations.

In such a scenario there is considerably more room for human creativity.

Well, this was definitely not written by AI.

> ... it's like if we had an explaination [sic] of ...

I hear that running a spell-checker is no longer a sin.

Attempting to translate the proof is valuable, but we have to be realistic about what is and isn't possible.

- In Blindsight [1] the main character is a "synthesist", part of his job is to figure out what much more intelligent transhuman or artificial intelligence is up to and translate it to normal people.

- In Children of Time [2] the character is a "classicist", he studies ancient technology, which is far more advanced than the technology humans have in his era thanks to a technological collapse.

Ted Chiang's story came first, but these are still over a decade (or two) old.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel)

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Time_(novel)

Blindsight also has augmented humans whose reasoning is beyond baseline human understanding and there are dedicated people that are there to bridge the communication.

In fact, it's an interesting question: Would humans distilling ideas from AI-generated proofs help AI prove more theorems, or would AI not care at all, with no human contribution being useful in advancing its mathematical capabilities?

It exists in the same sense that every story exists whether or not it's been written because the Library of Babel contains it.

If only pure math were a source of riches, that might work out well for them.

I have a book on mathematical cranks where that seems to be the common delusion, that if only you solve some open problems then fame and fortune must surely follow.

Computer science has been a subset of math since the field was established decades before the first vacuum tube or transistor based machine was invented

"Computer" was coined to describe humans who did math all day

What we been doing the last few decades is fundamentally just algebra relative to values in RAM; LLMs only work because of math: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.10668

def arbitraryFunctionName() { some math to achieve a physical state in memory } ...where arbitrary function name is some biz logic or use case

We're just pushing those arbitrary semantics from the code to the presentation layer; just need to ship a kernel that handles geometry transforms to draw to screen what looks like a text editor and a video game and label it via the GUI

Text systems are just outdated GUI that we had to start with due to hardware limitations back in the day.

I still enjoy writing code by hand, but it's incredibly lonely here. No one at work talks about code details anymore. I'm basically by myself now.

I'm a bit of a holdout, but I can tell you that what used to be lively discussions about architecture are now just "ask Claude" responses. No one else wants to think through their code anymore.

There is value in doing things no one else likes to do. But only if this path delivers results in the long term. It's not certain that my path does that but if this field is truly collapsing I'd rather give it a shot with my brain intact rather than doing nothing.

AI isn't like any other historical tool or technology. Its qualitatively different. Flint axes or waterwheels or a plasma torches dont just suddenly appear everywhere, and then start getting rapidly (and likely recursively) better at the thing they do. While also mimicking innate human characteristics like complex language.

Its the rate of change.

I feel like the power loom is a better comparison. It put hand weavers out of business over a short timespan, while revolutionizing how clothing is produced. It certainly empowered a lot of jobs surrounding clothing, until clothing was completely commoditization and is now a lot less well designed simply as a function of clothing as a category being a much cheaper product now

The fear of AI is one that does (and already has, in many cases) in fact change your day-to-day. And given how the increasing economic disparity is going, it will not be one that changes the day to day for most people for the better. No one is positive because the current societal rate of change for most people is negative.

AI is a catalyst and will only accelerate what is already happening (since it fundamentally does not create nor open up new forms of labor). So it's clear why people who feel their day-to-day will get worse are not optimistic.

I don't know how that isn't obvious to all the "AI is just a tool" people.

New inventions eventually benefiting the society has always been accompanied by new jobs being created on top of those inventions, a culture of trust built upon mastering those inventions and a market being formulated around demand and supply cycle for those inventions. It is different now[1], because we neither see incentives being created for humans to operate/manage AI-led jobs (because utilizing such a thing is far more unfavorable than outsourcing due to economic incentives, duh) nor a foreseeable market stability for ever such thing to occur.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Technofeudalism-Killed-Capitalism-Yan...

When the atomic bomb was invented they didn’t hand one for free to everyone, and no one had access to sending their thoughts to everyone else in world.

> Looked what happened when crane was invented

That is a terrible comparison with no useful parallels. You can’t in god faith suggest something is going to have a desired effect because something completely unrelated did too. You could just as well have compared it to asbestos.

Many people pursue careers based on the intersection between their interests and what society considers valuable. Being upset when what they chose to spend their lives doing either loses value or changes so much it becomes a wholey different job is understandable, and calling it "rent seeking" is very unfair, in my view.

Mathematicians are ecstatic and delighted when major problems are solved by other mathematicians. If you've followed the discussions and read the reactions, you'd know why mathematicians feel differently in this case and why more than a few are upset and feel that they've lost the thing that gave them meaning and joy.

And to put it very simply, I don't want mathematicians to exist just because I want solutions to problems. I want mathematicians to exist because I want to live in a world that has mathematicians, philosophers, writers, painters, thinkers, etc. That is a better world that makes people better.

OpenAI's proofs do not make people better. They do not enrich our lives. And OpenAI was able to produce these proofs because countless generations of human beings sowed the fields of mathematics through countless hours of labor. OpenAI is clear-cutting and sowing them with salt. Nobody should he ecstatic. Everybody should be horrified and outraged.

This is not quite like that but the feeling I get from it is much the same. Mathematicians are first and foremost busy with understanding math, not with 'solving' math though they are solving individual problems within the domain of math. The journey towards that understanding requires specialization and often lots of studying.

To quote Douglas Adams: "If 'metal nose' here is going to give you God's phone number then the philosophical question of whether there is a God becomes meaningless."

It is the journey and the questions that matter as much or more than the answer does.

And with math being a branch of natural philosophy I can see why they would be a tad upset at this shortcut because it strips the collective efforts of a large number of people of their prestige and feeling of time well spent. Imagine your life's work reduced to a short string of bits, and worse, that short string of bits was created by a machine that effectively is still a toddler.

Let's just say that The math problem that got solved, I was working on it for many years but some company people used my knowledge my prompts and "solved" it without giving me any credits or money. Firstly they plagiarised the books and research papers and then they plagiarised the prompts by the mathematicians. Yes AI can make art and has caused many artists finding work difficult but AI art is always souless and worthless, same thing will be for math it will become souless and worthless because when humans who are experts in their fields invest their ingenuity then art becomes alive but if ordinary people like me will just prompt into the machine then souless things will come out that will be very worthless and disposable.

In fact you should be estatic that in a paralell universe all math problems have been solved, so there's no reason to pursue math at all (we did it reddit!).

When your job is automated and you're living in the streets, just remember that you should be estatic that the job is finally being done more efficiently by a robot. Like, we did it. We finally did the job right. The job was never about wealth distribution, self actualization, dignity or any of that crap it was always about getting some stupid task accomplished for an industrial system that exists for... what exactly? What is the end goal of all of this? Who does the system serve in an economy of no consumers? What is the point of solving niche mathematical problems if no living person can comprehend the solution?

That said, I think what has mathematicians… upset is probably two things:

1. These are hard problems. Hard enough that solving one could take decades of work. And there’s tons of collaboration involved. Pivoting to another - and making progress - isn’t exactly something you wake up tomorrow and start doing.

2. I think motivations matter to some. And the AI companies doing this aren’t doing it for the betterment of math or even society. They are in an arms race to prove their product is superior and any careers that are damaged collaterally be dammed.

Pure maths is much closer to philosophy or art than practical problem solving. Yes, we're extremely lucky that mathematics also happens to be a fantastic formalism for solving practical and scientific problems, by the practical problems are not remotely the subject matter of pure math. Of course, many mathematicians did advance theory in order to solve specific practical problems, but the pursuit of theory for theory's sake is also an important human activity.

Historically, this freedom from practicality has been important. It allows mathematicians to explore purely theoretical issues that have no practical bearing today but that might well have relevance in the future. We don't know. Carving out dedicated resources in society for that activity, though, has proven very beneficial for other sciences.

You have no computer, you have no neural nets, you have no AI, without at least some results from pure maths. Maybe keep that in mind before you crap on mathematics for its lack of immediate practicality. Not all good things in life arise as solutions to concrete and immediate material problems.

Shame on them for such weaknesses as:

* Desire to make memorable achievements in their field

* Missing the social elements of sharing and discussing problems with their colleagues

* Sense of self worth linked to ability to make a unique contribution to society

* Fear of losing status and income in a ruthlessly competitive economic system

* Anxiety over debts already accrued during years of studying

* Regret over choice of career path and roads not taken

Astra would never.

Personally, I enjoy the process of solving problems. I do not enjoy wrangling unpredictable AI agents.

Mathematicians usually care nothing about application of their work. Working on interesting problems is their only motivation. Practical applications are almost always happy accidents.

This goes back to the hope that robots would do the laundry and the dishes and the cleaning up so we could write and play music, create art, and solve mathematical problems.

Instead the AIs are doing all of that leaving humans with only the dishes and the laundry and the cleaning up.

Understand that there’s more than one way to prove something, that there’s an art to making something understandable, and that humans tend to take the most understandable paths (to humans.)

Models often don’t do that. But in solving, or claiming to solve, important problems, they nevertheless remove a lot of the excitement and incentive towards working towards a solution humans would naturally find. Plus, a lot of these problems really don’t have any critical applications at the moment. They’re done for the love of the game.

Does that bother you? That your tax dollars pay people who do math out of curiosity?

I think there is a little too much pessimism of the "math is dead" sort. As long as there is a need for humans to think there will be value in doing math.

Look at the most upvoted comment on that thread:

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I feel like the point is still being missed, and it's very similar to the way software engineers are trying to cope. The argument you are making "Well yes now this part of math we will not need to do again, but now we can do this instead" however the issue with most people just don't want to do that....

Like who are we kidding, the type of nerds who were attracted to math and software were into it because we saw it as an art-form, it was a craft, it was being the only one in your city to be able to solve a complicated math problem, it was immortalizing yourself because you discovered a proof and added to the ever expanding human knowledge.

Imagine a leather workman who's life passion is making insanely high quality handbags, who takes joy in knowing everything he touches will last someone a lifetime and give them joy everytime they use it. And then not gradually, but almost overnight someone comes to his door and tells him we can make bags 50 times better than you at 1/tenth the price. But don't you worry, you can make more money overseeing the factory, or selling people on how good this bag is, and explaining that to them.

I mean, ok, that just is not what I wanted to do with my life. I never wanted to be a manager, I never wanted to be a salesman, I never wanted to be a writer. A craft I enjoy doing has been taken away from me, I should be allowed to mourn, I don't care that I can do something else since I never liked doing it in the first place. I enjoyed solving problems and writing code, I don't care if people say "well thats never what programming was about it was actually about becoming a manager all along" I never wanted to be a manager, I never wanted to manage, I never wanted to be a proof reader.

I just hate this existence.

Then I'm in programming for the wrong reasons.

[1] https://radiolab.org/podcast/math-vs-machine

But there’s always a risk that someone in an adjacent domain makes a breakthrough that completely reshapes the research landscape overnight. It’s happened before AI and it will happen at some point again in years to come. Grief is understandable, but this isn’t the first time or the last time.

Yes, much of pure mathematics is "playing with puzzles" to the end of the joy and beauty revealed by a human solving them.

Your present a false dichotomy; that mathematicians care about the result, or are rent seeker that just wants to play about with puzzles.

Many people enjoyed the process of finding things out for it's own sake.

Yes, this is overly harsh. Some of us are interested in the craft, not the solution. Is that not the "right" reason?

I'm not a mathematician but I find this framing to be rather non-pragmatic and frankly, pointed.

In the process of Leonhard Euler's "rent-seeking" so he could "play with" bridge crossings he invented a completely new branch of mathematics that is the basis for things like Google Maps today. The process of working with these problems is just as important if not more, than just solving them.

It's quite bizarre how many people feel so personally affronted at the existence of a rather exclusive intellectual community that they take glee in seeing it decimated overnight. But make no mistake, AI is coming for the things you value as well.

There’s something here about the journey not just the destination.

Press a button and problem solved is not too fun

Incredibly nasty stuff to serve on the rent-seeking forum. Doubly nasty to levy at people who actually like being alive, like mathematicians. If capitalists had their way we'd all be slitting our wrists on day two of existence

It's like saying "If your goal is reaching the top of Everest, you should be ecstatic they built a train line that brings you right up to the peak!"

It was never just about the destination.

Would sports teams have as many fans who enjoy their games, if all the humans were replaced by robots? Your team may win, so I'm sure you'll be happy with the outcome, but maybe something got lost?

I for one have always felt inspired when reading about remarkable human achievements. To think that those might be coming to an end, replaced by AI, takes the humanity out of those stories.

Still, I have sympathy for the people who are grieving right now.

With the software industry, you kind of know what you’re signing up for, so you have some emotional preparation. However, this might be one of the very first truly disruptive innovations many mathematicians have ever seen in their fields in their lifetimes.

Should they have better prepared emotionally for a black swan event? I’d argue that the answer is no, but even if the answer were yes, the grief that many are experiencing is still worthy of sympathy.

That’s the nature of exponential improvement, which humans are incapable of.

The cause of what you're describing here, and the cause of the problems with AI are the same: it's capitalism, closed competition and businesses deciding what happens.

In an alternate society built around providing the best solutions for everyone, instead of being built around businesses making as much money for themselves as possible, your organisation would have been working alongside the other company to share insights into solving the same problem for everyone.

Same goes for AI: all the existential downsides of AI pretty much all depend on businesses being the main driver of who uses AI and when. If we only let individuals choose when to use AI, then they're not going to choose to automate themselves out of a job they need, or give up something they actually get personal value and joy from.

I'm not convinced humans will be better at this than LLMs. Frontier models are quite good at handling even deliberately lazy/ambiguous eli5 prompts on complex topics IME.

Mathematics produces concepts and produces proofs of theorems. Up until now, the two things things fed into each other - you needed the concepts for the theorems and the theorems for the concepts. Now you can just prove theories without caring about the production of ideas.

Consider also, math produces the intellectual "tooling" for science in general. As I understand it, the important of grand unified comes because physics want an unified abstract conception of physical laws and thus a grand unified theory aims to be a unified mathematical understanding of the world.

I mean, as a though experiment, suppose a company produced a machine that simply predicted events in the future without giving any explanation of why. It didn't tell physicists whether any of their ideas were true or false, it simply answered question like "will this building fall down", "what will the spectrum of this star be", etc. It gave all the information of physics but discarded laws - physicists might find this a bit unsatisfying, especially if the machine was going to put them out of a job.

When is a problem in mathematics "solved?"

There's an old joke in math and computer science about a huge leap of logic in a proof either being flagged as "left as an exercise for the reader" or "trivially shown." The problem being that things are only trivial if you have all the context to know why they're trivial.

We can claim a problem is solved if there is one paper explaining the solution with airtight logic that is understood by five people on the planet. And that is the kind of solution that LLMs can kick out (by basically, to hand wave a lot of details that I will admit to not fully understanding, doing a search across the whole problem domain with vastly more capacity than most human beings to do the symbolic manipulation that makes up the mechanics of mathematics). But what does that really mean? To have something "proven," but only to the comprehension of five people on the planet?

3blue1brown is making the interesting argument that perhaps mathematics practice shifts from a frontier that AI might actually be better at exploring than humans, to the process of digesting the output of that exploration and making it sensible and comprehensible to the billions of mines that could take advantage of that knowledge... If it were shaped in a way that could stick in their brains.

That's a kind of creativity that AI is not likely to be good at in the near future, because AI doesn't really "understand people."

Nobody has solved the Riemann Hypothesis, but it has been highly fertile ground for new mathematics. Answering the question is of far less value than the question itself.

1. One view of the field treats Maths as directly solving real-world problems. Under that lens, yes, solving problems is directly advantageous for the field. Even so, it's not necessarily a good thing for the participants. Suppose the incentive structures require tackling hard, long problems, the field attracts people who enjoy that sort of thing, it's hard a-priori to tell a hard problem from an aggrandized brute-force proof search, etc. Even if directly producing proofs is the desired output for the field, a capricious machine occasionally solving 40% of the big problems the field is working on is still demoralizing. On a human level, if a society has organized around producing 100yr+ problems and bestowed on you the privilege of tackling a few of them having the last 40yrs of your work solved by a fancy calculator is never going to feel good. Sure, that means that in retrospect that was a problem we could have waited to devote human effort toward, but you couldn't possibly have known that at the time. You worked hard, made locally correct decisions, and later found out that the work was worthless. Beyond that, I haven't seen any model of "Maths 2.0" produced where that issue goes away. We still want people to devote their lives to hard problems. The machine will still advance and solve a moderate fraction of them at random, killing many of the field's life's work. What motivation do you have in that environment to pursue those challenges in the first place? Why not pursue adtech or fintech and make the world a worse place instead? Solving 40% of the problems isn't +40% throughput; it's -60% as the rest of the field leaves for greener pastures, -inf when nobody's around to construct the right problems in the future..

2. "Solving problems" isn't directly the point of most of the field. That's true both from the perspective of most problems requiring many intermediate results (solving one useful thing requires solving many less useful things) and from the perspective of building the machinery capable of solving problems being much more important than the solutions themselves (a properly presented proof leveraging clever, new techniques is infinitely more valuable than whichever thing it proved -- indeed, the Millennium Prize problems were chosen precisely because it was assumed they would create such techniques, and for the human-solved ones they did -- without new techniques, eventually the field caps out at whichever frontier of knowledge we're currently stuck at).

3. A third view of the field treats it more like art. A machine producing behind your back the painting you were envisioning, or at least a close enough simile to fool the masses, doesn't advance "art" in any meaningful sense. It's extremely demoralizing when flaky cast tools are passed off for proper forged variants (your work is better, and it's sad to see people choosing a wrench they'll later snap in half instead), and when at a creative level people are accepting mediocrity instead of something objectively better.

They had warp drives, but only starting to get human level intelligence four centuries from now in the form of Data.

I think the word you are looking for is 'peripheral'.

The only way change this situation so that it comes out positive is to enjoy being a slave, but hey thats a you choice.

>Typically every solved problem opens more doors than it shuts. >We're pretty far from knowing it all.

Open doors to whom? AI or mankind? We have never been farther from knowing it all. The information knowable by people will become a sliver of the total relevant information in the world.

>It's like someone saying the field of Math died when we got calculators and computers and spreadsheets to make it easier to do calculations.

In that instance, the busywork was automated and challenging work remained. What we are talking about here is the reverse. It's the automation of all of the cerebral thinking.

Imagine that all of the cerebral and beautiful aspects of math were automated first, but for some reason humans were required to specialize into number crunching instead. Now open your eyes.

>Not any different than some Amish person being annoyed that s/he can't contribute to the field of Math because it's too hard to do all the calculations by hand on paper...

The thing about amish people is that they own their own land and grow their own food and are independent within a governmental system that respects their property rights. The rest of us renters and feeders operate within industrial society-work or die.

The disposition amish people have towards technology has been ahead of the curve.

>You can spend your whole life crying that one day we'll all die, or you can enjoy the time you have.

I would also encourage my peers to enjoy what little time they have left. What we are witnessing is the end of history, and I am honored to experience it. However I get the impression your nature is to go out with a wimper.

The whole point of current AI is to replace ALL human contributions, in every field. Collaborating with humans is not a consideration, as shown by OpenAI leaving practicing mathematicians completely out of their process.

The obvious retort is "that's cold comfort to people losing their livelihoods!" But that's not the discussion, and (at least at this point) we're not at risk of mathematicians going hungry. It is obvious that AI will have a profound impact on what mathematicians do. It is not obvious that we won't need them anymore.

With potentially plummeting value for human involvement in these skills, I think that’s precisely what many people are worried about.

To generalize beyond math... how many bits of working memory do you have? How about a transformer?

AIs will do all the math with zero human involvement whatsoever.

I don’t buy these claims anymore, and haven‘t been for a long time. I think you [as in you boosters; not you specifically] are full of shit. I don‘t think you know what AI will become, you just dream up some scenario where everything becomes better by some magic, but it won’t. It will become worse. People loose their jobs, people loose their tenures, and instead we get just more and more slop, more and more span, energy becomes more expensive, our planet becomes more polluted, our internet becomes more polluted. Our servers become overrun by bot traffic, our gaming machines become too expensive, etc. etc.

I just want you to stop making things worse. I just want you to stop training more AI. It sucks, I hate it, and I want it gone.

AI is the complete opposite. It takes away the thinking part. When people use AI, they tend to offload a lot of thinking part to it as well. I use it because company policy. But if you care about every single if case and every single variable name, writing by hand is faster unlike CAD.

Sure, there are probably some mathematicians that are sad that robots can do all the proofs and such for them, but it seems to me that most of them probably would be happy with the robots helping to solve problems if not for the little issues that mathematics is their profession and in the current state of things, they need to eat and have a place to live.

And that is the actual problem. Let's just remember, the Luddites were not anti-technology, they were against the technology being owned by a small elite that could use it to take away their livelihoods. They were against the capitalists essentially throwing them into the ditch to starve, and we're seeing echoes of that in the current AI discussion and the reactions of mathematicians, programmers, artists, etc. Back in the 1800s it was physical and artisan manufacturing labour in danger, and now it's mental labour.

Its kind of in Grant's incentives to push the interest for mathematics, because without an audience he won't be able to keep doing what he loves.

Like, my old uni has a history department, and had an Egyptian history teacher. This was at some point deemed a pointless use of resources because there was no role in society except for teacher of the same subject after that, and the classes shrunk, and she ended up getting offered a role in admin. She was not happy in that role.

At some point though, I'd assume the AI would start finding breakthroughs itself.

But, if I get the insinuation, this would still require a huge social change to absorb once broad consumer demand falls off.

As for pursuing math for fun: that would turn most disciplines into something akin to speedrunning, chess, or mountaineering. People would add constraints to make it harder for themselves and compete against each other, and that does motivate some - but not all. A lot of people want to be "on the frontier." If discovery gets automated, the remaining frontier may be physical, actually going places no one has been, and that might pull those people toward space as it opens up.

Math jobs are either in:

- teaching, which except for tertiary education, is poorly paid

- or a very limited, competitive and unstable pool of jobs in academia and maybe a handful of companies with large research departments

We're probably talking 50 000 people in math research worldwide and probably millions of underpaid regular math teachers at middle and high schools.

I went back to school for CompSci in the early 90's. Some of the math classes were almost the best part: number theory (loved it, but almost failed, lol); and statistics (terrified of failing and spent so much time studying that I almost failed compiler design). I thought sure I'd have a software career, but I hardly spent more than a few weeks at any job writing software; mostly a few scripts, and some statistical analysis. And that was about all there was over the next 25 years.

How did I survive? There were lots of companies that needed bookkeeping/clerical work, later IT support, then telecom, then quality assurance (never thought I'd work on a factory floor - surprise!). Money was enough, but sometimes just barely. It hasn't exactly left me with a comfortable retirement, but honestly, I wouldn't change hardly a thing.

What is good advice for someone just starting? Don't expect any career to make you really well off. Try to find something you like. It won't be fun all the time, but you will know it's right, when you find it. I've know lots of people who changed what they were doing after school; you might be surprised at what you find you like doing.

Doing weights is not the same as say, updating the gym with shiny new weights; or migrating all the weights in the gym to metric. At the gym, if the current weights need to go and new ones installed, a forklift will one-shot it.

Seeing the difference empowers you to choose the right approach for the right situation.

What would be the limiting factor?

I agree with you, just wondering your thought on how we will know the latter has come true? As I understand it, you're describing ASI, not AGI. The way I personally define AGI, we are already there.

On the other hand, if we are going to survive as a species for a long time it probably depends on us learning how to not be the most intelligent thing around.

Even if it leads to our demise, I don’t think willfully holding ourselves back is the way forward

That said, other humans can and will put AI to use in ways that don't benefit humanity. It's actually already happening - newsfeeds waste hours of people's lives and attention; give teens low self esteem etc etc. and guess what. Society is adjusting - governments via legislation, device makers via screen time limits, communities by spreading the word and raising awareness

Smart AI wielded by people without your best interests in mind may be tough to counter; but you don't have to do it alone: humanity is getting wise to the threat. We don't have great tools but it'd be against the grain of history to assume we won't come up with them in time. Can't give specifics - as they say, predictions are hard, especially about the future..

We've made it through bigger more violent upheavals and we'll make it through this.

Are you suggesting that if an AI could do all of those things to your satisfaction you would not be extremely impressed.

I do have empathy for people who see the world changing and are forced to adjust. That can be uncomfortable, but it is something that is inevitable with the changing world. It has always been this way, There is very little need to make swords these days, and as anything becomes superseded there are people that are attached to the old things and there are people dependent on the old things.

I think it entirely possible to have sympathy for their position while disagreeing that the solution is to prevent change.

I don't see this as a breezy lack of empathy. I see this as a hand reaching out and saying 'Hey, you can come this way and things aren't so bad after all'

Why do the labs have thousands of employees? Lets think about this...

Who's designing the evals needed to validate the model quality, who's deciding what goes in the system prompt? Who's negotiating to buy training data from hundreds or even thousands of data vendors? Who's responding when the Internet goes apeshit over some prompt tweak that makes models over-verbose? Who's out there listening to users and feeding what they say back into the product pipeline?

Computers????

However automated things get, that quickly becomes the new baseline. Customer expectations are always going up.

And as soon as humans figure out how to automate any of the things listed above - it becomes part of the new baseline too. It's always advancing. To beat the baseline and be competitive, you need humans. No matter what. No matter how automatic the automated things get. Always and forever. Because you need someone to drive, to find the next automatable thing and automate it - and to prioritize where to search for automatable things.