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Comment by jboggan | Hacker News Reader

If that had happened I would be overjoyed, maybe a hair chagrined that I didn't get it myself, but truly happy that someone got it and that I could go and talk to that person. Because it's the kind of problem I don't think would have fallen to a human after a few hours of thought, and I would have so much to talk about with that person. I would fly to Japan and hope to have tea with them, I would learn some Japanese to make the conversations easier. I would learn some interesting things hearing about their struggles and their false starts. I would make friends with that reclusive Japanese genius and my life would be far richer for it.

I will never meet that person and I will never hold a real conversation with the "creator" of that proof. They will never tell me how they came up with the cancelling exponential summation that cracked the construction. It's just another enigma but one that is far more unknowable than the original problem.

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This experience of alienation is a social consequence of the mechanization and automation of mathematics as intellectual and creative work. There is no author or thinker behind the creation of the proof, only the practical result. It's the same process as the industrial revolution, but applied to the intellect and mental work, where factories and machines replaced manual craft, devaluing the community, culture and humanity around the work.

I don't know, I work in a field that could be seen as the logical culmination of the Industrial Revolution (to this point) - highly technical, machine assisted knowledge work - and I have community, culture, and humanity in my working life.

Weavers don't have dibs on those intangibles.

Being the 'logical culmination' of the Industrial Revolution does not mean you've been automated (and thus suffered the alienating consequences), rather the opposite: you're currently on the un-automated cutting edge. Your intangibles are exactly what others have lost, and you personally will lose, with further progress in automation.

In programming we've been dealing this for a while. You see some weird code that doesn't make sense, maybe it's a lack of your understanding or maybe the code is bad, but you can't ask the author anymore since it's an AI.

You can -- just ask the AI to explain it. For truly weird stuff sometimes it takes a few rounds of back and forth to really grasp what is going on, but the model also has infinite patience and availability.

Beautifully put.

> It's just another enigma but one that is far more unknowable than the original problem.

You just made my day, beautifully said. Thank you Sir, for all your thoughts expressed in this thread. You put an human story behind the #180 number.

Thank you!

In this case, once the model is released anyone in the world will be able to go to https://chatgpt.com/ and talk with that model.

It's still not quite the same though, is it.

It's even better. Then tons of people can work together with it on more problems. Work with it on understanding more things. Ask it about random stuff. The time of a single human cannot be parallelized as easily.

I think you and I have fundamental disagreements about identity and consciousness.

Claude has been used to build awesome things, but it’s not “speaking from experience” when I ask it to help me prototype a weather model, for example.

It has no memory or experience of working on similar problems. Even if it made one of the foundational libraries that I use in a weather forecasting program, it still has no comprehension of the thought process it takes to understand the problem and build it from zero, and if I’m building on that library it just makes fresh assumptions about how things should work.

It’s not a human with experience or expertise, it’s a computer program that’s really good at turning English descriptions into functioning code

>it still has no comprehension of the thought process it takes to understand the problem and build it from zero

If it did it once, it can do it again from zero, and this time you can watch as it works and even it ask it questions. Many of the agents that worked on the problem did not have comprehension of the whole problem. I don't think you need that many tokens to be able to query it for the insights it had during the process.

> Many of the agents that worked on the problem did not have comprehension of the whole problem

Isn’t this the issue with using it the way you’re suggesting? At best the model can come up with an after-the-fact rationalization of how to get to the solution, but it doesn’t know what actual path it took to get there - what were interesting traps it fell into, where was a place it was close to the solution but didn’t realize at the time.

Those are things that are valuable to share between humans, those which teach us how to think better, and give us deeper understanding ourselves, and which a model doesn’t have any comprehension of.

Then have it discover it again and have it answer based off that run. Or if you are more curious have it solve it 10 times. See what it did differently each time.

That's not the same as talking with the person who would have made the proof, and it's hard to argue that's comparable at all.

The OP would never, EVER, have had the opportunity to talk with the mythical Japanese math genius over tea. Their story is a fantasy, probably meant to help the OP ascribe meaning to an otherwise scary existence. Which may be at the root of the anti-AI brigade's unconcious motiviations.

While the math genius in this thread is mythical, I sort of had Shinichi Mochizuki in mind.

Why are you so sure about that? Research communities are (used to be?) very tightly-knit with a lot of communication, exchange, and networking. Arguably, the more niche the research area, the more tightly knit and personal.

This is what I hear most about from friends who stayed in academia and research: the pain of losing that. Conferences stopped being interesting, because there's barely an exchange of ideas anymore. Nobody trying out new approaches, everybody just pulling the same lever in an endless loop. Nobody with anything interesting to share, and no potential to learn.

You display zero understanding of the human experience you’re responding to.

But how is it any different from what humans are doing? :) /s

Likely will never experience talking with that model.

It’s probably distributed on so much compute that it would never be economical to serve it to you or I or anybody

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