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Comment by cma | Hacker News Reader

Trying to slow down this for the joy of discovery is a deeply anti-intellectual position. I think that position is similar to when everyday people get mad about the minor spending on the NSF, picking apart people who study beetles on Fox News with no context etc.

There are real safety concerns with AI that can be made very convincingly though.

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I think I would feel a lot better if it wasn't a $15 million cannon being fired from a silicon tower inside of the labs across vast swathes of fertile ground that would otherwise be used to train budding mathematicians. For instance, if it was the budding mathematicians themselves who were making these discoveries using their own tools.

I feel something about human nature makes us treat joy of discovery, status, etc. as a source of energy and motivation. I hope we'll find other ways to keep some "strategic intellectual reserve" of mathematicians alive.

What if we just discovered an alien artifact with the next 200 years of math? I can see arguments to throw it away for safety, who knows if the aliens are getting us to nuke ourselves or whatever, but throw it away so a few hundred/thousand of the most elite thinking humans can have the joy of credit for discovering each thing?

If the argument is that we have discovered 200 years of math in 1 year that we might need to throw out for fear that blindly applying its incomprehensible results will lead us to ruin, then I would say: why not settle for 199 years of math in 1 year which can be verified by our human intellectual reserve that we will train on the remaining 1 year?

I never said they are trying. They already have.

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