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Comment by caaqil | Hacker News Reader

> With automated math that community as tao pointed out is at risk.

If they can be automated, they are not necessary. If they are necessary, they won't be fully automated. It's a pretty simple experiment to run, the math "community" should bear with us. Darwin would be proud.

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This statement assumes local maxima don’t exist and greedy short term optimization always leads to long term benefit.

> assumes local maxima don’t exist and greedy short term optimization always leads to long term benefit.

Even if your stated assumption was baked into the original comment, which is doubtful: the historical record shows that we will keep relearning The Bitter Lesson and each community will pretend what they do for a living is exceptional and immune because of xyz. The screams will get louder when the "greedy" and "dumb" automation comes knocking and it turns out nothing was truly immune or "nuanced ".

Getting some new hobbies may be in order, it's a Brave New World.

"Greedy" is not a moral statement, it's a description of an optimization strategy focusing on short term improvements without a view to the long term consequences or state of the system.

Bringing it back to math explicitly: you are essentially betting that the singularity is here, today, and that there are absolutely no downsides to breaking the pipeline which trains mathematicians (meaning that in 5-10 years at most there will be zero humans capable of assessing AI math output or independently advancing the state of the art).

"Who will advance [X] field or check on the work of the AI that surpassed us in 5-10 years?" is not a question that is unique to math, and the answer is pretty obvious if we get past the grieving process some are going through.

The CS101 lesson in the first paragraph is appreciated, you should do it more often for us simpletons.

“If they can be automated, they are not necessary.” That’s a pretty interesting take as eventually everything could be automated.

I guess what OP meant is automated and with 100% accuracy.

That’s different from what OP said, and I doubt much if anything is automated with 100% accuracy 100% of the time.

> “If they can be automated, they are not necessary.” That’s a pretty interesting take as eventually everything could be automated.

It's great that we're starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel, and will some day achieve a perfect market without humans. If you think about it, all the market really needs is a people to own everything, everything else can be automated, and all those annoying human workers can be eliminated.

I guess that analogy works if the light at the end of the tunnel is like the sun.

You've abandoned every part of yourself to the siren's song of efficiency and automation, huh?

To witness an arson and rejoice reveals an ugly kind of sadism.

Will it also be "arson" if OpenAI dump on us solutions to more practical problems, for example, a blueprint for a better photolithography machine, or a nuclear power plant?

No that would be irony. Use up all the chip foundries and power plants to make more plans for chip foundries and power plants so we can build more chip foundries and power plants and use them to run AI to design more chip foundries and power plants.

How is that irony? This is literally how life works: eat to gain energy, expend it to forage/hunt/farm/toil so you get more food, eat it, hopefully get enough of a surplus to raise kids who will do the same. Everything in life is built on top of this basic gameplay loop.

I see why you might call it sisyphean, but I don't see what's ironic about it.

Darwin, possibly the most misunderstood scientist in history, would not be proud

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