Comment by crypto420 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crypto420 | Hacker News Reader

I kind of see their point.

For thousands of years mathematics had this aura of being at the pinnacle of human thought and was one of the things that separated us from other species. People like Euler, Gauss, Euclid, Hilbert, Erdos had this aura about that them that they were on the noblest of pursuits - trying to solve problems that had no immediate practical use, and largely needed focused thinking over extended periods of time with the occasional spark of creativity.

Then comes along AI, a mass extinction event to the entire field. It turns out LLMs can think for longer without stopping, have better recall and working memory. What we're seeing now is a 5000-year old set of institutions facing an existential threat because they no longer require humans to be the sole source of labor.

I find the closest analogy to be automobiles displacing the horse-carriage industry in the early 1900s. Horses couldn't protest and rapidly went out of a job, but horse-carriage owners and that industry certainly did.

https://ghostsofdc.org/2018/07/16/horse-dealers-claim-automo...

This visage of mathematicians among the general public is fairly new I think; it may have existed in some intellectual circles but was not common among regular people. It’s fairly common to read about the lives of mathematicians well into the 19th or even early twentieth century where as children or young adults who excelled at mathematics, their parents or guardians attempted to dissuade them from pursuing mathematics as a career because of the difficulty in obtaining lucrative jobs in mathematics unlike fields like law, engineering, etc. This was the case not only in impoverished countries but in western Europe as well.

Side note: it’s often the case that mathematicians and scientists are perceived only in terms of their research work instead of their personal lives or just other aspects of their lives. How many people on sites like HN or Reddit, would still perceive, for example, Euler the same way if they learned that along with being a genius in mathematics, he was also a religious fundamentalist who was known for annoying his colleagues with his incessant preaching? My point is not to suggest that this takes away from his mathematical work, but it is an indication that the perception people have about at least some of these figures is not based on their reality.

>People like Euler

You met the chap?

Jokes aside, and regardless of how anyone perceives their field or industry, I feel pretty much every thought-based industry is up for an existential threat to some degree. Given a bit of time, manual labour fields are looking a bit shaky too.

The real question is not "are we impacted?" but rather "to what extent, and how do we integrate it?"

Are they?

The problem to be solved was not to spew out maximum lines of text containing some greek letters per hour.

It was to write down iterative progress in conceptualizing, modelling and consistently explaining difficult questions - in a way that advances human understanding. If nobody bothers to read through 50 pages of gibberish that may or may not be containing some insight, then the total problem solving remains zero.

... Coachbuilders built the bodies for cars, and some still do.

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