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Comment by theplumber | Hacker News Reader

What exactly to protect? I really don’t get what this fuss is all about.

We still need math research just like we still coding or software or cpu research regardless of how many problems the AI solves.

To me it feels like a bio researcher complaining that his field has no future because AI started to cure diseases so now instead to spend 100 years to run experiments someone can do it in a day with AI(obviously it’s not the case yet).

Are they guys upset that people can “run math” without hiring a math guy?

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The main problem is that without safeguards it becomes impossible to adjudicate new work in math or CS, meaning grad students who care about originality in work will have little sense of accomplishment if the AI gives them all the answers and will decide to study something else. Not to mention that AI users in math/CS are often ignoring standards in publishing, including issues with plagiarism and scooping of work. These are pretty serious problems that will end up causing a lot of people to move to other subjects.

But that’s not something specific to mathematics, is it? I am bit against “safeguards”. That reads more like censorship to me from some kind of high priests.

You don't hire someone to "run math" in the context of all these discussions, which are about pure mathematics.

Protecting human thinking. Protecting human endeavors from automation. It's like nobody took Frank Herbert's warnings in Dune novels seriously. You give over thinking to machines, you become enslaved by those machines and the elites controlling them.

So what is stopping you from thinking and using the machines as tools? To me it looks like AI is solving the “low level/grunt work” problems and leaves us the important stuff such as steering it, making products using the discoveries, find new problems to solve/discover and so on…

I use coding as an example, I am glad I can ask AI agents to do all the boilerplate coding so that I can focus on building actual products rather than spending a month to get an API just right. It’s not like I am no longer thinking about the code or the end result. I do but only where it actually matters. Just punishing myself to not use AI would be like writing code with pen and paper. Some people enjoy it but that’s just a personal exercise not an industrial tool. I definitely enjoyed coding without IntelliSense and I think it made me a better programmer but definitely it’s not something I would recommend people to do on their day to day job.

The problem is this: “Astra write me a masters thesis applying new techniques programming language theory to Rust” is not using a tool, it’s hiring someone to do the work and thinking for you.

I have difficulty figuring out how to solve this issue.

You could have done that before AI as well, albeit with a little bit more effort. Plagiarism has been quite common.

That being said, if whatever Astra is spitting is really innovative, the prompt author understands it, proof checks it and can support it in front of a live evaluator I think it’s good enough for me. In practice I think that prompt would be just one of many, perhaps also some “old school” evaluation and improvement before the thesis is done. Again, I see the AI as a tool.

You could ask Astra to generate you an e-commerce website with one prompt. Can you show it to someone and claim it as your project? Can you actually use that in production?

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