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Comment by flowerlad | Hacker News Reader

> Imagine waking up one morning to find that an alien technology has solved the problem you had dedicated your life to

But it could be another human that did that, and the impact would be no different.

As a software engineer this is part of my life, and always has been. I may have been working on a software product for the last 3 years, and suddenly one morning I find out that another company has released a similar product, and selling it cheaper, now the value of my work is slashed by 90%. I may even have to drop my project and find something else to work on. This is a normal part of life.

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In research, there is always the same risk, that some adjacent field will completely change your field overnight due to some breakthrough.

Still, I have sympathy for the people who are grieving right now.

With the software industry, you kind of know what you’re signing up for, so you have some emotional preparation. However, this might be one of the very first truly disruptive innovations many mathematicians have ever seen in their fields in their lifetimes.

Should they have better prepared emotionally for a black swan event? I’d argue that the answer is no, but even if the answer were yes, the grief that many are experiencing is still worthy of sympathy.

I am confused why this is considered a black swan event. Does AI take the joy out of mathematics research? Yes. But universities are not laying off mathematicians just because OpenAI has released some proofs. The proofs were never the point of mathematics, it is the understanding behind the proofs, and applying that understanding to solve real world problems.

Now consider a computer science major in college who knows that he won't get a job when he graduates. Consider fresh graduates who thought they would have lucrative jobs but had to take up jobs as Uber drivers. To them AI is a black swan event. That's who I have sympathy for.

Black swan events aren’t necessarily negative.

For example, the original black swans who were found by the Dutch mariners neither attacked, injured, nor robbed those mariners.

Yeah, mathematicians will totally be fine.

Right now mathematicians are freaking out because they think the AI will make them useless and they will have to go find real job with real usefulness.

But honestly mathematicians have been totally useless long before the first AI, so generally nothing have changed for them.

The entire cryptographic underpinning of the Internet is based on mathematics that, when I learned it as an undergraduate in the 1980's, was considered just an impractical curiosity. Non-Euclidean geometry became special relativity. Math underpins all science - "totally useless" phooey.

When I learned it as an undergraduate way later, entire cryptographic underpinning of the Internet were based on pretty trivial mathematics. Trivial to that extent, that if mathematicians wouldn't create those math, then it would be created by engineers designing cryptography along the way. So even there mathematicians were totally useless.

it's just started in math, only a few months. it's been happening for years in CS. Give it time.

No matter what you choose to work on now, the AIs will get there first.

That’s the nature of exponential improvement, which humans are incapable of.

Your comments are grim. What's your estimate on self replication? Sustained energy? Trigger fingers?

Oh, nvm you made it clear 8m later: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50147638

Give me an argument for not having a grim outlook given current AI trajectories paired with a political apparatus incapable of action. At least in the US.

Putin's getting old. If he dies before we hit recursive self-improvement, there's a chance some maniac gets access to the nukes and saves 4 billion of us (global nuclear war only kills about half of humanity).

Oh thanks I feel better now!

> As a software engineer this is part of my life, and always has been. I may have been working on a software product for the last 3 years, and suddenly one morning I find out that another company has released a similar product, and selling it cheaper, now the value of my work is slashed by 90%. I may even have to drop my project and find something else to work on. This is a normal part of life.

The cause of what you're describing here, and the cause of the problems with AI are the same: it's capitalism, closed competition and businesses deciding what happens.

In an alternate society built around providing the best solutions for everyone, instead of being built around businesses making as much money for themselves as possible, your organisation would have been working alongside the other company to share insights into solving the same problem for everyone.

Same goes for AI: all the existential downsides of AI pretty much all depend on businesses being the main driver of who uses AI and when. If we only let individuals choose when to use AI, then they're not going to choose to automate themselves out of a job they need, or give up something they actually get personal value and joy from.

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