Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

If we play a game of chess and I move the pieces to the final position on the first move and declare victory you might feel that something was missing, even if I'm right.

This is not quite like that but the feeling I get from it is much the same. Mathematicians are first and foremost busy with understanding math, not with 'solving' math though they are solving individual problems within the domain of math. The journey towards that understanding requires specialization and often lots of studying.

To quote Douglas Adams: "If 'metal nose' here is going to give you God's phone number then the philosophical question of whether there is a God becomes meaningless."

It is the journey and the questions that matter as much or more than the answer does.

And with math being a branch of natural philosophy I can see why they would be a tad upset at this shortcut because it strips the collective efforts of a large number of people of their prestige and feeling of time well spent. Imagine your life's work reduced to a short string of bits, and worse, that short string of bits was created by a machine that effectively is still a toddler.

> It is the journey and the questions that matter as much or more than the answer does.

Selfishly, as someone who enjoys programming, I feel the same way about the journey. But let's face it: for everyone else, the outcome is what actually matters. Mathematicians argue that their journey may lead to novel insights, but are those insights really valuable? Are they going to help the LLMs solve more problems? And are we sure that the LLMs can't deliver those same insights?

I think that ties in with the 'who will train the juniors' angle: if the ladder consists of nothing but the top rung because the AI combine stripped away the rest of them then a lot of fields will be looking at zero new entrants. Nobody wants to compete with a machine for their living and sense of self value. I know I don't, and obviously I can't speak for anybody else but society has pretty much programmed people to tie a good chunk of their identity, success in life and general well being to their skills and ability to put bread on the table. You can't just toss that in the bin for 3/4 of the current crop of professionals (I'm seeing the mathematicians as simply the first (and probably not even the first) of many).

I don't know if you have kids or not but I have two kids in high school and keeping them motivated through the AI revolution is a serious challenge and some of their classmates have already all but given up. The next generation down the line is going to grow up with the same kind of attitude towards thinking that you might have towards the skill of map reading. And I think we'll all be poorer because of that, not richer.

they probably do deliver insights, just not in a human-readable form, so at some point, human progress stalls.

Exactly. As a software developer, AI has given me more time to tackle higher-order problems. The actual architecture, optimisation, and user experience.

Mathematicians could:

- Continue working on philosophical aspects of the solution and not bothered by whether the solution is known or not. It is not a movie that gets spoiled when the ending is known.

- Or better, demand from AI labs, how they would like to see AI helping them on philosophical aspects.

> Continue working on philosophical aspects…

…except the machine will be better at these aspects too :D

I find it funny when people suggest "just re-orient from knowledge work X to knowledge work Y, doh!". Not realizing all knowledge work is on the chopping blocks.

This misunderstands mathematics. There are entire branches of the subject that have no practical use. Some things also appeared to be useless for centuries before physicists discovered they actually have an application.

> It is the journey and the questions that matter as much or more than the answer does.

That only makes sense to me when its what someone chooses to spend their time doing. When they expect someone else to pay them for it, its the end result that matters.

Maybe its a fundamental flaw in capitalism or money itself, but we can't expect to be paid for the sheer love of the game. Others will only end up paying us if the expected output is worth it.

Well we have been paying people for the pure pursuit of knowledge for its own sake since the scientific revolution, which is kind of the material base for capitalism, so I don’t think your argument holds much water. Why knowledge and following curiosity facilities general prosperity is maybe an open question but that it does is inarguable.

Capitalism incentivises paying people to pursue more capital, not the putsuit of knowledge.

And to be clear I don't say that as a good thing, it may be a flaw in capitalism, but we don't psy people simply to chase knowledge for the sake of the chase.

> Capitalism incentivises[sic] paying people to pursue more capital

That only works as long as people earn a living wage. See also: Henry Ford.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com