> He described it at 'strip mining'
Strip mining what, platonic reality? Mathematicians don't have a monopoly on mathematical truth. It doesn't exist for their benefit.
Strip mining what, platonic reality? Mathematicians don't have a monopoly on mathematical truth. It doesn't exist for their benefit.
It's not about improving understanding, as you just pointed out.
So why? What the purpose? Is it just pure misanthropy?
A small subset of humans who lost a bunch of comparative advantage hate it. Most people who care about math in the abstract probably think it's really cool!
The thing I liked about humanity was its ability to think. Making that valueless is not my idea of progress.
I’ve seen multiple conference submissions that read like English, but take hours of effort to disentangle and figure out what they mean.
There is a limited number of known interesting problems that are worthwhile to engage in. New ones are found and understood, but it is a slow process and it is dependent on understanding and verification, not generation of content.
Saying AI will create new ones, strengthens the strip mining analogy. The idea that AI will find other problems parallels the idea that firms can cut down a forest and plant them elsewhere.
The conversation on HN is driven by non mathematicians, to whom math is a subject, like “nature”. It’s not their core business. The original post by Tao is a better source of information on what he means.