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Comment by 0c3ca83 | Hacker News Reader

> But even if it had solved every problem in the Langlands program, to imagine that would have “solved number theory” would be as naive as saying that the construction of the periodic table solved chemistry.

This analogy is pants on head stupid. They're talking as though the only thing AI will ever solve is the Langlands program, not as though we have discovered a generic tool.

It's like saying "they drove the car one mile -- and every mile driven leads to more roads that we can trot along, why are you so worried about the future of horses?"

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People are allowed to process their anxieties. And processing takes time. That said publicly doing it on the great modern internet attention/noise factory complicates the story.

Everyone is surprised that a person that some consider to be one of the greatest modern mathematicians can have such obtuse views of technology and its own field.

Note, this is a guest post.

I don't think it was a particularly well-reasoned essay (I thought the classification of finite simple groups is almost evidence for the opposite of what he says), but at the same time I don't think you understood his point.

If we have a theorem proving machine, then we can use it to prove theorems. If we have a machine to solve the Langlands program in one day, then we'll think of more things to prove after that. There's a million unsolved questions in number theory unrelated to Langlands, and if we knew Langlands (and why it was true) we could make new conjectures that our theorem proving machine could solve, rather than having to speculate for 50 or 100 years like now.

The possibility he's not considering is that the machine might be better even at conjectures, and then there really is no role for humans once the machine already knows things our primitive meat brains are too small to understand. But what he's saying isn't "pants on head stupid".

I think I’ll take the professional mathematician perception of how AI affects his field over random HN commenter saying it’s “pants on head stupid”

Sure, or you can think for yourself for five minutes on the implications of a general proof machine, and whether it's likely to continue producing proofs.

If you've forgotten how to think for yourself, you can also ask an LLM.

The host of the blog, Tao, was an early booster. He didn't think through the implications, and seems to have expected it to remain unable to do interesting work. Today he's on a "war footing".

I don't think mathematics are uniquely skilled at predicting the future, and the impacts of AI on their profession.

It is weird. From what I can tell, you and I have quite similar expectations on what AI will be able to do in the future, but for some reason you are much more dismissive of Taos opinion.

I perfectly understand his point and it is not about being selfishly frustrated by a machine being better than him. Is that really your interpretation of the discourse?

Tao didn't write this article.

Either way, either there's no future for AI in math, or there's no future for people in math. I think this is true for many professions.

> Tao didn't write this article.

True, but you referred to Tao yourself: "The host of the blog, Tao, was an early booster. He didn't think through the implications, and seems to have expected it to remain unable to do interesting work. Today he's on a "war footing"."

My comment was in response to this.

Neither are mindless AI boosters

https://fortune.com/article/ai-godfather-radiologists-obsole...

Ironic that you resort to “think for yourself” as your silly name calling go to btw

Logic is logic, you don't need a specialist's opinion on every aspect of a specialist field. I've had eye opening insights delivered to me on problems I'm working on by people who barely know how to use a computer.

You are welcome to opine on anything but there’s a reason we’re reading his blog and you’re down here in the comments

Speak for yourself. I'm reading these comments and not the blog.

On the flip side, the professional mathematician has all the incentive to pearl clutch and rent seek.

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