bemtevi

> get something that helps us understand what is going on, and live to see a better future.

Nah, I don't really buy the sales pitch that ultra advanced math will give us a better future. For decades we've had ultra advanced math already before AI like geometric langlands, higher topos theory, and Waldhausen categories and it's done nothing to give us a better future.

Maybe it helps to train people to think abstractly and inspire technical people through the beauty of math but that's only when it was a human endeavor anyway.

The idea of going to even more layers of abstraction and complexity with AI may be possible but it's just a mental game at that point and isn't going to help anyone. It will just waste energy.

As far as I'm concerned (as a former mathematician), they can take their new discoveries and shove it. Yes, science does help us live easier lives in some way but it doesn't follow that endless new discoveries always been better lives past a certain point. And I think this is a prime example of that.

This highlights the true problem with society. We're only concerned with immediate impact and superficial enjoyability. But the true scope of enjoyability goes beyond this: it should also be about how the story eventually effects a person. Anne Frank's diary for instance: it's a gripping story but also it informs us about the reality of an actual person.

But even in fiction this is true: eventually one learns about the author and their life and this contributes a little also to the enjoyment of a work. But this isn't measured in these studies, which ignore everything that's important to being human.

An AI photograph similary can be enjoyed more than a real one based on its visual appeal, but the real one has the advantage of informing us about the experience of the photographer.

Modern algorithms and science always downplay the human sharing aspect and focus on a single dimension, to the detriment of us all.

Because it's not for the benefits of those receiving the funding. It's money to pay people willing to improve how AI does math so AI companies can be even more effective and rendering human endeavors unprofitable. Math is a hot target right now and they're going after it.

It's completely selfish and won't help anyone except those at the top.

Not promote AI for one. If there's money to do something, someone will take the money to do it, which will in turn erode the discipline.

> Once humans stop caring

As a former research mathematician, I've already stopped caring due to AI. I used to write expository articles on mathematics on the internet but I deleted those because of AI. Unless mathematics and indeed human endeavors can be made human again, I don't see much point in caring to generate commodities in a mechanical fashion.

It already has happened with technologies before AI. The internet itself in many ways has disrupted communities a lot with the net effect being the erosion of individuality and value placed on the uniqueness of people. AI is just the next stage in the cohesion of technology against the human spirit.

So it's already happening and is just strengthening now with AI.

Well, the original link seemed to imply that it was a choice or behaviour that one could change, which is what I was disagreeing with.

Neither do I. But what I suspect is that the unpleasantness of too much forced social interaction, which dominated discussions in times past, was also associated with the begrudgingly-acknowledged good it did, even for us introverts. Hey, I'm like that too. But AI has taken that away for many people, who are now realizing that occasionally eating those dark greens actually did some good and now they're gone, life is actually worse.

The problem is that it's really hard for the average person (including myself) to understand which problems I should and shouldn't care about. Often the most trivial of tasks end up becoming inspirations to me, and I have some of the best ideas when I'm sweeping the floor.

It's almost as if the nature of rote or grunt work has a hidden beauty that provides negative space for creativity to flourish. And being forced to do those things without a choice is a great simplifier in life to maintain that contrast.

True. I wasn't referring to high IQ. But innate ability to have some wisdom or learn easily from life's mistakes, which IMO is much different than high IQ.

What if I don't want to use a phone any more and just use Linux without a password manager?

Efficiency in the short-term also leads to community degradation in the long term. And by efficiency I mean efficiency past the point of diminishing returns. Compiling code by hand would suck, but not writing code at all also sucks.

There is no formula to determine the right level of it, but it's one of those things that's obvious when you see it... like not eating.

> In particular, it would be pretty sad to destroy one of the few things that makes our life meaningful, not the fancy prize or the fancy position, but simply having a community to share and discuss and learn.

Exactly. The problem is a weird one though, because there are at least independent forces that are working together here:

(1) The people that are inventing AI or those that are pro-AI are typically those that have been conditioned to enjoy the "information rush" and place personal superificial enjoyment over human interaction. Lots of nerds/geeks simply love the idea of having a playground devoid of the necessity to actual interact outside their microcosm and so they think AI is the best thing since sliced bread. They're often people who were taunted in school or at least partially ostracized early in life because of their intelligence and take emotional comfort in tech.

(2) The perverted incentives of academia reward publishing and in general the incentives of capitalism create an arms race to be as efficient as possible at the cost of goods like "community" that only accrue vague benefits often outside the capitalistic system. So people tend to use AI.

(3) Very advanced technology itself weakens and even destroys smaller communities whose members then seek out technology as a superificial salve to ease what they consciously or subconsciously feel as something missing.

AI was never great. Knowledge as an end in itself is not a good thing and we should seek knowledge to better ourselves in a myriad of ways. But today it's just sought out for material and capitalistic advancement, which prevents our using it to actually become wiser and enjoy the basics of life.

The only people who defend it are those who are already addicted to it, or those who don't want to experience the cognitive dissonance of the truth of its harmful nature.

> toward strictly rewarding better writing

Part of better writing is that a human wrote it because writing reflects the person who wrote it. I don't want to read clear writing if it doesn't represent communication from a human being. What's the point? I want to do more than learn or understand a piece of information. I want to simply communicate with others and understand them. And part of that means having a good idea of their ability or lack thereof to communicate.

I hate passkeys because they're always tied to a specific account or a device like a phone. I hate being dependent on phones/devices. That being said I know they solve a lot of problems so....

I still prefer a good password written down in a paper book, with multiple methods of 2FA. But I know there are attack vectors for that.

> will most "explorers" survive in a world where "problem miners" exist?

I think that's the key question. To be honest - I have no idea. You said it right when you said "But motivations are multifaceted and I could see people who value careers over satisfaction winning if AI helps them."

It's a complicated question. I can only speak for myself in that I would not want to participate in what's happening today. But it's entirely possible that people will adapt also and find a new niche for themselves within mathematics even if they're not the miner type.

"There are no smart people or stupid people, just people being smart or being stupid."

I don't know if I really agree with that. I mean, there's definitely some behaviour stuff that can be changed, and some things someone can do to make themselves think more logically and clearly. But what about innate ability? It seems to me that some people just find it easier to make connections and certain kinds of logical thinking comes easier to them than to others with very little effort.

Although perhaps the terminology is a bit dichotomous - smart vs. stupid, which could be misleading also. I mean it's a bit ridiculous to condense ability and wisdom along many dimensions into this single dimension. And it further seems that in common parlance, stupid can mean a variety of things based on context...

Although I get the spirit of the article, I think it's just too much of a simplification to be useful.

> Humans are interested in geometry because we’re interested in building things in the real world.

To clarify and be fair, the people who actually invented geometry, or at least worked on the majority, were never interested in building things. Or at least that wasn't their primary concern.

It's more accurate to say that mathematicians were just interested in intellectual exploration, everyone else was interested in building things, and there's an uneasy alliance between the two that is about to be shattered.

Former pro mathematician here. There's a big divide amongst mathematicians right now. Some like the idea of going full steam ahead with ideas like this, and others are dead-set against it. There's even "The Association for Human Mathematics" [1] which believes in human mathematics and not using AI at all.

The central problem is that the majority of people go into math because they love discovering mathematics and want to participate in the process. That itself is a huge part of the reward. That creates the community. Simply have huge numbers of people outputting math as if it were an industrial factory kills the joy in the process and so in itself destroys the community.

So in short we're seeing a dichotomy between the "problem miners" who are simply hooked on producing results and mining them and "explorers" for lack of a better term.

There's one thing you've got to keep in mind - mathematics, in reality, is mostly useless in the sense that most discoveries these days will always be useless. What is useful generally is teaching, and applying mathematical abstraction to more realistic problems, a skill that you mainly get from dicovering generally useless stuff. (Math for art's sake.) That's how math works, or at least worked before AI. Once you put AI in the mix, it messes up all the incentives....

Personally, I'm 100% anti-AI because I think there's not much point in simply discovering new things if it's not primarily a human journey. It's revolting to have solutions generated by machines like that.

1. https://www.ahmath.org/

Now it seems there are two editors named Pulsar. This, and the successor to Atom.

True! But that doesn't mean we should exacerbate the situation and make it worse....

This looks just like the old HTML, where people would specify everything in the HTML code itself!

I try to avoid Amazon as much as possible. 95% of the products are throwaway junk brands. It's tiring to shop there. I think Amazon is a great example of why competition, while good in most cases, has its limits when the information asymmetry due to overwhelming and opaque choices. I wish those junk, throwaway brands were banned...

No, this is just a fringe perspective based on the hyper-introvert bias in a lot of people on this forum....

I think that's mainly true. Of course, there are specialized applications necessary to connect the data of one program to another or some fringe cases but by and large new software isn't really needed. A lot of it is coded because of an arms race (hackers vs. security) or to take advantage of people (more ways to make them spend money).

Most new tech is just shit.

It somewhat does have an impact on it, because a cool part of recreational programming for SOME people is to share their hobby with others, but the value that others will place on that sharing is diminishing with AI. It's just human nature to value something less or find it less impressive when it can easily be made with a machine.

I'm glad you can just say it. I think if you love computers and programming, then it's natural to hate AI. Especially if you like putting your own touch on your code and figuring out how things work by learning things.

Those that like it seem to like seeing the results more than the learning, especially since there's a lot of attention given to results these days. But hang in there! I also do a lot of programming for my job and I hate AI too, but luckily I don't have to use it. Just protect yourself as much as possible from AI!

This isn't random. It's based on the specific nature of AI. It's a good idea if the entire community doesn't agree with the spirit of AI, which apparently they don't.

Absolutely right! Honestly, I hate AI even though it COULD make me 10x more productive in what I do. I can think of a dozen tasks that AI could help me with.

Audio processing for instance: I process audio by hand, it's more of a rote task, and it takes me hours a week to do it. AI COULD give me what I want in probably one minute. One minute instead of one hour.

But firstly, I've built up my audio processing skill over years and I enjoy it. It's calming. It's not creative, thinking up new stuff-type work but it's calming. And secondly, I want to do things myself. I don't want to let a machine do everything so I can concentrate on the high level stuff.

In fact, what I've found is that my mind works best when I'm NOT concentrating on high-level stuff. When I just go about my tasks by hand.

Do I write code to save time? Yes I do. But I write the code by hand and I understand how things work from first principles, as far as possible of course.

So, I don't use AI. AI could take away hours of work for me and I don't use it because I hate it and I hate the idea it represents.

> Why are they being forced to that dubious trade?

Because it's just the prisoner's dilemma in disguise. Most people don't really like the idea of AI, a lot of people especially outside of programming hate it, and I bet deep down inside a lot of programmers would prefer if AI never existed.

But it's easier to say that AI will bring great wonders because the alternative is acknowledging the reality - the diminishing returns of technology. And that brings a lot of cognitive dissonance if you're a programmer.