rubikscube09

Eh, mathematicians themselves have started embracing it. Terence Tao talks about how LLMs will be on the frontlines, proving new results and humans will just be there to digest and explain them (if the LLMs don't end up being able to do that as well). It's valuable work but not what I really signed up for.

Sure, this is in agreement with some people's view that math will become an empirical science. Basically humans probing/mining the brain of an LLM.

PhD student in math here. Doing LLM math is soulless and takes most of the fun out of solving difficult problems (for the most part - my opinion only, I'm happy to talk to mathematicians who like this kind of work). But ultimately the public funds us to produce and understand as many mathematical results as possible for downstream use (if you ask OpenAI/Anthropic, to cure cancer). In that case it doesn't matter who figures a result whether it be a human, LLM, or dog.

So what are we to do? Follow our duty to the community and the public, which is to produce as many results as possible? Or to follow our duty to ourselves and enjoy and understand what we are doing? To someone like me those things seem to be incorrigably opposed to each other now. At this pint the only option is to quit and find a new domain where human input in problem solving is still necessary.

Sure it is a construct (it's how I feel at least).

I didn't mean to say sewing and knitting weren't impactful - on the contrary, they are analogous to programming: they were impactful but now they're basically hobbies. Maybe there are more developments left in the clothing making process - not sure.

Fair enough. I don't mean to speak for all programmers (I'm not one). In fact I'm an academic so that's probably why I'm upset.

yes, that's my point.

when i say haven't worked a day in their life, I mean it in terms of the aphorism "if you love what you'll do you'll never work a day in your life".

I'm just saying that before programmer feelings used to be loosely aligned with advancing society: fun work (for some people) was useful work. Now that's starting to be decoupled and it sucks when your choices are hate your job and contribute or do fun stuff and don't contribute. Granted this is the dilemma most people have faced, but for people who like their work as it is right now it sucks.

for sure but the point is that sewing isn't really necessary anymore. if all the knitters disappeared tomorrow, the majority of society wouldn't feel it . If (say a few years ago) all SWEs disappeared, that would be a problem for a lot of people. The feeling of impactfulness is gone when things are reduced to a hobby.

probably not, but my main gripe would be that there would be no way to punish anyone if something went wrong with the car, not (necessarily) that human judgement or expertise is still needed as part of the car design process.

So yes, maybe we will all just exist to get sued at the end of the day.

No you're right - I guess I meant moreso that you seemed to be expressing incredulity that people live this way. It's natural to identify with something you spend the majority of your day doing (especially if you like it or perhaps have stockholm'd yourself into liking it)

but so many things we have are black boxes now. do people need to understand how cars work to drive them properly?

And even if you understand how it works, how does it affect your day-to-day function or the advancement of the field? As Apple liked to say, It Just Works (TM).

that probably makes it feel even worse for most people

imagine spending years to develop mastery of something that anyone can do now? For example, sitting your ass down in college, debugging lines of code on a Saturday night while people are out partying? It's fun to do, sure, but there's still a huge opportunity cost.

It's easy to say that such people are prideful, arrogant, only cares about being better than others, but I think such a feeling sucks for 99% of the population that are not siddharthas.

ok and? both are allowed to suck? most people have lived for 10s of years not 10s of thousands of years so it's not like that "ancestral memory" matters anyways.

It's debatable depending on who you're talking to whether taste is more "important" than execution/the mechanical part (I think calling it the mechanical part is a little misleading because that suggests one is brainlessly implementing a fixed algorithm). Maybe for the manager/CEO types who have a grand pie in the sky vision that they need an army to implement "taste" is more important. But I think for the artist themselves being able to spawn something into existence with their own labor is a large part of the experience.

Yes, we'll have lots more art for people to enjoy, but fewer artists.

yeah there's no point developing skills anymore.

It's just tough to hear a mainstream "impactful" line of work be compared to knitting and sewing. Say what you want but people thought that their work was necessary to the advancement of society, or at least something bigger than themselves. Whether you agree with them or not, reduction of the job to a hobby takes that away from them.

Wouldn't people who thought programming was fun be even more upset that they can't do it (a certain way they used to) as a job anymore? That they were never working a day in their life before and now have to work every day?

what's wrong with who you are being defined by something?

well, this is what happens as people move up the needs later (as ted kaczynski said) - they turn to other activities outside of basic survival for fulfillment.

And of course in a society based on protestant capitalism, it's clear why work and happiness and work are so strongly coupled. I'm sure things are different in most of europe.

But again, academia and math are things people only do because they really love doing them and can't imagine doing anything else all day.

sure, but we're talking about math here.

It's an interesting thought experiment: how many human lives would cost you one LLM?

there is value in the craft itself, and in creating value. now one half of the bargain is gone. you feel like you're just playing games now and not contributing anything (which tbf, math was before to some degree anyway).

yes, but LLMs can hold all this data and once they are trained they blow any human out of the water. It takes a few years for an LLM to ingest the entire internet. No human will ever be able to do that.

I think calling people like the op (and using quotation marks) those who 'love typing special characters into a computer' is a total strawman. I don't think OP is mourning being a typist lol.

the people who develop mastery also deal with all the things you've mentioned as well ... PhD students are famously some of the loneliest, worst paid, stressed, and mentally ill people on the planet (in the developed world). Imagine pulling 80 hour weeks while being paid 35k a year.

I am at an R1 school, I know at least 4 or 5 people personally (Profs and Postdocs) whose entire research programs were annihilated. Like they wrote grant proposals that are totally obsolete now.

To be fair LLMs can be used in an empowering way to learn, etc. But at that point it feels disingenuous - why not just one shot the problem and get the result more efficiently than just babying it around?

And yeah, fair enough. I guess my bio sample size is limited, but many of the PhD students I've seen in the experimental sciences seem to operate this way a majority of the time. I remember my brain being absolutely fried after 4 hours of thinking about math, only to hear these folks say they pulled a 12 hour shift in the lab. And I'm just like - how? In any case it's all anecdotes from me so feel free to ignore them.

Interesting - thanks for your perspective! I just took Scott's comments mostly at face value.

In any case, I think most researchers have been filling the convex hull (and have been enjoying doing so?) for most of their research. So even if Einstein provided something truly necessary, there's a reason there's only one Einstein (or grothendieck or insert famous name here). I know that's moving the goalposts but yeah.

Me too - as a depressed PhD student, the only math I've been doing lately is problem sets for courses, because they're fun and help me pass the class.

But the fact of the matter is that the purpose of my program and of research isn't to work on solved problems but to solve new ones. And the machine seems to be better than me in basically every way in this regard.

it barely accommodates anyone today