I mean, one of the leading mathematicians at the moment, is expected to spent his time collating conference statistics? Does he not have an assistant for this kind of thing?
So yeah, “only”.
University could have paid for Terence Tao’s assistant, but then they could have paid him more too.
If you expand your point of view to the interests of all mathematicians, or society at large, the waste here is even more extravagant.
To the GP's point, a friend of mine makes 80k but is still provided an assistant. That's in the entertainment industry, where PA's are dirt cheap and union laws prohibit multitasking.
Either salaries in the US are extremely higher than what I thought, you have a very idiosyncratic definition of "good" or you are significantly overestimating how much people make.
The point is that amongst people that I know who are making 500k, the majority of them aren’t having assistants. And I do think it extrapolate to the population of people with 500k income too (no proof here, just a hunch).
In the case of this post, one could argue that collating statistics should be done by ICM staff rather than the committee chair.
For example, this article [1] says that to be in the top 1% of earners in the US a family needs to make $600k or more. There are 330 million people in the US, meaning that 3.3 million people are in a household earning $600k or more. I think that's a lot!
[1] https://smartasset.com/data-studies/what-it-takes-to-be-in-t...
That is a bit more than 1/9th of what the head football coach at UCLA makes, who has two assistants (offensive and defensive coordinators) who each earned a bit more than Tao. Additionally, UCLA still paid more than $3M in 2021 to another head football coach whom they had fired in 2017. The university seems to have fairly clearly defined priorities.
https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/university-of-califo....
But even IF this were a profitable activity, should a university really be in the business of running an enterprise that literally causes irreversible brain damage (Story about USC, but undoubtedly applies to all football programs: https://www.si.com/college/2020/10/07/usc-and-its-dying-line...)?
With respect to the brain damage, he spent much longer in the professional setting than college, it’s more likely the damage came from there. I don’t think colleges should be in the business of restricting what students should be allowed to explore based on the possibility they might choose a career where brain damage may occur. And if they did, Engineering should be the first to go. Just think of all the brain damage resulting from professionals engineers of the military industrial complex!
Every numbskull to every professor now has the ability to generate information on a scholarly level and solve problems that could take a human years of training and experience to produce.
I'm really trying hard not to get all doom and gloom about this stuff, but I'm honestly worried. It keeps me up at night.
Mass unemployment is a likely outcome, but modern states already have amazing safety nets in place and they're not far away from a universal basic income.
As technology has improved, so has life on almost all relevant metrics (education, longevity, poverty, crime etc.) and even though technology amplifies greed, criminals do not prevail because they are heavily selected against seemingly regardless of the level of technological sophistication.
As for paperclippers, there is actually no indication that larger neural nets misinterpret human intention. Rather, larger NNs mostly become better at understanding. Current AIs when prompted to make paperclips do not interpret this as us wanting to turn the entire world into paper clips, but in terms of (the more sensible interpretation) of meeting the economic demand for paperclips, hence giving advice on how to optimize the machinery for producing paperclips etc. Small models do tend to find weird, unintended shotcuts, but my hunch is we are seeing this less with very large NNs.
Lastly, we can always employ AIs to control other AIs. AI scammers will be counteracted by scam detection AIs. Same for fake news, mind control, drone warfare, propaganda, etc. AI will allow us to make better political arguments against mass surveillance and for freedom, and it will make journalism more efficient at exposing crime and injustice. Demonopolizing AI is hence extremely important, so that every misuse of AI or misaligned AI can be counteracted by other AIs.
very few western and east asian nation have that. 80% of population dont have safety net
I'm hopeful about the future use of AI, but this strikes me as potentially overly optimistic. Or possible misinterprets what academics do.
ChatGPT is very good at collating existing information. I don't know that it is anywhere near the level of creativity necessary to generate novel ideas (especially those that have to be rooted in reality to solve engineering problems).
For example, if you ask "How can we redesign a Wankel engine to achieve 2% better efficiency?" it does give a good summary of the main mechanisms that impact efficiency (thermal losses, friction, combustion efficiency) but it doesn't give any actionable, novel ways of implementing them. It's basically a 101 course summary of combustion engines. "Generate better materials" is not an actionable solution. So unless you think a freshman/sophomore understanding is all that's needed to solve our big problems, we've still got a ways to go before we can turn the reins over to AI.
I think a lot of people misunderstand what a scholarly level is. ChatGPT is not even close.
Unfortunately, professors currently have to spend a lot of time doing tedious administrative/organizational work unrelated to research/teaching.