"But Jobs" they scream and hijack the council to block new housing. I'm sorry folks, the point of housing isn't the jobs it creates, the point of housing is housing! New jobs ARE actually created, they are just higher leverage ones in the house factory.
Mathematicians are now facing the same... calculation (pun intended). And I think they are empowered to create a lot more leverage, and they shouldn't be afraid of it. A lot of them are catching on to this [1]
I don't think any of these AI layoffs are actually because AI replaced a human. I think a lot of the layoffs are actually just due to a faltering economy or greedy companies trying desperately to get a piece of the pie, so they're sacrificing their long game for short term gambles. I don't think that's going to pay off for them.
They don't seem to realize that 100X the resources have been dumped into building coding/design tools as other industries. As soon as that hose gets turned towards their industry they are going to be in a similar or worse boat.
I personally do wonder (worry) about where all of this pans out and what society looks like post generative llms. But at the same time there is a particular flavor of amusement that I can't help feeling watching folks simultaneously balance, "llms produce nothing of value" and "llms are so harmful and dangerous to our culture that we need to start policing use within our community"
Where that harm essentially stems from devaluing hard earned skills within the community. And while I do not take joy in the displacement of labor, never in my wildest dreams could I have anticipated how harsh and irrational of a reaction to the equity of these skills could be. Which, I would like to point out, though hard earned were earned under the tremendous privilege to pursue these goals in the first place.
Llms are an amplifier of an individuals intuition and taste. That these supposed pillars of the community are not bravely exploring how to push and wrangle these bounds, and instead are retracting into conservative stances under the guise of human centric morality is (IMHO) demonstrative of lack of confidence and creativity within these fields more generally.
I believe that this lack of creativity and imagination is how we find ourselves in the personal fable you're noting: the experts are so myopic that they can't even imagine how they're field can be disrupted until it's disrupted outside of their control, and feel the need to control rather than explore.
So I suspect that the cloud will pass on math too, initial demos get extrapolated and people get worried but in the end slop is slop and serious people aren’t getting replaced or even threatened.
If you think 'most people are completely put off by AI slop', you're living in a blessed bubble because: most people cannot even tell that the slop is slop, and are happy to engorge themselves on it.
The markets that have replaced writers and artists with slop never valued them in the first place, and the markets that do will never replace them with AI, and I say this as an AI engineer.
Writing movies, writing theater, creating clearly original illustrations for various purposes, these are all tasks AI will never threaten, because there is just no point. And also, the market sizes for this kind of thing are a rounding error compared to say coding or back office automation which is incidentally the bulk of the token spend right now, confirming all this.
I found myself thinking about this issue when I was experimenting with an MCP server to handle tuning some precision parameters for scientific simulations. Claude did a much better job than I used to do when I was a fresh PhD student, yet being given tasks like that was how I learned, so it almost felt like pulling the ladder up after myself.
In the sciences, I think this is less of a problem because the PhD to scientist pipeline is pretty normalized, labs are used to the idea of having to let younger people take longer on problems that experienced people could solve much faster. But this doesn't seem to be as normalized elsewhere.
I think most knowledge workers don’t like AI because most of them are aware that AI was created to replace them.
Just about every CEO that has given a speech about AI at universities have gotten booed by the students which isn’t surprising as those CEOs are effectively promoting technology that will take their future from them.
it is demographics.. there is no single answer, you are talking about millions of people with varying amounts of this JOB description
> most people are completely put off by AI slop
this is almost pathological.. most people consume media not produce it. Those in the business of media have been eliminating people for thirty years, and this AI tooling has multiplied that effect
> the value of XXXX writing or image generation generation is basically zero
yes - bingo.. the average capable person now can expect to be paid ZERO for their ability to personally produce writing or image generation.. and, if you don't start somewhere, you will never get to ascend the ladder of success in those fields, by definition
> I suspect that the cloud will pass on math too
consistent with the other statements here, this is 180 degrees false.. substantiation? the content of the letter signed by world class mathematicians, who are visibly quite concerned
Certainly the scenario where a human touch isn't valued by the market raises lots of very difficult philosophical and economic questions but that's a separate issue.
No, it does not, at least for arts. There is a chance, that AI will free art from it's utility or the necessary to create value. Maybe graphic designers and illustrators will lose their jobs due automatization, but most paid art (concept work, corporate design) was instrumental compromise anyway. Take away the commercial floor and what's left is the part they cared about most. Engineers on the other hand identify mostly by being optimizators and creating value. They may keep their jobs, but at what cost?
> Engineers like to build finished products, not wallow in minutia
This only works if what you loved was having built the thing. If what you loved was the building itself, the solving, then "here's a way bigger system, the AI figured it out" isn't a win. It's just a promotion from maker to manager. And a lot of engineers specifically tried to avoid this promotion in their career.
Of course AI threatens this too, but the threat is of a much lesser degree. One could even argue that AI is helpful here with getting mathematicians to the 'frontier of knowledge' as AI is usually good in combining ideas from different fields.