I'm sure most research mathematicians would like more freedom from some of the drudgery of their work (grading, admin, etc.), just like the rest of us. But we should be aiming for a world that allows more people to become mathematicians, not fewer.
Yeah. UBI. We'll probably be seeing that in the next 15 years.
(In Europe, at least. In America the culture may not be able to stomach it, and I see even odds of a massive fake jobs program instead.)
Many of the fields that were traditionally considered for "smart" people (STEM etc.) are the ones that are being really hammered by AI. Whereas, things which people considered lightweight often involving social relationships and interpersonal skills are still beyond the scope of AI (much of it even theoretically beyond the scope although perhaps robots might have an effect there).
There used to be a sysad T-shirt from the BOFH days "Go away or I'll replace you with a very small shell script" which pushed the idea that whatever could be replaced by a computer was something trivial. Now we find that the things which we thought were only for "smart people" are the very things being replaced by computer programs which is telling. Perhaps what we considered tough and smart really wasn't.
Found it:
> Rodney Brooks explains that, according to early AI research, intelligence was "best characterized as the things that highly educated male scientists found challenging", such as chess, symbolic integration, proving mathematical theorems and solving complicated word algebra problems. "The things that children of four or five years could do effortlessly, such as visually distinguishing between a coffee cup and a chair, or walking around on two legs, or finding their way from their bedroom to the living room were not thought of as activities requiring intelligence. Nor were any aesthetic judgments included in the repertoire of intelligence-based skills.
The things like proving complicated theorems are things that are acquired by education within a lifetime, and that's why they're easy for AI.
The things a child can do are acquired through millions of years of evolution. While they don't require much explicit education, that doesn't mean they're easier.
As an example, the kid who can solve Math problems has less of an edge over AI than the kid who automatically becomes the captain of the neighbourhood football team but older human beings often assume that the former is smarter.
> "it is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility."
Also, who do you think were the vast majority of AI researcher in the 50s, 60s, 70s?
What reason is that?
The toilet brush is a much better tool for unclogging the average toilet.
The plunger is actually meant to unclog sinks as far as I can tell, since it can attach much better to the sink and through its action can create pressure to unclog the much smaller sink drain pipe.
Way to miss the mark (and also shift the discussion to woke conversation points on a comment from 4+ decades ago).
The point of his entire comment is that it seems like the "hard things" (aka abstract science) will be a lot harder for AI than "easy things" (a 5 year old or a dog understanding their environment in great detail, from depth perception to smells, sounds, etc, etc).
Your comment looks like it was written by exactly the kind of man Brooks was mocking.
Pick and place robots, or humanoid robots that can fold laundry, are still a lot tougher than automating knowledge workers and a lot more expensive to the point it's questionable if they're worth it.
We may not be on a path to assured destruction, we may be on a path to becoming livestock.
5 guys were on that truck. 1 driver and 4 guys that actually lifted up various shaped trash cans and dumped them into the truck.
Today I live in an apartment complex. 100 families take their trash to the compactor. 1 guy in a garbage truck comes once a week to collect the compacted refuse.
I wonder what happened to the other 4 guys. 80% of the garbage collecting labor… freed up to do something of higher value.
Maybe they cured cancer.
L
What you propose makes fine rhetorical sense, and I can assure you it did reach me, it's just that a (very) cursory search yielded me no significant employment rate changes or drastic layoffs in the related sector over the decades. Instead, it suggested that people have been reshuffled to do waste sorting and other related activities rather, and that the field actually grew, directly contradicting your smug, sarcasm-laden, willfully demagogue framing. Traits that are not exactly the hallmark of epistemic rigor to begin with, nor do they further it, even if the given narrative did hold up.
It's so easy to be asinine and make up a story, especially when one feels morally justified in doing so, and considers the base facts & analogy to be "obviously correct". I don't think that setting people up for failure by feeding them correct sounding lies - or sending related discourse into a nosedive in quality just to get in some cheap zingers - would help the cause a whole lot though. Do you?
Put differently, it helps if the example provided actually holds up as an example for the topic discussed. Especially if that example is as dramatic as 80% of a given job disappearing, and the people involved just plain losing their livelihood supposedly.
Serfs, all right, but in what world do you live where "computers", people who did manual computing (i.e. mechanical additions/multiplications/... with very large numbers) are the same as actual research mathematicians, who are basically pure logicians?
The only perspective where it makes sense to root for mathematicians to go away is if you're a misandrist that thinks humanity should be replaced by robots (for reasons...). Or isn't logic something that's a defining human trait, and one of the main reasons we became the dominant species on the planet?