Hacker News Reader

Comment by esafak | Hacker News Reader

Isn't this sucking the fun out of math? It's not like we're going to get any tangible benefit out of them, so why not let mathematicians keep their jobs?

View on HN

The thing about math is we don't usually know what is pure fancy and what is civilization altering until far after the discovery. Once in a while it's a real targeted crack at something practical but most often it's collecting things which seem trial until you use them together and suddenly you have computers running LLMs.

If it were really just about funding people who like math to have fun then it's easy to do forever: just don't have them look at the results and keep paying.

What is their pay going to be justified by once computers start conjecturing and proving theorems on their own?

Attending department faculty meetings

We have found the true use case for AI.

This is kind of insane reasoning. It's basically asking "what is their pay going to be justified by once their pay isn't justified?"

I think you're trying to say their pay won't be justified? You are not being clear.

Mathematicians will be the ones who can tell us if the computer theorems are decent or not.

Otherwise they’ll be the ones like Erdős who pose the questions in the first place.

Either way it will always be humans who decide what matters. AI is speaking our languages, not the other way around. We’re in charge. It’s impossible for us not to be, unless we can train an AI from dolphin data or other natural phenomenon.

The AIs intelligence is tuned to us and in 300 years we’ll need new training runs for the update from human zeitgeist language and the 2200 century famous mathematicians.

> Either way it will always be humans who decide what matters. AI is speaking our languages, not the other way around. We’re in charge. It’s impossible for us not to be, unless we can train an AI from dolphin data or other natural phenomenon.

AI companies are accruing power by virtue of its knowledge and ability to do work. If endowed with agency, which seems likely at this rate, it is the AI itself that will be powerful. And we'll be in charge because AI is trained on human language? I can't fathom the logic behind this.

Is this question just for mathematicians in isolation or does it imply the same for most other jobs too? I think the answer for the former is we don't, mathematics would become a hobby the same as we don't hire people to be human calculators anymore because we have machines better st it. For the latter, it depends - some say UBI while the machines do the work, others say dystopia ruled by the machines or their few owners, yet others say anything in between.

Put differently: There is no natural law of the universe of why we pay people to do work. It just works well for us currently. If it stops making sense we do something else that works well for that new currently.

It is for all jobs. We have to be open to new arrangements. I like the recent proposal (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47748123) to tax AI companies that destroy human demand. My point is we have to sort this out now because AI companies are quickly usurping power from labor, and if we wait there will be even more unrest, and worse.

This is pretty much the UBI take. I'm not sure I see a rush to get there before we've even figured out which jobs will actually be replaced and how much work that leaves us (paradoxically, we seem to do more and more work lately as technology enables tasks to be done faster) but I think funding UBI via AI is a nice answer as it kind of wraps itself in the scale of the impact it actually has.

There is real risk in doing it too early as well. Imagine if we thought the same ~50 years ago when microcomputers started to appear. If the tech companies had to pay the salaries of every displaced job we would have ended up with severely hampered progress on computers and then a job shortage as we realized there were just different jobs now, not necessarily no work quite yet.

Isn't the pursuit of knowledge alone good enough?

The job of a mathematician is to study mathematics, not to create proofs.

An automatic proof solver doesn't make mathematicians obsolete any more than the excel sheet made accountants obsolete.

Conjectures and proofs are the fruit of the understanding. Nobody gets paid to think without producing anything.

How about philosophers?

They get paid to produce confusion.

They're getting paid?

It looks like it might confuse you, so they did the job well apparently.

Philosophy majors do surprisingly well in getting jobs outside academia, so I think the market demand for confusion is bigger than you might guess.

At Burger King?

I worked with two philosophy Ph.Ds in corporate strategy years ago. An a chemical engineer, and a nuclear engineer. We were all managing excel documents at the time.

They make cab rides more enjoyable with their deep conversations.

Good example! I think philosophy's purpose is to clarify and systematize unexplored intellectual areas. I imagine philosophers today are already using AI as intellectual sparring partners. I suppose if energy were cheap, we could run AIs all day long to pontificate like humans and write philosophical tracts on the issues of the day. When that happens, we will see if they say anything of merit.

Mathematicians will soon be left only to conjecture, with proofs being automated. The issue I see is that AI will devise proofs that are beyond our comprehension, since humans are already taxing each other (cf. Wiles, Mochizuki, Perelman, etc.) Once humans lose grasp of the proof, how will they propose new conjectures?

That’s the problem, the coupling of work with the right to survive

You went deep ... and I for one appreciate it.

I mean, it doesn’t have to be deep to be meaningful.

The connection between “needing to work” and “right to continue existing” is THE problem with society right now.

You think AI boomers are paranoid because they think robots are going to replace the jobs? People are paranoid because they don’t know how they’re going to exist in a post-work world.

Boomers? I'm a boomer who retired 8 years ago. The youngest boomers hit retirement age in 3 years. It's not boomers who are worried.

Typo on my part, “doomers”

Oh ... never mind! (In the voice of Gilda Radner.)

Hah! Fair call out though, just a typo from me. Hope your Saturday is going well.

In undergraduate math it doesn't matter if someone else did prove a result a hundred years before you. You still need to write your own proof and deeply understand it. Maybe in the most advanced PhD math it can have some impact, but these proofs are becoming intractable by humans alone.

I don't envy the talented young research mathematicians starting their career now. While there's still space to distinguish yourself (inventing completely new mathematics), the path to recognition is narrow.

> Inventing completely new mathematics

There will be fewer good mathematicians, but more great mathematicians!

It's probably more akin to changing where the fun is in maths.

This will keep happening until we stop people from doing it.

Get the looms while you're at it

Reply on news.ycombinator.com