Hacker News Reader

Comment by _alternator_ | Hacker News Reader

This series of posts by Terry Tao is a direct response to the Navier-Stokes results (multiple results!) from the last 24 hours. The question is what is left after the levelling of mathematics, in all its senses, occurs? How can you protect a field that's under this much pressure in the next 6 months?

> [I]t is now the identification of a promising problem which is the scarce and precious resource. We have now seen that even the rumor of someone working on a problem can trigger a massive amount of AI-powered effort to flatten it before the original research project has time to reach its full potential.

View on HN

If math is solved then move to an area that’s not. Why do fields need “protecting” from ai?

Have you read his tweets?

yes but the tweets don't really address why the field needs to be protected instead of adapting and evolving.

And to reply to the sibling since I hit my comment limit and I'm going to probably forget about this conversation until tomorrow:

But our situation before 2023 was one in which we had an endless abundance of solutions and ideas. I understand that AI can generate bad ideas faster than we can discern them, but we already have tried and true mechanisms to filter good ideas from bad (e.g. the scientific process), why can't they be adapted?

The reason is because the entirety of society, historically, has been based upon humans using their differential skills to further it, which in turn promotes societal cohesion. If most human endeavours are solved, then we will enter a period of abundance that paradoxically will erode the glue holding society together. In short, endless abundance of solutions and ideas cannot coexist with a healthy society. Only those who are priveleged and have a naive belief in a Star Trek utopia think otherwise.

This far into history I don't think many are going to buy a "the next technology is to be the undoing of society itself" pitch until after society is already undone by something. They're as easy to make and hard to concretely evaluate ahead of time as the utopian predictions while offering little in the way of practical approach to preventing the same result from occurring anyways.

>endless abundance of solutions and ideas cannot coexist with a healthy society.

This really cuts to the heart of the problem with AI. Not only does AI undermine the monetary economy, it undermines the intellectual economy. What is humanity without the need for collaboration for survival or for intellectual progress, ultimately providing the impetus to build something greater as a result? I don't know, and I'm not looking forward to finding out.

I mean the past 10 to 20 years of social media have shown a lot of societies glue already breaking.

A society can live just fine in a period of abundance. The societies that we currently have on earth do make it questionable of 'we' can right now. I mean I see people posting stuff like "I'd rather burn it all to the ground rather than see one cent more tax" kind of stuff when they have millions. That kind of person doesn't want more people uplifted and it takes away from their idea of being special.

>naive belief in a Star Trek

The naive ones don't read into ST lore to know it comes after WWIII.

The dangerous ones do.

Yes, the glue is already breaking and AI is the next stage in the process.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_fetishism

Math can never be fully solved by a computer, if only for lack of computational resources.

Math can never be solved, depending on exactly what set of axioms you're using. Certain problems can be though.

> How can you protect a field that's under this much pressure in the next 6 months?

Sounds like they're going the way of the DoDo. better take that PhD, migrate to the new world and become a tuktuk driver.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com