Comment by petilon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by petilon | Hacker News Reader

> We are witnessing a general threat to intellectual work, with misalignment between the outcome of the use of AI and its initial purpose. In many fields and activities, years of training have traditionally served not only to produce a final answer or product, but also to develop understanding and the ability to formulate new questions and ideas. However, building on a vast body of previous human work, AI systems are becoming increasingly capable of producing the results of such work directly, and these goals cease to align.

This is Terry Tao talking about AI's impact on Math, but this could just as well be a software engineer talking about AI's impact on software development.

Do mathematicians deserve more job security than software engineers?

It's not about job security. It's about the social and intellectual practice of the discipline.

The threat to mathematics isn't that suddenly the profitability of their profession (lol) is going to go away, it's that people are thinking of AI as a replacement for the human social and intellectual practices that constitute the discipline.

Kinda crazy to think that academia functions as a kind of humane reverse centaurism. Theory X (reverse centaur) before Theory Y (centaur) for managing the development of others.

> The threat to mathematics isn't that suddenly the profitability of their profession (lol) is going to go away, it's that people are thinking of AI as a replacement for the human social and intellectual practices that constitute the discipline.

You could say the same about software development.

Software development is a group effort, so it includes social practices, and certainly includes intellectual practices as well.

For the sake of argument, how is this different from the Luddites? The Luddites feared that machines would displace not only human labor, but also the social knowledge, skilled judgment, and craft traditions embedded in their work.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com