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Comment by shimman | Hacker News Reader

Of course there's a meaningful analogy. The poster wants to make Tao sound unreasonable and against "progress" while ignoring the very real concerns Tao has.

It's what fanatics do when they want to enforce their view on the world, they have to attack anyone with a reasonable viewpoint because they can't imagine a world where someone tells them they don't like what they're doing.

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I do not want to make him sound unreasonable. He is a brilliant man. But I also think that he is a bit shell shocked, much like other luminaries in the past have been when confronted with rapid technological development, so I wanted to highlight some historical similarities, imperfect as they can only be.

As for the rest of your comment, I hope you have a great day.

He’s not shell-shocked. He’s had an extremely consistent narrative for years now. You are experiencing a bias where you project your own views onto others, probably because you are not very informed on this.

> But I also think that he is a bit shell shocked, much like other luminaries in the past have been when confronted with rapid technological development

You're locked into that idea, but provide no real argument. The dangers they describe in the letter are real.

This goes back to not liking the idea of consent and having to establish an entire worldview to justify actions against someone's consent.

It's the work of authoritarians and needs to be rightly called out.

Tao is quite the opposite of what you describe. He's had an ongoing dialogue intellectually with the challenges created by ai for mathematicians for some time (years) now and his viewpoint is quite balanced. He is not alarmist but rather correctly addresses the real problems ai advances create for mathematicians traditional way of working.

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