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Comment by simianwords | Hacker News Reader

This pattern of argument keeps repeating in every place.

Pro tech people: technology removes bottlenecks. Sometimes we use those bottlenecks as a side effect to build muscle and so on. But removing bottlenecks gives us much higher degrees of freedom. It is up to us to coordinate and make use of the technology.

Anti tech people: bottlenecks are fundamentally useful. They should remain and technology shouldn't remove those so easily. Humans cannot coordinate as well when the bottlenecks are removed, so lets not remove them so quickly.

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>It is up to us to coordinate and make use of the technology.

1) Coordination is hard, and 2) "us" is a hopelessly nebulous term that appears inclusive but is almost always exclusive.

I think people would have said the creation of social media platforms like Facebook was neither good or bad, but rather it was "up to us to coordinate and make use of".

But did our society really have a say over how Facebook and other social media sites were able to embed themselves in our everyday lives? I would argue the answer is no.

I can only suggest reading the letter with open mind and literally, without uncharitable bias towards the authors or conspiracy mindset.

Its not a conspiracy. Its 25 fields medalists who think exactly like how I put it. Ideally, they can just take whatever the technology gives as soon as possible and use it. They don't want it because they don't think the community can rearrange and coordinate such that they can make use of the new found degrees of freedom.

That's literally all there is to it - they don't believe in the rearrangement.

I can only envy the insight you have into thought processes of 25 fields medalists. Wish I could have that.

you must have been so smug writing this. But I wanted to engage in a discussion.

From your other replies it's clear you still haven't read the letter. There is little to discuss so far.

Discussion is indeed impossible if you're trying to insist that this garbage anti-AI letter is anything other than just that.

FWIW it didn't sound accusatory to me, it made me think the anti tech people might have a point.

It’s not even anti-tech though. Terence Tao signed it. The commenter above reduces the conversation to a false dichotomy.

Anti immediate-tech-progess-as-primary-objective?

I don’t think the letter is even anti-tech progress. I also don’t think the tech companies are primarily pro-math progress (not that I think you think that). It’s primarily “anti-unnecessarily-destroy-the-human-systems-of-mathematics-just-for-benchmarks-and-marketing”

> … the push by AI companies to solve mathematical problems as a benchmark is detrimental to the science of mathematics, and to the mathematical community. The goals of the AI companies and the goals of the mathematical community are severely misaligned.

Counterpoint: I'm not anti tech at all. In fact, I sell an AI harness for legal.

I think you've set up a false dichotomy. I'd propose to you the middle ground that a lot of us are concerned that VC-backed AI slop is "solving" problems in indigestible ways that hollow out the core. This applies in OSS as well as mathematics.

Please help me understand this and I'm asking this in good faith.

Why can't OpenAI publish whatever it wants. And the math community can use it or not use it. Fundamentally OpenAI's solutions are high signal - they are incentivised to not deliberately mislead people. Let the individuals in math community choose to read it or understand it? If OpenAI wants to publish something, let them do it in the current channels using peer review using whatever time is required.

What's wrong with this? The math community thinks this will destroy previously unwritten ways of prestige allocation and remove incentives that used to exist. I say that the community can rearrange and allocate prestige and time in different ways to maximally use the technology.

>Why can't OpenAI publish whatever it wants. And the math community can use it or not use it.

The "math community" is not an isolated entity that is free from the confines of society. It's made up of lots of people who coexist in a system that requires you to assert your right to live.

Furthermore, the "math community" is overwhelmingly supported by outside donations to keep it running. That's not to say people don't practice math for the fun of it, but that if you're researching problems like Navier-Stokes, you almost certainly are being paid by another party to do so. But those parties may hold new forms of technology over the professional mathematicians head in the name of "productivity", or they may even believe in light of this tech that paying a human to practice math is no longer worth it.

Therefore, mathematicians find themselves coerced by the market to adopt new tools in order to get by, even if the mathematical community largely finds it distasteful.

It feels like the scene from Blazing Saddles where Mel Brooks' character says "We've got to protect our phony-baloney jobs, gentlemen."

If the math community was previously not entirely aligned with what society was expecting, and these changes threaten that previous arrangement, that sounds like a "you" problem for math, not a problem for OpenAI.

If they can't align with society's needs and demands then some creative destruction is coming their way.

Well said. It’s on them to adapt. They make it look like it’s society’s problem (which it is) but also put the ball on OpenAI’s court which it shouldn’t.

Next time you devote 20 years to developing the skills to further humanity only for an unethical group of people to replace you with a stolen version of your work let’s talk.

I did! Went to college for CS, glad that I'm being replaced, and happy to see the end of human labor.

>and happy to see the end of human labor.

How is a chatbot going to end human labor? Where are the millions of robots required to do all the various other jobs in the economy.

You and everyone else with this rhetoric must see AI as the rapture or something.

> Where are the millions of robots required

You're kidding, right?

https://shop.unitree.com/ https://www.figure.ai/ etc

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do you think about where your resentment is coming from?

That's some prime gaslighting you're doing there.

So what you're saying is that, if the same work can be done with fewer resources, that money can be better used elsewhere now?

They can use the new proofs as foundations for future proofs.

But many folks just won't be motivated to attack or help digest solved problems because there's less extrinsic value in doing so. Tao and others argue that it's this human effort that finds human-relatable abstractions which spurn further investigation. Take the humans out of the loop, and they'll stay there, is the argument as I understand it.

I read this multiple times and also recollected the original letter. You can’t really blame me for thinking this is a straaaange request.

“Don’t help me solve my problems because it removes the incentive to be in this field” is how I hear it. Honestly.

I would say the incentives HAVE to change because of new found capabilities.

Imagine accountants asking companies to reconsider producing calculators because we used to value accountants for how well they did arithmetic!!

Edit: my main point is that the math community has full agency to do what it wants with new found tech. Instead, asking to change external entities like OpenAI to be careful with releases is a strange thing to do. Why not change yourself and adapt?

>community can rearrange

You're describing an improvised surgery on a living organism. Developing a complex system involving humans that is productive and doesn't collapse is extremely hard, so if it ain't broke don't fix it.

But man this is ridiculous. 25 field medalists don’t accept agency in their own community but try to push external people to change their process??

Why can’t the letter say “guys new tech dropped. We need to reorganise. Understanding is crucial” instead of asking OpenAI to change their process.

Might have to do with the circumstances of Open AIs conduct that was quite sketchy to say the least? There is 25 people who see it as their responsibility to use their status in the field of maths to weigh in on public discourse regarding that field.

> Might have to do with the circumstances of Open AIs conduct that was quite sketchy to say the least?

OpenAI did nothing wrong, being a Fields medalist does not give anyone a monopoly on the truth.

receiving a prize for math or any other discipline doesn't even mean the person was right or truthful. just sayin'.

Fields medalists aren't made on some Fields factory. These are 25 people from different backgrounds, generations, educational institutions and countries. It's kind of incredible you guys think they decided to collude against OpenAI rather than simply addressing a concern about their field they believe is important.

I am aware of this. As I am aware they at times decide not to give anyone one... shrug.

Mathematicians were somewhat wiser in the 1960s but the biologists and social sciences never were.

Never said they were colluding. I said I have no patience for incumbents asking for restrictions on a technology that threatens the value of their expertise.

That’s because you have literally no idea about anything you’re weighing in on.

This is just fucking absurd.

The Math community can "not use" a proof? How would that work? It's a little like coloured functions (async etc) - you have 'human proved' vs 'machine proved'?

Are you suggesting that a human can't have the agency to decide whether to use it or not?

No, obviously not ...

I'm pointing out that the way Mathematics works as a discipline is that a new proof builds on existing proofs. If we have a bunch of machine-generated proofs, then a human Mathematician has to decide whether to reference any relevant machine proof that has been put out there.

If, as you suggest, human Mathematicians 'choose to ignore' a machine proof, then another human decides not to, what then? Mathematics bifurcates into 'pure human' proofs and 'mixed machine-human' or maybe 'pure machine'?

Well ok I understand your point. I’m trying to say the system has to change to adapt.

Imagine accountants saying the same thing against calculators. They had to adapt. So do mathematicians. So do I in software development.

Consider that 'calculator' used to be a title for a role a human used to do. That went away, which is probably fine as there were other jobs and likely it was tedious.

Then consider that "just adapt" could be "adapt or die", and that maybe, just maybe there is no way to adapt to well-funded corporations churning out millions of proofs a minute.

I don't know, maybe AI companies have "agency" to not break everyone else's stuff, just to get more funding and a higher share price?

The dichotomy is more 'human understood' vs 'not human understood', I think

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