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Comment by E-Reverance | Hacker News Reader

Jacob Tsimerman claims [1] we might have superhuman expositors by April, so then what?

[1] https://youtu.be/H7_d_sgui6o?t=4436 (timestamped url)

The people building AI claim it will surpass human intelligence in all respects and prerhaps kill us all. Should we just cease all human activity on the basis of what AI might do in future?

Personally, I doubt AI can surpass a good human explainer because explanation requires empathy, which benefits from being an instance of the kind of entity you are explaining the thing to. That gives you a way of exploring and evaluating the space of possible explanations that isn't available to an LLM.

Thanks for pointing me to this video - it's been interesting to follow the discussion! (I personally don't see that math has lost its purpose at all in the past months. I mean, where would we be, if we were thrown at these AI based mathematical proofs and had no mathematicians and specialists?! Much of this discussion is about a disciplin readjusting its way of work and tasks.)

You get $100 billion for an AI X that generates the proofs, $100 billion for an AI Y that explains the proofs and another $100 billion for an AI Z that reads Y's output and appreciates it.

Humans meanwhile scrub the floor and write blog posts about "what a time to be alive".

> Humans meanwhile scrub the floor and write blog posts about "what a time to be alive".

I'm pretty sure we already have machines to do both of these.

It's all good until we have superhuman appreciators :)

That which has received the Mandate of Sapience must be cool (eg any skateboarder skilled enough to impress his mom)

LLMs got It, sometime this year. Terry Tao and Friends have appatently lost It, same time this year. (This is not to claim that the Mandate gets extended to their creators the frontier labs or even Jeff Dean et al. Definitely not their sponsors. Howbout distillers?)

The thing about Mandates--- they are not forever. LLMs can "lose" It. Probably not back to mathematicians -- that'd be atypical (unless they quickly learn to "make their own lightsabers"?) . Likelier: to a scene of humans no-one yet thinks about.

Skateboarders didn't take the Mandate from anyone. So no one takes It from them. There's some karmic law at play

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