Radiolab: Math vs Machine

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5 points·kohsuke··3 comments

I think I get the genuine fear of mathematicians like Steve, that the understanding of math might be about to slip from the hands of the humans. That is an uncharted territory.

OTOH, at the individual level, for 99% of humanity, the frontier of math has long escaped their understandings. Collectively, we function as a network, and guess what this network uses to communicate, languages!

This network has been incorporating non-human intelligence for a while now, so I'm failing to see how math is special and different.

I dunno, sometimes I wonder wha the point of all this progress is. what’s the point? What are we racing towards? At the end of all of this is death.

There are other philosophies and ways of living in the world and it feels like we’re abandoning them all for progress accelerationism. Even if that progress leads to our extinction

And I get a lot of use out of AI! But philosophically I would give it up in a heartbeat.

We don’t actually seem to have a coherent philosophy of what we’re doing here. So build AI to automate all the things, and then what? What happened to our ability to dream and make manifest a better life for ourselves?

I hear you. I think a lot of people are asking some variants of that existential question. The question itself isn’t new, but you are right, AI has been a catalyst for many to ask this question.

I don’t think humans ever had “a coherent philosophy of what we’re doing” for anything. That shouldn’t be a surprise because we all act on our individual philosophy and motivation. People pushing AI forward certainly has those.

Personally, I’m finding a lot more joy lately outside tech. Riding a bicycle. Cooking. Painting. There isn’t any point in any of those, aside from the fact that I’m having fun doing those.

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