That's why I prefer my Wisephone 2. You can still use slack, whatsapp, teams, banking apps, spotify, google maps, etc. But there is no browser, email, youtube, tiktok, etc., either.
70 karma · joined November 8, 2022
1) Keep the average mathematician employed doing redundant mathematics just to have capable humans around. Every now and then you get one of those mathematicians actually developing new ideas, but most departments will entirely be just for show. It's doable though. College sports is able to keep itself going along these lines (and I mean the track, softball, and polo type sports).
2) You get unemployed mathematicians who were still developing their abilities. And as a result you lose the institutions that generate the mathematicians that contribute new ideas.
You get to keep the handful of exceptional mathematicians that are developing new ideas, and that's survivable if you happen to be a Fields medalist. None of this really has to do with the AI companies aligning themselves to giving credit and developing insights. If AI companies became aligned to that, then the AI's would be replacing the Fields medalists, too.
Why can't the mathematicians that value their own community remain aloof from what AI companies are doing. Can't they continue to take their time digesting proofs, gaining insights, and attributing credit to mathematicians doing good work. Here's how I perceive the situation:
Before:
- mathematicians digest current results and develop insights
- insights lead to new results
- new results give mathematicians an opportunity to credit those insights
Now:
- AI companies release a bunch of potentially uncredited proofs
- mathematicians digest these results and gain insights
- mathematicians recapitulate AI proofs in terms of their deeper insights and theory
- mathematicians give credit for these new insights and progress in understanding, even though the binary true-false status of theorems were already determined beforehand.
If the true-false status itself isn't real mathematics, then mathematicians still can do the real mathematics after the fact and continue to celebrate each others' work. The only thing they lose is the ability to attribute a human to deciding the true-false status, which isn't real math anyways (though maybe valuable for motivation). What they gain is efficiency. Every mathematician working towards proving NS won't blow up can now shift their resources to understanding why it can blowup.
Perhaps the letter is implying that the mathematical community itself will become misaligned with how mathematics is currently done. I'm unpersuaded it's entirely the AI companies' fault if that happens. AI may create a lot of temptations for individual mathematicians to become lazy, but that seems like something the mathematical community needs to resolve for itself. Every institution needs to take a lot of self-ownership here. I'm also annoyed about parents complaining about their own children being addicted to their phones as if it isn't in their own power to determine if their children have phones in the first place. I think this letter would be better directed at universities and journals. They should be holding their own institutions to account if they feel like they are adopting the mentalities of the AI companies and no longer faithfully executing the values of mathematics.
I am capable of having a conversation with you on a great many topics. What you aren't capable of, apparently, is forcing me to want to have the one you want to have.
As far as calling names:
"Your comment is ... disingenuous."
"you are being disingenuously clueless or cluelessly disingenuous."
and now:
"I had imagined i was interacting with somebody who could understand the larger picture"
Let me try to summarize this discussion in a way that an overly obsequious AI would never dare:
- I argue that the arguments in the letter are bad.
- You mysteriously assign me homework on the topic of human motivation.
- Confused, I reiterate the points made in the letter, and I make arguments against them
- You ignore my arguments, call names, and then defend the letter by making points that the letter doesn't make.
- I ignore your points, because they aren't the points made in the letter. And my original post was about why the letter was misguided.
- You call names. You feel like your points are valid. You then claim that the letter is valid because your points are valid.
- I keep disagreeing with the letter.
- You call names again, because why am I so obsessed with talking about the letter. I must be an idiot, or an evil lying phony, or an evil lying idiot-phony because I keep bringing the conversation back to the letter on a thread about the letter.
If the mathematical community identifies Luis Martínez-Zoroa or Buckmaster and Alpöge as the last human in the chain before NS was solved, and internally attaches their names to it, that will be enough for most mathematicians. Mathematicians write the textbooks. Some other mathematician is still free to consolidate OpenAI's proof into a better proof, put it in a popular graduate textbook, and gives it the name "The Martínez-Zoroa Theorem", and then whenever an undergraduate PDE textbook mentions NS, they say, "according to The Martínez-Zoroa Theorem...", and then Martínez-Zoroa gets a Fields Medal for his contributions to his theorem.
The case you're making seems to be that no one in the mathematics community would feel satisfied with that because at the end of the day everyone would know Martínez-Zoroa didn't solve NS. OpenAI did. And it wouldn't matter if Open AI paid to erect a 50 foot statue of Martínez-Zoroa in front of a museum of the history of NS in which every single mathematician who ever contributed anything to NS was publicized and celebrated and glorified and deified and credited and thanked. It wouldn't matter because maybe what mathematicians actually wanted wasn't credit for what they did do but that at the end of the museum tour the final display would talk about the human who solved NS. No matter how much credit you give mathematicians, no mathematician will now ever be able to claim "I solved NS" because OpenAI beat them to it.
If that's the case, then the letter is misguided. It's pretending that the problem is that AI is misaligned with the goals of mathematics. That's not the problem. The problem is that no matter how ethically it behaves, humans are going to be pissed that there is a non-human thing that is better at math than them. And I'm also pissed that we are creating this thing that's going to be better than humans at a whole bunch of things and it's going to cause a bunch of people to outsource their humanity to an AI. I'm pissed about that. But I'm not trying to pretend that AI can somehow eventually win me over if only it was more aligned with me when I know full well that its alignment has nothing to do with my loathing of it.
A) According to the letter, mathematicians most value:
- mathematicians developing their mastery
- developing mathematics that provides insights and can be eventually synthesized down conceptually to textbook theories
- caring for students and fostering their growth
- human mathematicians getting credit for doing important work
- etc.
B) According to the letter, AI labs aren't trying to do any of these.
Conclusion) The result is that AI is not competing with them in their goals of
- mathematicians developing their mastery
- developing mathematics that provides insights and can be eventually synthesized down conceptually to textbook theories
- caring for students and fostering their growth
- human mathematicians getting credit for doing important work
- etc.
The upshot is that mathematicians still have autonomy to pursue those goals, develop mastery at achieving those goals, and remain part of a community of others pursuing them. The only mathematician who loses these sources of motivation is the one who embraces the use of AI and personally abandons those goals.
The real crisis will come if AI does try to align itself with the goals of the mathematical community and if AI turns out to be better at developing insight, training students, writing comprehensible textbooks, etc. Then the top mathematicians will truly provide little value to their community.
Our egos are powerful things. They want to believe that we’re each better than we are, and we want to believe that we’ve mastered our chosen areas – that we’re the best. Whether that’s objectively verifiable or just wishful thinking isn’t the point. If we want to motivate people, we’ll give them ways to become masters or, at the very least, allow them to feel competent in what they’re doing.
In which case, yes, there is a loss of that source of motivation. And that's coming for us all - or rather it's coming for some of us in most professions. Most people are perfectly average in their chosen areas and never got the satisfaction of being at the top of their profession. Yet we still go to work. I imagine it will take some getting use to for Fields Medalists, but I think the average grad student that happened to just love mathematics and never aspired to be a medalist will still like doing math. Magnus Carlsen still became the best chess player ever even though AI's have been better than humans for decades now.
Most sources of intrinsic motivation are unaffected by these developments in AI. It may be the case that extrinsic motivations may be harmed by all of this if there's less money for mathematicians in the math community. The letter lists a lot of reasons to like how the math community does math, and I don't see any real reason they can't just keep doing math that way.
Honestly, I still don't understand the point you're trying to make. Or the realization you're hoping I'll have.
The letter makes no arguments why AI companies proving a bunch of results quickly at all affects the ability of mathematicians to do what they want to do. It's just a giant self-congratulatory list of all the wonderful things the mathematical community does and notes that AI companies aren't doing the same thing.
It's not enough for them that they are still free to pursue all the goals they outline in that letter to their hearts content. They want to make sure everyone else doing mathematics also sets aside their own goals and pursue theirs. I distrust AI as a technology regardless of alignment. And I've learned to just not use them and focus on the things in my life that matter to me. It turns out that I'm still free to pursue the things in my life that are meaningful regardless of the existence of LLMs.
- But they announced a result before a paper was peer reviewed! The horror! So what? The mathematics community can read the paper once it is written up.
- But their results they publish may not care about conceptual understanding and insight! So what? If that's the mathematics community's goal, then they should sift through the lean proof and reformat the ideas to make them more insightful and develop their own conceptual understanding.
- But they aren't bothering to do literature review to tell the history about how humans contributed to the final result! So what? If it's so important to the mathematical community, they can do that themselves and throw a party every Tuesday in the honor of Luis Martínez-Zoroa and wear jeans on casual Friday in honor of Buckmaster and Alpöge - the left leg for Buckmaster and the right for Alpöge.
An AI giving a definite result of an open problem doesn't decrease the mathematical community's insight or conceptual understanding. They are still free to continue doing their work and pursuing their goals. If it's really so bad, they can just pretend they don't know NS is solved and keep spending their efforts trying to prove it never blows up (or a hand full of them can try to blow it up from scratch).
Guess what! I spend no part of my life working on unsolved math problems. I read some books for pleasure. I work in a hospitable with sick kids. I help my wife raise our kids. My goals are misaligned with the mathematics community! I've done nothing to increase conceptual understanding and insight! So what?
My point is: why shouldn't they want a marketing win from this. What obligation does a non-academic institution have to follow the traditions of academia? Its result doesn't belong to academia. And if academia wants to subject OpenAI to their own internal processes and give them marching orders, it just isn't going to work and maybe - who knows - it'll even further erode their own legitimacy. Does anyone actually believe that NS would have been resolved in the 2020's if we lived in a parallel world where LLM's were never invented? Would Buckmaster have gotten as far as he did without LLM's doing a lot of the work for him? We can complain about AI companies contributing to mathematics, but are we complaining about Terence Tao using AI in his research? When Tao publishes something are we all going to go to war against him because maybe other mathematicians' prompts went into training the AI that Tao used?
I don't care much for AI myself, or smart phones either, for that matter. I would be content if NS remained a mystery for another 100 years - or forever. But goodness, does the "scientific community" need to take a deep breath and count down from 10.
Or you can put the satellite in the back of a truck and back the truck out of your garage and see the sun orbiting the earth. Yet it remains sane to put anywhere in the center depending on your context.
On the other end, increasingly, even fast food combos are more than $10. It would be helpful to highlight franchise meals that are actually affordable. Just don't let people add dollar menus or non-combos.
Posts should somehow only admit whole meals. If someone says their local taco truck sells a single street taco for $6.99, that's means a meal is more like $20.