notice that you're talking about areas other than mathematics. I was talking about mathematics.
8,585 karma · joined February 14, 2014
that is the way of technology. If i want to be just in the middle of the pack, not even a cutting edge, i have to buy a car, i can't just walk everywhere in reasonable time. I have to use a phone, i go to the doctor for modern medicine, etc. - note that pretty much everything is private companies goods and private services.
>where the frontier is in the hands of a single company.
We did invent anti-monopoly laws though to address such major issues with the private origin of the goods and services, and of course AI companies should be subject to it too (if you noticed, by stocking the scare of AI the BigAI companies are actually trying to get the anti-monopoly laws relaxed for them - and this is where our attention should be, the rest is just red herring)
>It takes what was previously an incredibly open field
It was nice riding a horse among the open rolling hills.
You still can be punished for violating a law even if you hadn't passed the bar exam. So even without bar exam, you're supposed to know that sequence of letters and apply in your life exactly because it is available to anyone (until a law is officially published, it usually has no force)
reminds an old sci-fi story where top engineers were shown a video of a genius inventor who invented anti-gravity and unfortunately died while testing his apparatus which was clearly anti-gravitating in the video. Thus believing that it is a solved problem, just need to rediscover the lost solution, the engineers quickly developed anti-gravity. The original video happened to be a fake specially created for that purpose.
>thus themselves holding a monopoly on certain aspects of mathematics
Monopoly prevents others. In science me knowing something doesn't prevent others from obtaining the same knowledge, especially in math where any knowledge is just a result of thinking.
The math establishment is trying to bring into the math the rules and notions similar to those of the patent and trademark laws. Those attempts should be outright rejected.
no. The math result is a result only when it includes proof. The proof is the value here. The way somebody came to it isn't really important - we don't know how Newton came to his results, whether it was apple or pear, and it isn't really important. Or how Einstein was walking the city streets looking at the tower watches - it is just historic curiosity having no real value for science.
That has been one of the greatest thing about math departments - smooth talkers were always clearly visible as smooth talkers. You're either producing proofs, or you're anything but a mathematician.
I feel for mathematicians. They have similar situation like we have in programming. Well, we all just have to evolve and adjust (in particular reign in our pride as just in a few years - i think once LLMs start hitting 100T+ - we may loose our "top of God's creation" position). Any attempts at gatekeeping, ludditing, organizing in quasi observational/advisory boards really intended to protect their tenures, etc. ... - well, you just can't stop the wave.
It all reminds how Catholic Church insisted on responsible release of the Bible in German. The Church even unleashed the devastating 30 Years War trying to protect its monopoly on religion including the right to sell indulgences, etc.
>AI labs should provide significant support, including funding
And now all those "responsible math" and advisory boards would like to preserve their monopoly on math and would like to sell the indulgences to the AI labs. As usually it is all about money and power, not about science. As a Math PhD dropout myself i feel a bit of a shame and disappointment for that undignified scramble by the mathematics establishment. Being smart they should have led the way and show an example to the rest of humanity ...
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DXFNl51Ixbl/
"To feed, a female mosquito uses a complex mouthpart called a proboscis, which contains six specialized needles (stylets).
Two of these needles are serrated saws that slice through your skin, while two others hold the tissue open. A fifth needle searches for a blood vessel and sucks up your blood, while the sixth simultaneously pumps in saliva containing an anticoagulant to keep the blood flowing. "
sounds like robot-surgeon-manipulator from Star Wars/Trek/etc.
"In his 2005 bestselling book Blink, Canadian journalist Malcolm Gladwell noted a seemingly bizarre fact about his work with Fortune 500 leaders. “In the U.S. population, about 14.5 percent of all men are six feet or taller. Among CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, that number is 58 percent. Even more striking, in the general American population, 3.9 percent of adult men are six foot two or taller. Among my CEO sample, almost a third were six foot two or taller.”"
that is exactly what i said.
>something with evidence
middle-school physics, basic knowledge, at least if you decided to participate in such a discussion.
"Dual-motor variants produce up to 603–789 horsepower (450 kW to over 580 kW), delivering rapid acceleration comparable to sports sedans"
speaking about anemic minivan for soccer moms...
Granted it may result in Toyota losing the battle in the long run. On the other hand any large improve in batteries may gradually bring Toyota into EV world just by letting to upsize the plugins' batteries.
Personally i like very much my 2015 Prius Plugin, and the only thing i'd want about it is to have additional 20KWh of batteries (may be one day i'll throw them in myself :)
somebody gotta build all those datacenters ... (a kind of reference to the gulag tremendously growing simultaneously with and being the major source of labor, and practically free at that, for the very fast and massive USSR Industrialization in 193x)
And with opposition to the datacenters in developed areas, and all the need for water and energy, the datacenters (and all that massive infrastructure like power lines, power plants, etc.) would probably be built in less hospitable areas, like China does in Inner Mongolia [1], and it would be very hard to make people to move there at their own free will. DHS is already building out their own large gulag, and i think it is only a matter of time with this administration when they decide to use the forced labor USSR style.
>the president is able to make you into a state enemy just because you said you are against some technology.
not only technology. Any opposition to the Great Leader on any issue.
fast-rise sugar infested bun, non-organic antibiotic infested horrendous animal welfare beef, etc. - the BOM is well under $5, i'd think $3 at best. So, you pay $25 for sub-$5 bill of low quality materials (not good to your health with thus additional expenses down the road). Who is the sucker?
Italy has all that right across the pond.
And no energy source can beat solar on the speed of build out. And when it comes to the energy the next few years is all about build out [for AI]. Countries who get it right - like China, look at their solar and new datacenters getting powered by it, may be US if the required thinking wins - are going to lead the world in the near to mid-term future, the rest are going to be struggling seconds.
Building nuclear today in the energy field is like building tanks in military whereis solar is like drones - i.e. we have choice between 2 classic paradigms - very limited vertical scalability with extremely costly units vs. unlimited horizontal scalability of extremely cheap units.
no. Positive proofs have nothing to do with falsification. They just tell you that there is no point in spending effort on searching for negative proofs and counter examples. They don't prevent nor prohibit you from spending that effort. They just advise you that that effort will be wasted.
It is like nobody prevents from experiments to turn lead into gold. Of from searching for a right angled triangle violating Pythagoras.
not really. You can consider positive proof as an experiment confirming your theory and the negative proof and counter examples as an experiment falsifying your theory.
"Nervous systems are typically defined as networks of neurons that communicate across synapses. But Burkhardt’s lab found something unique in ctenophores: Beneath the animal’s outer surface is a nerve net (pink mesh in this 3D reconstruction) whose neurons are connected by continuous cytoplasm — but with no synapses between them. “I don’t think any other animal has a nervous system like that,” Burkhardt said. Because ctenophores are one of the earliest branches of the animal family tree, the finding indicates that evolution may have crafted nervous systems twice: in ctenophores, and separately in jellyfish and all other animals."
and you don't see any issue here? When it takes people 2 years to understand a proof it means that the old ways are done, they hit cul-de-sac. Like in many situations, it is the highest point as well as it is a crisis at the same time.
>why shouldn't an AI system be able to replace a 1870s mathematician
my point isn't that whether it would be able to replace - i think it would. My point is that it doesn't matter. The tool is needed for the 2020s math with those proofs taking 2 years, not for the 1870s math with proofs fitting a several pages letter.
That is math of 1870s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cefn-coed-y-cymmer#/media/File... and that is what we need in 2020 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huajiang_Canyon_Bridge#/media/...
Edit in response to the comment below as i hit my post limit :
New mathematical fields require many years of work by many people. What seems to be coming is people would be able to explore various ideas in say days instead of those years. It means more fields will be discovered and built up. And by wider array of people, ie. by the less capable than the top dog people. Mathematics will be more like engineering. Including more practical applications - like exploring transformers trajectories mapped into manifolds in p-adic spaces and applying the dynamic systems chaos theory there - borderline gibberish that no human would spend meaningful time on, yet a one would be able to throw a couple bucks at Claude++ for it to play with it. That would mean more money into the math, not less.
a car or a future starship wouldn't climb a tree better than ancient human.