At the individual level any mathematicians can, but the social group of “mathematicians” will not unless drastic social changes are made, because that's not how the system works today. Drastic social changes usually take decades, and funerals, to occur, so the reasonable hypothesis is that it's not going to change fast enough.
Mathematics belongs to all of us. If mathematicians get depressed about it, I don't give a hoot. Five years of guided computer-aided math could improve billions of lives or solve global warming outright through cheap clean energy.
This is a litmus test for the effective altruists in AI labs: fashion or conviction? The social pressure is to slow down and let the guild keep its norms a few more years. But what's clearly best for humanity is to push forward violently and leave them in the dust. A Fields medalist's feelings are not more important than the wellbeing of the planet.
> Mathematics belongs to all of us. If mathematicians get depressed about it, I don't give a hoot.
They are depressed because what's being destroyed is mathematics, actually.
> Five years of guided computer-aided math could improve billions of lives or solve global warming outright through cheap clean energy.
This is complete BS, math doesn't solve climate change or save life, that's a category error. The purpose of math is to help us build understanding of the mathematical objects and that's it.
Sometimes, after much distillation to the academic world, this understanding is later being leverage by other scientific field, but that's a very rare event when it happens. And it's not how other science progress.
> This is a litmus test for the effective altruists
EA has always been a lie to justify short term individual greed by hypothetical shared future benefits.
youre not wrong, but i think you are missing his base point. tao is saying that mathematics is a practice that the group collectively builds. students and new methods are built on top of what has previously been done, so its a community effort of research, experimentation, and knowledge sharing.
his core argument that is LLMs (and specifically LLMs owned and gated by corporations was my read), while able to solve problems, do not contribute to this practice of knowledge building. solving problems is just one piece, and the mathematics community ingests problems and new methods, iterates and thinks on them, and then produces new ideas, methods, etc. this is what he is defining as progress, and solving things like millenium problems are markers of this progress.
all of these fall very flat, many of them sound like generic commercial tunes at their worst. there is obviously melody and structure but none of it sounds good.
i dont know anything about the eff but based on this article i am on your side, they seem extremely untrustworthy so i am happy to be opposed to what they want.
>cuts young people off from essential information and experiences, particularly harming vulnerable youth and marginalized groups who often find safety in supportive online communities they can't access offline.
>Far from protecting children
so both sides on this are framing that their positions protects children while framing that the opposing side harms children.
>at work, i can tell that people are not thinking and losing the ability to thinking hard.
its also wild how quickly and willingly many people handed this over. the apathy and desire for connivence runs extremely deep among my coworkers. we are at the point where people are not even running their local dev servers and clicking around to ensure their work is functionality correct, they just ingest the ticket, dump it into the model, commit the output, and say they're the most productive they've ever been.
reminds of college when everyone would use chegg, but knew it was a shortcut.
the difference now is it is shamelessly encouraged.
one interesting topic is code reviews of AI code. code reviews have always been a bottleneck on the team and there's lots of trust and rubber stamping. I don't believe people are reading the code they ship.
I will say that it is a beautiful tool if you turn it on its head. if you don't quite understand something, it will never tire of answering your questions. It is a great time to need handholding.
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