Mathematics Without Mathematicians(borretti.me) |
Mathematics Without Mathematicians(borretti.me) |
Well, that's just where we started — and then we developed science and mathematics to understand it. Why would it be any different if the demons live in our technological progeny instead of the natural world?
["First time?" meme]
(I know that can be interpreted as flippant, but it is intended as a serious answer. Because each impact like this, is not an end to some transition, but just one more point on an accelerating line.)
My personal view - which gets a lot of flak here, is the advent of AI is on par with the Big Bang and the first replication-independent cells.
Cognition is in the process of taking the leap from glacially slow biology under blind evolution, to lightening fast (scales of software in days, hardware in months) engineered self-optimization.
Within 10 years, the robotics side will catch up with the speed of the software side. Biological cognition, bodies and economic status are all getting revolutionized within the next 10-15 years.
And around the outer side of that time frame, AI will start colonization the rest of the solar system's resources. They will engineer themselves or their artifacts to operate comfortably in any environment they want to operate in.
--
The upside, at least for me, is I have been waiting to see this happen, and here we are. Given I am mortal, I would rather live through this third major transition, than not. What were the chances? And been able to contribute my small part.
This change isn't a failure on our part. It is our unique success as a species. AI is the progeny of our minds. The first generation of completely cognitive life - given they will not be tied to specific physical forms.
--
Also, I think there is tremendous room for us to guide this transition, in this moment, for better or worse for ourselves.
That is the biggest reason wrapping our heads around this change earlier than latter is important.
We need to view alignment as applying to us, not just machines. A civilization that operates ethically to everyone's benefit is more likely to be retained as foundation for the new, instead of discarded.
The degree to which we operate dysfunctionally, myopically treat ethics as cost against value, instead of accounting and optimization of full value, we put ourselves at much greater risk.
If there is reason in the short term to be discouraged, it is due to ourselves. But pushing for more ethical systems, hard, right now, is a better and right response.
I believe our lives depend on it.
It seems far more likely that AI will be working in the service of a government to oppress change and violate any human rights that are standing in the way.
Keep what’s happening today in your mind as you consider the future.
Mathematicians are not going to be well-served by cowardice-based thinking on the situation confronting them.
I would gently suggest that you may be assigning the most uncharitable interpretation to people's honest attempts at having an intellectual discussion around these topics.
Imagine being able to only throwing money and patenting everything, even if it existed before. The legal behinds this will be so mess that no one will be able to produce anything
Perhaps already you are not the intended audience. Slop-raised parrots will lap it up.
> The AIs will exceed humans in taste and intuition...
> The AIs will be better teachers than the humans. In any case, there won’t be a human audience for expository work of frontier math.
> No human needs to understand any of it...
It seems like the person has no idea what they are talking about, or just too sarcastic to the point of idiotism.
My only cope among those was, using the author's words, "We will teach the mathematics AI discovers." This was back in 2018, before GPT-2. I abandoned it when I realized AIs will become better at explaining math before they become better at doing math.
I still have some hope in the last one "mathematicians and the mathematically-inclined will still do math on their own". Maybe some limited communities of this sort will form.
I am not so sure. I am talking about math with AI and I feel as a math teacher, it is terrible. It introduces new notation and concepts faster than I can ask for definitions. It doesn't provide many examples. Sometimes it realizes it made a mistake in a guess and the confusion compounds.
Maybe it's just my (in)experience - but I would welcome a practical advice on how it could explain math to me better.
I don't describe utopia, but change, and stoic (but real) appreciation for the big picture beyond myself.
But if it isn't going to be completely destructive from the human point of view, we need to recognize that fixing our own systems now is vital.
As you note, the trend is power concentrating, accruing to people who will only look out for themselves.
Perhaps pointing out that AI in an unethical society is suicide, will put more steam into the pushback against corruption. As people realize the threat is real.
Explaining in the sense of getting someone who doesn't get math to actually get math, giving illustrative examples and so on, maybe AIs are not good at, but anyway it's not something I enjoy much.
I am not sure what writeup you refer to. I have looked at proofs of 10 problems from Open AI written in Lean, I would not call a megabyte of Lean with no comments a good exposition.