>And now that AI has solved all our problems, we can devote ourselves to more important work: going into quantitative finance, vibecoding sports-betting apps, consuming AI-generated TikTok shorts, and arguing with political bots on Twitter.
Grim but this is exactly where society is heading.
There are no shortage of artistic pursuits, subcultures, pick-up leagues, and more that you're free to engage with. Get off the beaten path and you'll find humans enjoying life in a wide variety of ways that are uncorrupted by AI.
> you'll find humans enjoying life in a wide variety of ways that are uncorrupted by AI
Some of those people were mathematicians, engineers, physicists who found joy in being skilled at what they do and were able to be financially rewarded for their effort applying their skill. Are these artistic pursuits, subcultures, pick-up leagues, etc going to pay their mortgage? Will they help them get a job in a field they are trained in?
The "free to pursue more important things" is a hand-wavy statement that doesn't talk at all about what those people should be doing to provide for themselves after wages plummet. The hyperbole is drawing attention to the ridiculousness, not making a comment about there not being a rec soccer league or something.
It's increasingly becoming more of a majority and it's spilling in to real life. In Melbourne, Australia there would be a weekly "cooker" protest where they shut down the street to get angry about covid mind control vaccines or whatever the latest facebook bots are programming them to be mad about.
I think that's not taking the most charitable reading of their intentions. They are simply concerned with unverified, untested vaccines, much like many here were during COVID.
Are you by any chance born to rich parents in a western country?
Because most people in the world are working around the clock to supply food and shelter for their family. It's a bit unclear still how you are going to consolidate the two facts
GP was talking about how humans would spend their time after the "real work" is done, as if the only purpose of humanity is productivity or consumption.
The assumption is that there will be time left. But as it is the 'real work' takes up only 8 hours per day because the resulting pay is significant. But if that pay evaporates suddenly the real work will balloon to take up most of your waking hours.
We are referring to people in the context of "going into quantitative finance, vibecoding sports-betting apps, consuming AI-generated TikTok shorts, and arguing with political bots on Twitter.".
Those are hardly the "most people in the world are working around the clock to supply food and shelter for their family"
It's a bit unclear still how you are going to consolidate the two facts.
I've been looking for a baseball or softball league for my kid. He doesn't want to play school ball, doesn't play travel ball, but loves the game. It's impossible to find baseball or softball leagues after the age of 12 that are not attached to a school or travel. Volleyball is about the only thing that exists.
Let's hope they have some land so they can farm potatoes in between their lives of artistic pursuits and other joys. Because those are not going fill the fridge.
No need to hope. 99 percent of the world outside of mathematics and programmers who had already figured it out pre ai. We'll just have to learn from them.
Except that engagement is not free. All of these things require money, and they require time that isn't already set towards the goal of making money to survive. And one of the selling points of AI is explicitly the redundancy of numerous workers, including ones parallel to myself.
For many things this is true nowadays. Where I live walking in nature or swimming in the ocean is still free. In Dubai nature as in a green park might raise an entry fee.
I get that someone wanted to let steam off but this just sounds like they don't have any arguments so they went for the good old "in the future, you won't have free will and social media companies force you to be online" fable. An addicting algorithm isn't the same thing as fentanyl, you can uninstall the app in 5 seconds and getting it back with signing in takes atleast two minutes, enough to reconsider whether you actually want to spend time on it.
The toxicity of apps like Tiktok comes from muscle memory, not the quality of the content. Your thumb knows where the app icon is and opening the app happens quicker than you can think (literally). So offloading or uninstalling breaks this very effectively. The only thing that would still keep you on the platform is social connections. If somebody gets upset over you uninstalling Instagram or Snapchat, they aren't a good friend.
I don't think this goes far enough -- its a best case scenario.
There is no Utopia for mankind at the end of an AGI that is the labor force because people need a purpose; without that, degenerate behaviours and vice are easy to fall into and the spiral is not big. The state of the human race - particularly the internet-native generations - is a testament to that.
The only way the AGI Utopia works is with a massive reduction in the human population with a Spartan/Helot relationship between those remaining.
Let's face it, the people who want AGI so badly aren't the wam cuddly people who want to feed the poor, house the homeless, and cure the sick. Their motives here are not pure...
N=2 but deleting my Facebook account (~4 years ago) has effectively stopped me from arguing online about things I don’t really care about with people who I don’t know.
I mean I still do it here to some extent but much less frequently
> Looking up at the stars in wonderment, or enjoying a complex puzzle game, or being inspired by an encouraging teacher, and dreaming that one day an unfeeling corporate robot[1] will burn a rainforest to compile a list of 700 highly obscure barely-readable facts that might be true that nobody can understand as part of a marketing gimmick to raise hype for an IPO[2].
But if I am going to critique it's main point it would be this part:
> in the pursuit of advancing humanity’s knowledge as quickly as possible, many academics will recoil in anger at the suggestion that it is worth spending any time making results understandable to humans. It is inefficient to explain or check a result when those resources can be spent generating another.
While obviously ridiculous, I think this does not go far enough. The problem isn't that people don't care and resources should not be spent to explain AI results to human minds, the problem is that AI will soon be better at explaining itself than humans. The puzzle then changes from can AI formally verify and explain a proof to: do human minds trust the proof. Do we believe that the proof is correct and not an elaborate AI hallucination using tricks that are beyond our understanding. In order to trust it a formal verification is not enough unless it is human understandable. In fact human understandability is the only thing that matters. That is something that AI can never do on its own.
>In order to trust it a formal verification is not enough unless it is human understandable.
The whole point of formal verification is to remove the necessity of understanding most of the work. We only need to trust the formalization of the problem statement, the proof verifier, and the formalization of the result. We already have proof verifiers that humans understand to a high level, and the formalizations of the problem statement and the result are much simpler than the full proof.
I'm confident that the Navier-Stokes equations can blow up because I'm confident that Lean works correctly, and I'm confident that the mathematicians verified the problem statement and result correctly. This is despite the actual proof not being human verified yet (as far as I know), and despite the "human-readable" version not actually corresponding to the formal proof. The formal method still worked.
Some mathematicians are not confident in the NS verification because it is non-trivial to tell if the Lean proof matches NS. I would argue this requires "human understability" to make this claim. The Lean proof is a very useful tool, but it does not replace human understanding.
Beneath the sarcasm it's making a rather simplistic argument that OpenAI cares little about human understanding of the results or their correctness.
The author appears to argue that this in service of a pointless goal, that no one will even care to read the results, and that all this is taking away from human creativity and removing the fun in scientific discovery.
I don't see a convincing argument here that OpenAI does not in fact aim to further humanity's understanding of mathematics, or that using AI for scientific discovery is comparable to automating away the fun parts of life.
The sarcasm is rhetorically strong, but profound? I don't think so.
OpenAI certainly does not really care about human understanding of these math problems. We've always said solving the hardest math problems would be a remarkable demonstration of AGI, and here is their demonstration. But it's not really about the math, this is about the power of LLMs and the path to AGI/ASI. Solving math problems is just a parlor trick for OpenAI.
It may not be the most prescient or innovative sci fi series, but I read The Three Body Problem a few years ago and it's really stuck with me. Specifically the description of how humanity reached an inflection point in math & physics research that almost immediately unlocked novel innovations in applied science ... which then made space exploration & settlement practical. Moreover, that the antagonist society in the series decided their absolute best bet at avoiding complete annihilation was to hamstring humankind's scientific research -- and that's it.
It feels like frontier models are starting to approach an asymptote where what you suggest could become reality, and we'll begin seeing not just AI research but AI-designed & led applications of that research into fundamental parts of our society & culture. For better and for worse.
I'm all for advancing human understanding, even if it might lag behind machine understanding, but there is a way to have machines prove they understand something we don't: ask them to build something functional that we can't. If your hypothetical future comes to pass, and we ask the machine to build a cancer-curing healing ray, and it works, I'd say that's its own win. Then we can spend however long it takes trying to understand how it works. It's depressing and disempowering in a way, but I think overall I'd be happy with that future.
I once visited a town in Spain over which an ancient Roman aqueduct runs, elevated above most of the buildings, even today. It carried an essential ingredient foundational to life in the area, but after the fall of the Empire and the deaths of the architects and engineers who could understand it, the aqueduct stood in the midst of people who could not have repaired it. Relying on mission-critical technology divorced from human understanding is exceptionally risky. Obviously, people have done it before and will happen again, but it makes me nervous.
Chess has already been this way: computers are far better than humans, yet the humans still play and learn/understand new position evaluations from the computers.
There also will never be a Mikhail Tal type of player again and most classical matches at the highest level are just draws now. I'm not sure if you could say AI is a benefit for the highest level but it is an equaliser in the sense that you don't need to pay for a tutor to analyse your mistakes (though they can still be helpful) which helps the average player. Chess is also predominantly for entertainment making it not the best example for AI not replacing people.
100% agree. In fact, this issue of verifiability is not at all unique to AI. It was a profound and growing issue before the advent of useful AI. Perhaps the issue was best elucidated by Dr. Anthony Fauci when he suggested that we "Believe the science" as a rational for why people should follow his covid prescriptions. I side with those who feel that Dr Fauci was really just trying to do his best. Regardless, with that statement he cut the foundation out from under the whole scientific project! Science (and math) are not to be believed. They are to be tested!
We have moved quite a long way down the "believe the science" road already, and for good reason. Belief is much (!) faster and cheaper than proof, so those who are fed good science(math) and believe it tend to outcompete people who get stuck trying to prove things all the time.
But fraud is fraud regardless of the platform (meat or silicon) committing it. People who believe in frauds often end up worse off for it, though it hard to know which piece of BS has led you astray or who's to blame for it or how to deal with the fall out.
Obviously, we shouldn't believe AI any more than we believe humans. That said, the world was already suffering greatly under the weight of human generated BS long before useful AI came on the scene. Now that AI has reduced the cost of producing plausible BS by orders of magnitude, we may need some new methods for BS detection.
I feel this way about code. Writing things by hand is the quickest way for me to fully understand it, and that is what I am paid to do, to understand it. It will be executed millions and millions of times for every time it is modified, so even if writing it by hand is 10x or 100x as slow, it is still a better payoff.
> the problem is that AI will soon be better at explaining itself than humans
(I assume you mean explain itself to humans here.)
I keep seeing people saying this as fact. It might, but it might not, and there are various reasons one might be skeptical that it will, using current techniques. Not least among these is that explaining something well to a human requires a degree of empathy and sophisticated theory-of-mind that LLMs have not yet exhibited yet*, and that is an area where humans are uniquely advantaged by being humans.
Someone will almost certainly reply by just stating as fact that they will achieve this goal, or pointing out that past predictions that LLMs wouldn't be able to do particular things have failed, and that's all very well. I certainly wouldn't be rash enough to claim it's impossible, but there are still models of all this available that are consistent with all the successes so far but don't predict "LLMs can do anything and will do everything". We'll find out in due course.
(I should clarify that the benchmark here is good human explanations. Of course many humans are capable of producing "explanations" worse than Markov chain text, let alone LLM output.)
* My idle speculation is that a lack of decent theory-of-mind is why LLMs still suck at using the "it's not X it's Y" construct. I doubt they actually use it any more frequently than humans when writing on the same topics, but they use it wrong and it's jarring. This particular rhetorical flourish works when there's some reason to think that X is an idea that might actually be present or forming in the mind of someone reading the passage (or in some other mind that they in turn might be imagining, eg. a fictional character), and that explicitly calling it out and negating it will have a particular dramatic effect. LLMs probably use it with about the expected frequency, but they use it for that reason (frequency) and then come up with something to put in the X and Y slots. The result often jars because the X it uses isn't something pertinent to the reader's thought process and/or the Y isn't a convincing, persuasive or relevant counterpoint to it. I suspect the result is that they stick out and seem more frequent than they are.
> an unfeeling corporate robot[1] will burn a rainforest to compile a list of 700 highly obscure barely-readable facts that might be true that nobody can understand
He'd have more of a point if a huge number of humans weren't occupied doing exactly this, and much worse on top.
Understanding math isn't just about "having a good explanation ready".
People fundamentally misunderstand the nature of mathematics: it's not "flat" like most of common people's daily pursuits. It consists of building upwards, on top of previous concepts.
In other words, AI is like an oracle: it can tell you all kinds of stuff, but since you probably don't understand, you won't act properly.
There are plenty of things we use and found useful before we understood them. We knew how to make it, how it works was for the most part inconsequential.
the problem is that AI will soon be better at explaining itself than humans
But will it? What's the trend on the metrics for this? Everything else has metrics, why not this?
I mostly work on getting ChatGPT to come up with algorithms, which it is moderately good at. When I ask it to summarize it's findings, the results are less understandable to me than what it said originally.
I don't believe that it's always getting better at everything everywhere. It's no doubt getting better at many things but even there it seems clear the rate vary.
Well, we can try tying it to ground truth. AI does the math for magnetic field containment? Test it. AI predicts a particle? Test it. AI says P=NP? Ok, factor this in polynomial time.
And if it fails, and AI goes, "I don't know what happened. I relied on these papers" then I guess one of those must be wrong.
I'm not saying it'd be easy, but I think AI can also find the pieces of the puzzle that broke a pyramid of "discoveries" culminating in a disproval,
And the only other option is to simply never understand as much. AI has the potential to understand things humans cannot. Not necessarily a strict superset.
Humans can deal in 5+-2 things at once. AI doesn't have to, and can cut through leaky abstractions.
If AI says a new invention will do X, and it doesn't, it'll say "you're absolutely right" and try again until it does the thing.
I think the author is hiding the ball a bit. The problem is that, for a long time, humans have attributed meaning, value, and social status to great cognitive insights. Taking physics as an example, it has almost always been the theorists who develop new ideas, not the experimentalists that test and validate them, who have won praise and acclaim. The name Arthur Eddington doesn’t have the same cachet as that of Albert Einstein. But now that the creation of those insights can be automated, there is a great wrenching as esteem shifts away from the former.
Well, maybe it’s a good thing that we are seeing this shift. Maybe it is good and right that we begin valuing your ability to exist in the real world, rather than play math puzzles on a sheet of paper. Because, while the AI labs are receiving a lot of attention and excitement now, that’s a short run phenomenon. Ultimately, people aren’t impressed for long by a machine doing something novel. Once it’s up and running, it fades into the background just like the combustion engine, or the dishwasher, or electric lighting.
> The problem is that, for a long time, humans have attributed meaning, value, and social status to great cognitive insights.
Not really, they haven't. It's only when those insights can be communicated in such a way to other people that those other people can find utility (which could be enabling them to derive more insights that yet other people find utility in recursively) in the insights that they do so, and this is a huge difference. This is why AI is such a total problem to this mentality, because it disrupts not only insight production but the mechanism that values insight production.
Of course cognition was labor and it had a significant value attributed to it because it was they only way to figure things out. Now are you saying that devaluing it is A ok because cognition can be automated by stealing from those who figured it all and now cognition is overpriced? If that was true, the machine wouldn't take its content from those humans but it does. It is built on top of human collective cognition and knowledge.
If Ai is something novel for now and then it will be all ok? Just dream on; would you be happy if your job was replaced.. what about your kids.. If that is the case , then enjoy. It is demoralizing for a lot of people who will be replaced by a better thinking machines.
It is no longer about the automation alone but also humans will change to avoid competing with the machine because humans will lose that race just like how they lose when playing chess with the machine.
Not a huge fan of the sentiment in this article, and the very cynical way it was communicated, but the references to the library of babel reminded me of this fun site.
I sympathize with some feelings the author is trying to communicate, but the cynical and sarcastic style really detract from the authors points in my view.
I don't think this article communicates any new ideas; to me the style is the unique aspect of it that makes it worth reading. If you personally don't like the style, there are many other articles portraying the same sentiment in a more agreeable style.
The question is the right one. "Why are we even doing all this?"
Why, indeed, is society funding pure mathematics? Many mathematicians are complaining that they do not like AI and their jobs are less fun when AI is involved. But does that matter? Should that matter to the institutions who fund mathematics research?
To me it seems that we fund pure mathematics because we believe that some pure mathematics will end up being useful. Turing was doing "pure mathematics" when he invented the Turing machine, because we didn't have another word for it, yet.
So, which is going to be more useful - the sort of pure mathematics that AI does in 2026, or the sort of pure mathematics that humans do in 2026? That is the debate I would like to see.
Usefulness and efficiency should serve all humans, rather than privileging the feelings of elites accustomed to receiving accolades for their intellectual capabilities.
> This aligns with my own lived experiences — I didn’t become a theoretical physicist to learn about the universe or better appreciate the beauty of nature myself (that’s philosophy, which I would never be a doctor of).
If one truly philo's sophos, then wouldn't one at least be curious what the computer says about a difficult problem? Like, if you've been wrestling with an especially troublesome integral for years then I feel like that somewhere along the line you should have plugged it into a CAS - even if you want to clean up the derivation afterwards it would be foolish to ignore every tool at your disposal and even rail at the Mathematica authors for the temerity to write a symbolic integrator.
I feel that the article is so preoccupied with clever sarcasm that it doesn't really engage with nuanced views and is instead happy to just spend a few KB of text tearing down vibe research strawmen.
> From what I know about the academic community (mostly from Twitter and LinkedIn, which I assume are representative), there seems to be near-unanimous agreement that the purpose of math and science research is to gather a large quantity of potentially true factoids in a repository that nobody will actually ever read, in a ritual called “advancing humanity’s[3] knowledge”. That these results are well-written, understandable, pleasant to read or look at, or even completely correct is a secondary concern — in fact, in the pursuit of advancing humanity’s knowledge as quickly as possible, many academics will recoil in anger at the suggestion that it is worth spending any time making results understandable to humans.
Am I the only who thinks this is rhetorical? Modern mathematics is so far removed from the base average knowledge (lets just assume high school instead of going to axioms) that the only people who understand most (if not all new) mathematical achievement are the mathematicians themselves, heck not even all mathematicians, it needs to be spread and developed from "hot spots"?
Your math results are not "well-written, understandable, pleasant to read or look at" unless you literally operate with two or three levels within the proof paper compared to the average person who probably starts at an order of magnitude levels higher.
To the average person, asking a mathematician to explain something is the same as asking the AI/LLM. Both are asking an oracle to dumb it down to their level of abstraction.
To the person who are not career mathematicians, both LLMs and mathematicians do the same thing, pump out garbled output that they themselves understand, and to mathematicians, the difference is one probably explains using axioms rather than theorems.
As a mere software engineer, I found that many human written papers in my field (DSP, ML) aren’t exactly well-written, easily understandable or pleasant to read either, and it’s been the case for at least 15 years. In the past, I would frequently spend an hour or two trying to read a SOTA paper full of convoluted prose and dense pages of equations, only to realise that the algorithm is incredibly simple if visualised properly or even just written down as pseudocode.
Now with LLMs the process is much shorter. They can walk me through the algorithm step by step, translate it to pseudocode, explain equations, and most importantly, I can ask them questions and get clarifications, without worrying about seeming ignorant or exhausting their patience. With a paper, you’re stuck with whatever was written (and often, researchers aren’t good teachers, or intentionally over complicate simple concepts).
> many human written papers in my field (DSP, ML) aren’t exactly well-written, easily understandable or pleasant to read
Yep, my eyes glaze over at the convoluted mathematical explanations for pathfinding in worldspace, but when I see the pseudocode in the appendix it make so much more sense.
That's simply because code is easier to read for programmers than math. For mathematicians it is the other way around. Each profession has developed their own DSLs.
I work in construction now. Commercial Millwork/cabinets as a project manager.
It is so much harder and more stressful than my php/jquery mini saas coding days.
Often at work I start thinking "why are we doing all this? Why does anyone want this fancy reception desk?? This desk is not worth the human aggravation that it's causing."
I genuinely start thinking we should go back to concrete eastern European communist type buildings just for the simplicity and efficiency. Why all this fancy stuff that causes every project engineer, superintendent, and subcontractor Engineering department to get grey hair.
But I guess it makes the economy grow. I don't know.
I hate the concrete/modern aesthetic, but live and let live I say and you should build your dream one day.
I read something interesting recently that some huge percentage of society, all genders, all classes etc etc hate modern architectural compared to classic architectural style. The only people that like are architects and/or architecture students. Amusing tid bit. Could also be complete junk when I drive all over Australia and see white/grey render & black trim absolutely everywhere. Yuck.
My note wasn't really on style, but more so how much human energy goes into custom cabinets in a lunch break room, when in reality an almost custom off the shelf solution that just has a bit of evenly spaced empty space on both sides is cheaper and 90% less hassle.
I'm currently working on metal hallways portals that are 10' tall, except the material is only 8', and the seams are ugly, so several people are designing solutions on how to split the span up And what kind of reveal to do so the edge/seam is nice. Why? Why does this hallway need a metal cap at the end of it?
Man, mathematicians and scientists are going through it! I think one thing that makes things different for software engineers is there was always a belief that you were building for a specific use. It was rarely just for your own intellectual satisfaction. I think math and some of the sciences will now have to shift given that no one will be impressed by their intellectual achievements any longer.
What I’m most curious about is how this impacts our perception of who/what is smart.
I don’t accept this framing. If tools allow us to pursue ever more deeply into the mystery of being, and get to both questions and answers we never thought we’d see, that’s a good thing. I think the genuinely curious should have no problem redoubling their “freed up time” into further exploration. The library Borges describes is infinite. I won’t mind getting to read a few books I wouldn’t have otherwise.
I've read it, the main idea is "this isn’t just about mathematics or physics — it’s about fundamentally reimagining what it means to be human", but he still talks like all problems are solved. My point is that no only those that did not require novel creative approaches like Collatz.
Why Ai? Because its development was pretty much free and paid by the pension funds. The objective is supremacy and being the first entity and country to collect rent via Ai supremacy and block every other entity in their analysis; reality who knows what will happen..
It started with internet which was subsidized through military for sake of military supremacy and then it transformed to become a utility connecting everything and collecting information and it subsidized by the markets to collect rent from the world using this utility and now it is subsidized to replace labor around the world by knowing everything that humans know and to collect rent from its use to discount labor.
Just hit "random." It's always gibberish. The odds of getting something that isn't gibberish are astronomically low, like winning the lottery.
The actual library Borges describes has 25^1312000 books, the very vast majority of which are utter nonsense. (As the simulator makes clear.)
Yet with AI, we're getting an abundance of very credible -- and, as Tao himself notes, frequently correct -- mathematical proofs. In these new AI math results, the ratio of signal to noise is high, which makes our current situation the exact opposite of the library, which is pure noise where signal emerges only by random necessity.
I wish I never had to see this type of comment un-flagged on HN. Every time I do, I feel like I should leave, even though it's the last place on the internet I will engage with. It's a scary leap to make - to have nowhere left online to read or write.
> Fortunately, OpenAI has brought us one step closer to realizing Borges’s vision. Rather than generating every possible mathematical paper, they’ve found a way to probabilistically generate things that look correct.
Or at least ask your favorite LLM to read it, then give it your knee-jerk comment and ask it to check if it's already covered on the text. This saves you from wasting time using your own brain.
> First, they came for the artists,
and I did not speak out, because I was not an artist.
// actually FIRST they came for the programmers. and many of us were ultimately ULTIMATELY pretty tickled to get such a massive productivity boost. this anti-AI sentiment as seen here and in Jon Stewart's rant that all AI is good for is optimizing shopping carts or something... it's so upsetting see good folks buying into this and not realizing how much benefit it will bring. If anything, I've seen how much amazing power it has now given programmers such as myself... I can do what would take me years in an afternoon.
// Btw, can we retire the "first they came for the..." template, it's a little tired.
Diffusion models were the first gen AI tech to plausibly be able to replace humans, no? I feel like image generation was ahead of text generation 2015-2022, and prior to 2015 the best "gen AI" was markov chains which I don't think is within the scope of what we're talking about.
I remember being blown away by BERT and all its variations (BART etc) after the Transformers paper. For topic modeling and other semantic understanding of text, that was bee's knees. But certainly not replacing any humans.
Yeah, BERT was cool, but IMO things like StyleGAN were equally cool. I think DALL-E was the first time that there was practical, nonphilosophical, discussion about AI replacing human industries. Maybe there was discussion within the data labeling industry about text classification models replacing humans prior to that? But also, data labeling is one of the industries that probably got a lot bigger due to AI, so...
Just a coincidence that your comment is fourteen words and begins the same way as the other fourteen words, I'm sure.
Not surprised you made a throwaway account for a dog whistle this loud. Nazis are always cowards
So we have the Fields medal, awarded for making "progress" in math.
Now we are told explaining, understanding things, asking new questions is more important than proving things. So where is the math community medals/awards for this job?
It's a nice rant that I think will become more common until everyone burns out and one important realization dawns upon them: the corporations doing these things don't really care about your plight, suffering, etc. You can write thousands of books using this kind of tongue-in-cheek-but-really-angry language, and they'll just laugh it off. Felix Reisenberg will make a new post about something he's doing with Claude, Boris will make a tweet and everyone will rush to turn it into LLM-generated images so they can post on their LinkedIn for their bosses to measure their engagement KPIs, and we'll forget about the rants.
So if you are suggesting that life is now meaningless at status quo, it suggests that life will find new meaning....perhaps it will come in the form of a realisation that if corporations are in no ones interest, perhaps the better life is the one fighting against meaninglessness through our own redefinitions of noble pursuits...perhaps the most noble pursuit will become war against companies and executives in a post-modern religious crusade to reclaim some purpose in ones life. Perhaps murder is not a problem when you murder companies
It's the same process that has been running - creation of complexity as a dissipative structure - but now with even less friction. Some say we'll transcend, I think we're spiraling into the language-navel of cartesian dualist logical positivist insanity.
I love the dissipative structure framing. It's the only logical explanation for all of this.
Datacenters in space are visionary -- they are maximally energy rate dense and they expand the area of energy absorption. Might be 100 years too early but that is where we are headed, after we turn all of the available biosphere of earth into computronium, that is.
The only superior technology left would be von Neumann probes.
> Of all the things we could be doing, why are we doing this?
Money. Capitalism. It's all a fucking grift. Always has been.
If you thought AI was going to usher in a post scarcity golden age of infinite wealth where all disease, hunger, want and inequality are solved and everyone gets to live their lives purely for pleasure and intellectual pursuit, where the Eschaton is in their Heaven and all is right in the world, and humanity spreads out amongst the stars as beings of transcendent posthuman machine intellect or some shit you read in a sci-fi book then congratulations, you're the mark.
>> reimagining what it means to be human. By outsourcing the burdens of curiosity, creativity, and understanding, we can finally focus on what matters most
... the fact that this shit doesn't even scrape the ass of more than 500 million people, 60% of which are utterly useless with or without (mit oder mit ohne) ... neither sacrasm, nor cnysims or inorys will uplift this worst of all narratives ever written.
So, would most people, and this would mean that very little housing would be built, very little health care provided, and very little food grown or harvested.
well I'd be willing to help build housing, provide health care, and grow food as needed given the stability it provides
right now my contract is more or less "we'll keep paying you if you continue providing us with the arbitrary value we require" which is certainly more difficult to reckon with
Unlikable text. Just a rant with the usual “corporations” socialism-slop. Terry Tao’s blog rapidly diminishing in quality. I didn’t think that the way machines would approach top mathematics is to transform top mathematicians into boring Redditors who eagerly retweet other annoying Redditors.
Dear friends: you may not like to hear this but the profit motive is what ruins everything.
I have a degree in Economics. I have read Adam Smith (and not just the Wealth of Nations, by the way!). I spent years on this stuff. I understand markets and for some things they are indeed the best solution. No argument there.
It is a FACT that some things in life should not be done for profit.
If we as humanity cannot protect fields like art, science, even healthcare and housing, from the ever-growing pressure to make a profit off of them, then we are truly doomed. AI is not the sole cause, it just expedites the process of destroying everything that is not maximally cost-effective.
Some things cannot be done for profit, but need to be done. These are things that we consider moral or human rights, such as feeding the hungry, caring for the sick, or sheltering the homeless. This is the realm of charity, and it was once a serious obligation for the elite as well as a central focus of religion.
But for everything else, the profit motive is unsurpassed at allocating scarce resources to their most productive uses.
All the nihilism in the AI space is so tiresome. We have a tool now that can accelerate the technological development of our species and actually reach for the stars! How exciting! All these ruminations and lamentations about what it means to be human are downright laughable to people on the front lines of war, living in abject poverty, etc. "Oh, to be so lucky!", I'm sure they'd say.
The luddites and doomers should do the world a favor and go establish a commune in rural Alaska, then they can be happy and the rest of us can get back to building and playing with amazing technology!
> dreaming that one day an unfeeling corporate robot[1] will burn a rainforest to compile a list of 700 highly obscure barely-readable facts that might be true that nobody can understand as part of a marketing gimmick to raise hype for an IPO
The climate effect argument against AI is so intellectually dishonest. It’s the same as saying that Tao is on the side of stopping the advancement of Cancer research.
I thought the people clowning him were dumb, but the people arguing for either side are really fighting on a mud pit.
>And now that AI has solved all our problems, we can devote ourselves to more important work: going into quantitative finance, vibecoding sports-betting apps, consuming AI-generated TikTok shorts, and arguing with political bots on Twitter.
Grim but this is exactly where society is heading.
There are no shortage of artistic pursuits, subcultures, pick-up leagues, and more that you're free to engage with. Get off the beaten path and you'll find humans enjoying life in a wide variety of ways that are uncorrupted by AI.
> you'll find humans enjoying life in a wide variety of ways that are uncorrupted by AI
Some of those people were mathematicians, engineers, physicists who found joy in being skilled at what they do and were able to be financially rewarded for their effort applying their skill. Are these artistic pursuits, subcultures, pick-up leagues, etc going to pay their mortgage? Will they help them get a job in a field they are trained in?
The "free to pursue more important things" is a hand-wavy statement that doesn't talk at all about what those people should be doing to provide for themselves after wages plummet. The hyperbole is drawing attention to the ridiculousness, not making a comment about there not being a rec soccer league or something.
Why should financial rewards be only for mathematical and programming work? What's the principle you're working with?
> Get off the beaten path
I would really push back on this
What you're describing _is_ the beaten path. People who argue with bots on twitter are actually, vastly, the minority.
Go to your local park or bar and have a drink and try not to talk about the internet.
It's increasingly becoming more of a majority and it's spilling in to real life. In Melbourne, Australia there would be a weekly "cooker" protest where they shut down the street to get angry about covid mind control vaccines or whatever the latest facebook bots are programming them to be mad about.
I think that's not taking the most charitable reading of their intentions. They are simply concerned with unverified, untested vaccines, much like many here were during COVID.
Nice, fair enough.
Are you by any chance born to rich parents in a western country?
Because most people in the world are working around the clock to supply food and shelter for their family. It's a bit unclear still how you are going to consolidate the two facts
GP was talking about how humans would spend their time after the "real work" is done, as if the only purpose of humanity is productivity or consumption.
The assumption is that there will be time left. But as it is the 'real work' takes up only 8 hours per day because the resulting pay is significant. But if that pay evaporates suddenly the real work will balloon to take up most of your waking hours.
We are referring to people in the context of "going into quantitative finance, vibecoding sports-betting apps, consuming AI-generated TikTok shorts, and arguing with political bots on Twitter.".
Those are hardly the "most people in the world are working around the clock to supply food and shelter for their family"
It's a bit unclear still how you are going to consolidate the two facts.
The article is satirical and hyperbolic, while the reply above is concrete in its suggestion
That is the future. Gambling would be the way that Ai can distribute money; only random odds can win against it.
I've been looking for a baseball or softball league for my kid. He doesn't want to play school ball, doesn't play travel ball, but loves the game. It's impossible to find baseball or softball leagues after the age of 12 that are not attached to a school or travel. Volleyball is about the only thing that exists.
Let's hope they have some land so they can farm potatoes in between their lives of artistic pursuits and other joys. Because those are not going fill the fridge.
No need to hope. 99 percent of the world outside of mathematics and programmers who had already figured it out pre ai. We'll just have to learn from them.
Let them eat cake.. all will be will be well!
Except that engagement is not free. All of these things require money, and they require time that isn't already set towards the goal of making money to survive. And one of the selling points of AI is explicitly the redundancy of numerous workers, including ones parallel to myself.
For many things this is true nowadays. Where I live walking in nature or swimming in the ocean is still free. In Dubai nature as in a green park might raise an entry fee.
Arguably Dubai shouldn’t exist as a place where many humans live.
I get that someone wanted to let steam off but this just sounds like they don't have any arguments so they went for the good old "in the future, you won't have free will and social media companies force you to be online" fable. An addicting algorithm isn't the same thing as fentanyl, you can uninstall the app in 5 seconds and getting it back with signing in takes atleast two minutes, enough to reconsider whether you actually want to spend time on it.
The toxicity of apps like Tiktok comes from muscle memory, not the quality of the content. Your thumb knows where the app icon is and opening the app happens quicker than you can think (literally). So offloading or uninstalling breaks this very effectively. The only thing that would still keep you on the platform is social connections. If somebody gets upset over you uninstalling Instagram or Snapchat, they aren't a good friend.
I don't think this goes far enough -- its a best case scenario.
There is no Utopia for mankind at the end of an AGI that is the labor force because people need a purpose; without that, degenerate behaviours and vice are easy to fall into and the spiral is not big. The state of the human race - particularly the internet-native generations - is a testament to that.
The only way the AGI Utopia works is with a massive reduction in the human population with a Spartan/Helot relationship between those remaining.
Let's face it, the people who want AGI so badly aren't the wam cuddly people who want to feed the poor, house the homeless, and cure the sick. Their motives here are not pure...
You don’t need pure motives to do good. In fact they often are detrimental to that (see e.g. Mother Teresa, Mao, Stalin, etc.)
> offloading or uninstalling breaks this very effectively
For you, maybe. You can't assume that applies to everyone.
N=2 but deleting my Facebook account (~4 years ago) has effectively stopped me from arguing online about things I don’t really care about with people who I don’t know.
I mean I still do it here to some extent but much less frequently
> now that AI has solved all our problems
Make it your problem to find problems that AI have not yet solved. Problem solved.
Nope. Someone will just ask an AI to do that as well.
Be like the guy in Asimov's "The Last Answer" [1]. Work on a problem that the AI cannot solve.
[1] https://www.highexistence.com/the-last-answer-short-story/
He forgot one, "creating AI slop games that no one will ever play".
guilty
This is so well written, deep, funny, and sad.
> Looking up at the stars in wonderment, or enjoying a complex puzzle game, or being inspired by an encouraging teacher, and dreaming that one day an unfeeling corporate robot[1] will burn a rainforest to compile a list of 700 highly obscure barely-readable facts that might be true that nobody can understand as part of a marketing gimmick to raise hype for an IPO[2].
But if I am going to critique it's main point it would be this part:
> in the pursuit of advancing humanity’s knowledge as quickly as possible, many academics will recoil in anger at the suggestion that it is worth spending any time making results understandable to humans. It is inefficient to explain or check a result when those resources can be spent generating another.
While obviously ridiculous, I think this does not go far enough. The problem isn't that people don't care and resources should not be spent to explain AI results to human minds, the problem is that AI will soon be better at explaining itself than humans. The puzzle then changes from can AI formally verify and explain a proof to: do human minds trust the proof. Do we believe that the proof is correct and not an elaborate AI hallucination using tricks that are beyond our understanding. In order to trust it a formal verification is not enough unless it is human understandable. In fact human understandability is the only thing that matters. That is something that AI can never do on its own.
>In order to trust it a formal verification is not enough unless it is human understandable.
The whole point of formal verification is to remove the necessity of understanding most of the work. We only need to trust the formalization of the problem statement, the proof verifier, and the formalization of the result. We already have proof verifiers that humans understand to a high level, and the formalizations of the problem statement and the result are much simpler than the full proof.
I'm confident that the Navier-Stokes equations can blow up because I'm confident that Lean works correctly, and I'm confident that the mathematicians verified the problem statement and result correctly. This is despite the actual proof not being human verified yet (as far as I know), and despite the "human-readable" version not actually corresponding to the formal proof. The formal method still worked.
Some mathematicians are not confident in the NS verification because it is non-trivial to tell if the Lean proof matches NS. I would argue this requires "human understability" to make this claim. The Lean proof is a very useful tool, but it does not replace human understanding.
I find it shallow.
Beneath the sarcasm it's making a rather simplistic argument that OpenAI cares little about human understanding of the results or their correctness.
The author appears to argue that this in service of a pointless goal, that no one will even care to read the results, and that all this is taking away from human creativity and removing the fun in scientific discovery.
I don't see a convincing argument here that OpenAI does not in fact aim to further humanity's understanding of mathematics, or that using AI for scientific discovery is comparable to automating away the fun parts of life.
The sarcasm is rhetorically strong, but profound? I don't think so.
OpenAI certainly does not really care about human understanding of these math problems. We've always said solving the hardest math problems would be a remarkable demonstration of AGI, and here is their demonstration. But it's not really about the math, this is about the power of LLMs and the path to AGI/ASI. Solving math problems is just a parlor trick for OpenAI.
It may not be the most prescient or innovative sci fi series, but I read The Three Body Problem a few years ago and it's really stuck with me. Specifically the description of how humanity reached an inflection point in math & physics research that almost immediately unlocked novel innovations in applied science ... which then made space exploration & settlement practical. Moreover, that the antagonist society in the series decided their absolute best bet at avoiding complete annihilation was to hamstring humankind's scientific research -- and that's it.
It feels like frontier models are starting to approach an asymptote where what you suggest could become reality, and we'll begin seeing not just AI research but AI-designed & led applications of that research into fundamental parts of our society & culture. For better and for worse.
I'm all for advancing human understanding, even if it might lag behind machine understanding, but there is a way to have machines prove they understand something we don't: ask them to build something functional that we can't. If your hypothetical future comes to pass, and we ask the machine to build a cancer-curing healing ray, and it works, I'd say that's its own win. Then we can spend however long it takes trying to understand how it works. It's depressing and disempowering in a way, but I think overall I'd be happy with that future.
I once visited a town in Spain over which an ancient Roman aqueduct runs, elevated above most of the buildings, even today. It carried an essential ingredient foundational to life in the area, but after the fall of the Empire and the deaths of the architects and engineers who could understand it, the aqueduct stood in the midst of people who could not have repaired it. Relying on mission-critical technology divorced from human understanding is exceptionally risky. Obviously, people have done it before and will happen again, but it makes me nervous.
Chess has already been this way: computers are far better than humans, yet the humans still play and learn/understand new position evaluations from the computers.
You’re spot on here by analogy.
There also will never be a Mikhail Tal type of player again and most classical matches at the highest level are just draws now. I'm not sure if you could say AI is a benefit for the highest level but it is an equaliser in the sense that you don't need to pay for a tutor to analyse your mistakes (though they can still be helpful) which helps the average player. Chess is also predominantly for entertainment making it not the best example for AI not replacing people.
> Then we can spend however long it takes trying to understand how it works.
...unfortunately it took 57 years to unravel, but the cryptic exploit resulting in our telomeres suddenly expiring took a mere 42.
Why not live in a cage then and have the zookeeper deal with catering to begin with?
The state you proclaim to be happy with is one of irresponsible dependency. A retreat to self-infantilization.
100% agree. In fact, this issue of verifiability is not at all unique to AI. It was a profound and growing issue before the advent of useful AI. Perhaps the issue was best elucidated by Dr. Anthony Fauci when he suggested that we "Believe the science" as a rational for why people should follow his covid prescriptions. I side with those who feel that Dr Fauci was really just trying to do his best. Regardless, with that statement he cut the foundation out from under the whole scientific project! Science (and math) are not to be believed. They are to be tested!
We have moved quite a long way down the "believe the science" road already, and for good reason. Belief is much (!) faster and cheaper than proof, so those who are fed good science(math) and believe it tend to outcompete people who get stuck trying to prove things all the time.
But fraud is fraud regardless of the platform (meat or silicon) committing it. People who believe in frauds often end up worse off for it, though it hard to know which piece of BS has led you astray or who's to blame for it or how to deal with the fall out.
Obviously, we shouldn't believe AI any more than we believe humans. That said, the world was already suffering greatly under the weight of human generated BS long before useful AI came on the scene. Now that AI has reduced the cost of producing plausible BS by orders of magnitude, we may need some new methods for BS detection.
I feel this way about code. Writing things by hand is the quickest way for me to fully understand it, and that is what I am paid to do, to understand it. It will be executed millions and millions of times for every time it is modified, so even if writing it by hand is 10x or 100x as slow, it is still a better payoff.
> the problem is that AI will soon be better at explaining itself than humans
(I assume you mean explain itself to humans here.)
I keep seeing people saying this as fact. It might, but it might not, and there are various reasons one might be skeptical that it will, using current techniques. Not least among these is that explaining something well to a human requires a degree of empathy and sophisticated theory-of-mind that LLMs have not yet exhibited yet*, and that is an area where humans are uniquely advantaged by being humans.
Someone will almost certainly reply by just stating as fact that they will achieve this goal, or pointing out that past predictions that LLMs wouldn't be able to do particular things have failed, and that's all very well. I certainly wouldn't be rash enough to claim it's impossible, but there are still models of all this available that are consistent with all the successes so far but don't predict "LLMs can do anything and will do everything". We'll find out in due course.
(I should clarify that the benchmark here is good human explanations. Of course many humans are capable of producing "explanations" worse than Markov chain text, let alone LLM output.)
* My idle speculation is that a lack of decent theory-of-mind is why LLMs still suck at using the "it's not X it's Y" construct. I doubt they actually use it any more frequently than humans when writing on the same topics, but they use it wrong and it's jarring. This particular rhetorical flourish works when there's some reason to think that X is an idea that might actually be present or forming in the mind of someone reading the passage (or in some other mind that they in turn might be imagining, eg. a fictional character), and that explicitly calling it out and negating it will have a particular dramatic effect. LLMs probably use it with about the expected frequency, but they use it for that reason (frequency) and then come up with something to put in the X and Y slots. The result often jars because the X it uses isn't something pertinent to the reader's thought process and/or the Y isn't a convincing, persuasive or relevant counterpoint to it. I suspect the result is that they stick out and seem more frequent than they are.
> an unfeeling corporate robot[1] will burn a rainforest to compile a list of 700 highly obscure barely-readable facts that might be true that nobody can understand
He'd have more of a point if a huge number of humans weren't occupied doing exactly this, and much worse on top.
Someone else doing something bad (or worse) doesn't negate all other bad things.
Understanding math isn't just about "having a good explanation ready".
People fundamentally misunderstand the nature of mathematics: it's not "flat" like most of common people's daily pursuits. It consists of building upwards, on top of previous concepts.
In other words, AI is like an oracle: it can tell you all kinds of stuff, but since you probably don't understand, you won't act properly.
Your last sentence: "That is something that AI can never do on its own."
Never say never...
I'm saying this as a tautology: the definition of human understanding requires a human.
and really good RL
There are plenty of things we use and found useful before we understood them. We knew how to make it, how it works was for the most part inconsequential.
the problem is that AI will soon be better at explaining itself than humans
But will it? What's the trend on the metrics for this? Everything else has metrics, why not this?
I mostly work on getting ChatGPT to come up with algorithms, which it is moderately good at. When I ask it to summarize it's findings, the results are less understandable to me than what it said originally.
I don't believe that it's always getting better at everything everywhere. It's no doubt getting better at many things but even there it seems clear the rate vary.
Well, we can try tying it to ground truth. AI does the math for magnetic field containment? Test it. AI predicts a particle? Test it. AI says P=NP? Ok, factor this in polynomial time.
And if it fails, and AI goes, "I don't know what happened. I relied on these papers" then I guess one of those must be wrong.
I'm not saying it'd be easy, but I think AI can also find the pieces of the puzzle that broke a pyramid of "discoveries" culminating in a disproval,
And the only other option is to simply never understand as much. AI has the potential to understand things humans cannot. Not necessarily a strict superset.
Humans can deal in 5+-2 things at once. AI doesn't have to, and can cut through leaky abstractions.
If AI says a new invention will do X, and it doesn't, it'll say "you're absolutely right" and try again until it does the thing.
I mean... doomsday scenarios aside.
I think the author is hiding the ball a bit. The problem is that, for a long time, humans have attributed meaning, value, and social status to great cognitive insights. Taking physics as an example, it has almost always been the theorists who develop new ideas, not the experimentalists that test and validate them, who have won praise and acclaim. The name Arthur Eddington doesn’t have the same cachet as that of Albert Einstein. But now that the creation of those insights can be automated, there is a great wrenching as esteem shifts away from the former.
Well, maybe it’s a good thing that we are seeing this shift. Maybe it is good and right that we begin valuing your ability to exist in the real world, rather than play math puzzles on a sheet of paper. Because, while the AI labs are receiving a lot of attention and excitement now, that’s a short run phenomenon. Ultimately, people aren’t impressed for long by a machine doing something novel. Once it’s up and running, it fades into the background just like the combustion engine, or the dishwasher, or electric lighting.
> The problem is that, for a long time, humans have attributed meaning, value, and social status to great cognitive insights.
Not really, they haven't. It's only when those insights can be communicated in such a way to other people that those other people can find utility (which could be enabling them to derive more insights that yet other people find utility in recursively) in the insights that they do so, and this is a huge difference. This is why AI is such a total problem to this mentality, because it disrupts not only insight production but the mechanism that values insight production.
Of course cognition was labor and it had a significant value attributed to it because it was they only way to figure things out. Now are you saying that devaluing it is A ok because cognition can be automated by stealing from those who figured it all and now cognition is overpriced? If that was true, the machine wouldn't take its content from those humans but it does. It is built on top of human collective cognition and knowledge.
If Ai is something novel for now and then it will be all ok? Just dream on; would you be happy if your job was replaced.. what about your kids.. If that is the case , then enjoy. It is demoralizing for a lot of people who will be replaced by a better thinking machines.
It is no longer about the automation alone but also humans will change to avoid competing with the machine because humans will lose that race just like how they lose when playing chess with the machine.
Not a huge fan of the sentiment in this article, and the very cynical way it was communicated, but the references to the library of babel reminded me of this fun site.
https://libraryofbabel.info
I sympathize with some feelings the author is trying to communicate, but the cynical and sarcastic style really detract from the authors points in my view.
I don't think this article communicates any new ideas; to me the style is the unique aspect of it that makes it worth reading. If you personally don't like the style, there are many other articles portraying the same sentiment in a more agreeable style.
the cynical and sarcastic style was my favorite part
Sorry to be a little insulting, but I don't believe you feel sympathy with the author if the cynicism/sarcasm put you off. That's the point.
The question is the right one. "Why are we even doing all this?"
Why, indeed, is society funding pure mathematics? Many mathematicians are complaining that they do not like AI and their jobs are less fun when AI is involved. But does that matter? Should that matter to the institutions who fund mathematics research?
To me it seems that we fund pure mathematics because we believe that some pure mathematics will end up being useful. Turing was doing "pure mathematics" when he invented the Turing machine, because we didn't have another word for it, yet.
So, which is going to be more useful - the sort of pure mathematics that AI does in 2026, or the sort of pure mathematics that humans do in 2026? That is the debate I would like to see.
The article is about humans, not usefulness or efficiency.
If you put the latter above the former, you don't really exist, in a sense.
Usefulness and efficiency should serve all humans, rather than privileging the feelings of elites accustomed to receiving accolades for their intellectual capabilities.
Great satire, it is nice to see people with a human spirit left. The NYT should ask to republish this.
> (that’s philosophy, which I would never be a doctor of)
I'm in the office and was trying to contain my laughter next to my colleagues, but this tipped me over the edge
> This aligns with my own lived experiences — I didn’t become a theoretical physicist to learn about the universe or better appreciate the beauty of nature myself (that’s philosophy, which I would never be a doctor of).
If one truly philo's sophos, then wouldn't one at least be curious what the computer says about a difficult problem? Like, if you've been wrestling with an especially troublesome integral for years then I feel like that somewhere along the line you should have plugged it into a CAS - even if you want to clean up the derivation afterwards it would be foolish to ignore every tool at your disposal and even rail at the Mathematica authors for the temerity to write a symbolic integrator.
I feel that the article is so preoccupied with clever sarcasm that it doesn't really engage with nuanced views and is instead happy to just spend a few KB of text tearing down vibe research strawmen.
> From what I know about the academic community (mostly from Twitter and LinkedIn, which I assume are representative), there seems to be near-unanimous agreement that the purpose of math and science research is to gather a large quantity of potentially true factoids in a repository that nobody will actually ever read, in a ritual called “advancing humanity’s[3] knowledge”. That these results are well-written, understandable, pleasant to read or look at, or even completely correct is a secondary concern — in fact, in the pursuit of advancing humanity’s knowledge as quickly as possible, many academics will recoil in anger at the suggestion that it is worth spending any time making results understandable to humans.
Am I the only who thinks this is rhetorical? Modern mathematics is so far removed from the base average knowledge (lets just assume high school instead of going to axioms) that the only people who understand most (if not all new) mathematical achievement are the mathematicians themselves, heck not even all mathematicians, it needs to be spread and developed from "hot spots"?
Your math results are not "well-written, understandable, pleasant to read or look at" unless you literally operate with two or three levels within the proof paper compared to the average person who probably starts at an order of magnitude levels higher.
To the average person, asking a mathematician to explain something is the same as asking the AI/LLM. Both are asking an oracle to dumb it down to their level of abstraction.
To the person who are not career mathematicians, both LLMs and mathematicians do the same thing, pump out garbled output that they themselves understand, and to mathematicians, the difference is one probably explains using axioms rather than theorems.
As a mere software engineer, I found that many human written papers in my field (DSP, ML) aren’t exactly well-written, easily understandable or pleasant to read either, and it’s been the case for at least 15 years. In the past, I would frequently spend an hour or two trying to read a SOTA paper full of convoluted prose and dense pages of equations, only to realise that the algorithm is incredibly simple if visualised properly or even just written down as pseudocode.
Now with LLMs the process is much shorter. They can walk me through the algorithm step by step, translate it to pseudocode, explain equations, and most importantly, I can ask them questions and get clarifications, without worrying about seeming ignorant or exhausting their patience. With a paper, you’re stuck with whatever was written (and often, researchers aren’t good teachers, or intentionally over complicate simple concepts).
> many human written papers in my field (DSP, ML) aren’t exactly well-written, easily understandable or pleasant to read
Yep, my eyes glaze over at the convoluted mathematical explanations for pathfinding in worldspace, but when I see the pseudocode in the appendix it make so much more sense.
That's simply because code is easier to read for programmers than math. For mathematicians it is the other way around. Each profession has developed their own DSLs.
We're doing all this because it might make a shitload of money. Not for most of us, but we don't matter.
I work in construction now. Commercial Millwork/cabinets as a project manager.
It is so much harder and more stressful than my php/jquery mini saas coding days.
Often at work I start thinking "why are we doing all this? Why does anyone want this fancy reception desk?? This desk is not worth the human aggravation that it's causing."
I genuinely start thinking we should go back to concrete eastern European communist type buildings just for the simplicity and efficiency. Why all this fancy stuff that causes every project engineer, superintendent, and subcontractor Engineering department to get grey hair.
But I guess it makes the economy grow. I don't know.
I hate the concrete/modern aesthetic, but live and let live I say and you should build your dream one day.
I read something interesting recently that some huge percentage of society, all genders, all classes etc etc hate modern architectural compared to classic architectural style. The only people that like are architects and/or architecture students. Amusing tid bit. Could also be complete junk when I drive all over Australia and see white/grey render & black trim absolutely everywhere. Yuck.
My note wasn't really on style, but more so how much human energy goes into custom cabinets in a lunch break room, when in reality an almost custom off the shelf solution that just has a bit of evenly spaced empty space on both sides is cheaper and 90% less hassle.
I'm currently working on metal hallways portals that are 10' tall, except the material is only 8', and the seams are ugly, so several people are designing solutions on how to split the span up And what kind of reveal to do so the edge/seam is nice. Why? Why does this hallway need a metal cap at the end of it?
Man, mathematicians and scientists are going through it! I think one thing that makes things different for software engineers is there was always a belief that you were building for a specific use. It was rarely just for your own intellectual satisfaction. I think math and some of the sciences will now have to shift given that no one will be impressed by their intellectual achievements any longer.
What I’m most curious about is how this impacts our perception of who/what is smart.
I don’t accept this framing. If tools allow us to pursue ever more deeply into the mystery of being, and get to both questions and answers we never thought we’d see, that’s a good thing. I think the genuinely curious should have no problem redoubling their “freed up time” into further exploration. The library Borges describes is infinite. I won’t mind getting to read a few books I wouldn’t have otherwise.
> AI has solved all our problems
What about the Collatz conjecture? AFAIK, it requires some novel approaches to mathematics, which would be a real testament to AI creative skills.
I don't doubt it will be solved some day, but as of now it's too early to say that all our problems are solved.
You may want to reread the essay. Many of the statements in it are not the sincere beliefs of the author.
I've read it, the main idea is "this isn’t just about mathematics or physics — it’s about fundamentally reimagining what it means to be human", but he still talks like all problems are solved. My point is that no only those that did not require novel creative approaches like Collatz.
> No rational person, least of all us masters of rationality in STEM, pursues these for the joy of creation, learning, or beauty
well yeah the purpose of STEM education is to be a factory to produce the correct worker for another factory
Why Ai? Because its development was pretty much free and paid by the pension funds. The objective is supremacy and being the first entity and country to collect rent via Ai supremacy and block every other entity in their analysis; reality who knows what will happen..
It started with internet which was subsidized through military for sake of military supremacy and then it transformed to become a utility connecting everything and collecting information and it subsidized by the markets to collect rent from the world using this utility and now it is subsidized to replace labor around the world by knowing everything that humans know and to collect rent from its use to discount labor.
This is not a very upbeat post. It does not say much about the AI Library of Babel but I have been wondering about the same thing.
> This is a guest post by Rikab Gambhir. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.
Droll. Also, you needed AI to... convert a text file to another format? Really? That's what we're using all those GPUs for?
Such a weird take.
There's a library of babel simulator here: https://libraryofbabel.info/
Just hit "random." It's always gibberish. The odds of getting something that isn't gibberish are astronomically low, like winning the lottery.
The actual library Borges describes has 25^1312000 books, the very vast majority of which are utter nonsense. (As the simulator makes clear.)
Yet with AI, we're getting an abundance of very credible -- and, as Tao himself notes, frequently correct -- mathematical proofs. In these new AI math results, the ratio of signal to noise is high, which makes our current situation the exact opposite of the library, which is pure noise where signal emerges only by random necessity.
Above: Literacy crisis casualty
Causes:
The metaphor was, in my opinion, far too badly strained to work.
its not even a metaphor. you're not understanding the library of bable
The author made a stupid argument and the choice of comparison is part of that stupidity.
I wish I never had to see this type of comment un-flagged on HN. Every time I do, I feel like I should leave, even though it's the last place on the internet I will engage with. It's a scary leap to make - to have nowhere left online to read or write.
Maybe read TFA...
Or at least ask your favorite LLM to read it, then give it your knee-jerk comment and ask it to check if it's already covered on the text. This saves you from wasting time using your own brain.Whoosh.
> First, they came for the artists, and I did not speak out, because I was not an artist.
// actually FIRST they came for the programmers. and many of us were ultimately ULTIMATELY pretty tickled to get such a massive productivity boost. this anti-AI sentiment as seen here and in Jon Stewart's rant that all AI is good for is optimizing shopping carts or something... it's so upsetting see good folks buying into this and not realizing how much benefit it will bring. If anything, I've seen how much amazing power it has now given programmers such as myself... I can do what would take me years in an afternoon.
// Btw, can we retire the "first they came for the..." template, it's a little tired.
Diffusion models were the first gen AI tech to plausibly be able to replace humans, no? I feel like image generation was ahead of text generation 2015-2022, and prior to 2015 the best "gen AI" was markov chains which I don't think is within the scope of what we're talking about.
I remember being blown away by BERT and all its variations (BART etc) after the Transformers paper. For topic modeling and other semantic understanding of text, that was bee's knees. But certainly not replacing any humans.
Yeah, BERT was cool, but IMO things like StyleGAN were equally cool. I think DALL-E was the first time that there was practical, nonphilosophical, discussion about AI replacing human industries. Maybe there was discussion within the data labeling industry about text classification models replacing humans prior to that? But also, data labeling is one of the industries that probably got a lot bigger due to AI, so...
We had some really neat powerful classification around then.
We must secure the future of humanity and preserve dignity, freedom, purpose and agency.
Just a coincidence that your comment is fourteen words and begins the same way as the other fourteen words, I'm sure. Not surprised you made a throwaway account for a dog whistle this loud. Nazis are always cowards
So we have the Fields medal, awarded for making "progress" in math.
Now we are told explaining, understanding things, asking new questions is more important than proving things. So where is the math community medals/awards for this job?
oh stop it
> This is a guest post by Rikab Gambhir.
Very much worth noting for those about to read this! haha I got a couple of paragraphs in and shook my head.
I’m not doing it. Why are you?
It's a nice rant that I think will become more common until everyone burns out and one important realization dawns upon them: the corporations doing these things don't really care about your plight, suffering, etc. You can write thousands of books using this kind of tongue-in-cheek-but-really-angry language, and they'll just laugh it off. Felix Reisenberg will make a new post about something he's doing with Claude, Boris will make a tweet and everyone will rush to turn it into LLM-generated images so they can post on their LinkedIn for their bosses to measure their engagement KPIs, and we'll forget about the rants.
So if you are suggesting that life is now meaningless at status quo, it suggests that life will find new meaning....perhaps it will come in the form of a realisation that if corporations are in no ones interest, perhaps the better life is the one fighting against meaninglessness through our own redefinitions of noble pursuits...perhaps the most noble pursuit will become war against companies and executives in a post-modern religious crusade to reclaim some purpose in ones life. Perhaps murder is not a problem when you murder companies
What if the rants slowly transition into violence?
"Data center death threats."[1]
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2026/10/12/politics/data-center-backlash...
When, not if...
That's the point - why are we doing this?
Of all the things we could be doing, why are we doing this?
Is it collective mental illness? Economic hysteria? A cult of virtual personality?
It's simultaneously irrational, obsessive, ecologically and politically catastrophic, and all-consuming - none of which are good things.
It's the same process that has been running - creation of complexity as a dissipative structure - but now with even less friction. Some say we'll transcend, I think we're spiraling into the language-navel of cartesian dualist logical positivist insanity.
I love the dissipative structure framing. It's the only logical explanation for all of this.
Datacenters in space are visionary -- they are maximally energy rate dense and they expand the area of energy absorption. Might be 100 years too early but that is where we are headed, after we turn all of the available biosphere of earth into computronium, that is.
The only superior technology left would be von Neumann probes.
> That's the point - why are we doing this?
> Of all the things we could be doing, why are we doing this?
Money. Capitalism. It's all a fucking grift. Always has been.
If you thought AI was going to usher in a post scarcity golden age of infinite wealth where all disease, hunger, want and inequality are solved and everyone gets to live their lives purely for pleasure and intellectual pursuit, where the Eschaton is in their Heaven and all is right in the world, and humanity spreads out amongst the stars as beings of transcendent posthuman machine intellect or some shit you read in a sci-fi book then congratulations, you're the mark.
Why the hell would I want or expect a corporation to care about my plight?
I don't think this essay was written to appeal to the emotions of Sam Altman.
>> reimagining what it means to be human. By outsourcing the burdens of curiosity, creativity, and understanding, we can finally focus on what matters most
... the fact that this shit doesn't even scrape the ass of more than 500 million people, 60% of which are utterly useless with or without (mit oder mit ohne) ... neither sacrasm, nor cnysims or inorys will uplift this worst of all narratives ever written.
this is all soooooo baaaaaad
...for money
if I had guaranteed access to housing, healthcare, and food I'd stop immediately
So, would most people, and this would mean that very little housing would be built, very little health care provided, and very little food grown or harvested.
well I'd be willing to help build housing, provide health care, and grow food as needed given the stability it provides
right now my contract is more or less "we'll keep paying you if you continue providing us with the arbitrary value we require" which is certainly more difficult to reckon with
Now imagine what quantum computers will do. AI in polynomial time.
You can sense the fear and anxiety in the article.
Is existence not enough anymore? Do humans need more?
You will own nothing, and you will be happy.
Is that a prediction, or is that a demand?
It's a promise.
Unlikable text. Just a rant with the usual “corporations” socialism-slop. Terry Tao’s blog rapidly diminishing in quality. I didn’t think that the way machines would approach top mathematics is to transform top mathematicians into boring Redditors who eagerly retweet other annoying Redditors.
They're so butthurt about losing their social status of not being the top intellectuals anymore, I find it hard to take them serious.
Dear friends: you may not like to hear this but the profit motive is what ruins everything.
I have a degree in Economics. I have read Adam Smith (and not just the Wealth of Nations, by the way!). I spent years on this stuff. I understand markets and for some things they are indeed the best solution. No argument there.
It is a FACT that some things in life should not be done for profit.
If we as humanity cannot protect fields like art, science, even healthcare and housing, from the ever-growing pressure to make a profit off of them, then we are truly doomed. AI is not the sole cause, it just expedites the process of destroying everything that is not maximally cost-effective.
What is the incentive to protect these fields?
Will protection of these fields help the average person or country to survive and accumulate resources?
Narrator: But this was a fiction. In reality, evidence of any profits being made was extremely hard to come by.
> I spent years on this stuff.
All I needed was entering a game of Monopoly after a few rounds had already been played.
Some things cannot be done for profit, but need to be done. These are things that we consider moral or human rights, such as feeding the hungry, caring for the sick, or sheltering the homeless. This is the realm of charity, and it was once a serious obligation for the elite as well as a central focus of religion.
But for everything else, the profit motive is unsurpassed at allocating scarce resources to their most productive uses.
A corner stone of Economics is Game Theory and Prisoner's Dilemma. You can choose not to do things for profit, but other people will.
Capitalism is the real ASI running things, and in some cases, ruining.
All the nihilism in the AI space is so tiresome. We have a tool now that can accelerate the technological development of our species and actually reach for the stars! How exciting! All these ruminations and lamentations about what it means to be human are downright laughable to people on the front lines of war, living in abject poverty, etc. "Oh, to be so lucky!", I'm sure they'd say.
The luddites and doomers should do the world a favor and go establish a commune in rural Alaska, then they can be happy and the rest of us can get back to building and playing with amazing technology!
It's rationalism, not nihilism.
The luddites were rational.
Telling people to fuck off and go away when they were here first is hideous. You should be humiliated. You should feel unwelcome.
No, it's nihilism.
The luddites were not rational.
Telling people they should be humiliated and that they should feel unwelcome is hideous.
I didn't tell people to fuck off. I told them to go do what they want to do and we'll do what we want to do. That's called a win/win.
No one is telling them that, unless they're the ones starting the fight
haha you feel so superior for no reason
> dreaming that one day an unfeeling corporate robot[1] will burn a rainforest to compile a list of 700 highly obscure barely-readable facts that might be true that nobody can understand as part of a marketing gimmick to raise hype for an IPO
The climate effect argument against AI is so intellectually dishonest. It’s the same as saying that Tao is on the side of stopping the advancement of Cancer research.
I thought the people clowning him were dumb, but the people arguing for either side are really fighting on a mud pit.