alt Hacker NewsA few predictions:
1. I fear that AI is about to change from being a human art to becoming something like a bulk-extruded, industrial product.
2. I also suspect that mathematics is about to become substantially less open. As the number of entities on the planet that are capable of top-level maths explodes, and because most of those entiries will have no interest in the validation that publishing papers brings, we will see balkanisation and hoarding of "secret maths".
3. Areas of science that are downstream of maths -- basically everything -- will, in time, be degrated by lack of openness, before suffering the same fate.
Replies
Wouldn't AI make validating the research much cheaper?
Well, that's what AI does. It makes everything about the final product and nothing about the enjoyment of the process. Now a lot of people here will say "you can still read the AI results and enjoy math on your own time", but that is completely at odds with how most people do things: a large part of most people's enjoyment comes from sharing results with others and AI devalues that. People can't help but feel less impressed when you can come up with a result but AI can also.
People on here have also argued with me that enjoyment and fun should be decoupled from work but I'd argue that jobs that are enjoyable are important because I mean, what really counts in learning is inspiration. If no one is having fun, no one will be inspired to learn and do math in the first place. The best professors I've had are clearly having fun.
And sharing that fun on a human level is exceptionally important.
I just don't see the tradeoff (more math at the expense of people being able to have fun expressing themselves), as being worth it. The whole point of discovering knowledge is to enjoy the process and share that with the world to create hope an optimisim in it, not to product like a factory.
Unfortunately, this website tends to bring in the rare type of person who loves to believe that they can enjoy things all by themselves, and maybe they can, but the problem is that they (not necessarily you) foist their unusual view of the world on the rest of the world by developing and supporting AI and get defensive when someone points out that it actually contributes to a horribly destructive social structure - a cognitive dissonance most of them can't handle.
I'm an academic mathematician, and could you explain your second prediction?
It goes entirely against the culture of research mathematics to hoard secrets. If you've done something interesting, you want to share it, and it's in your best interest to share it.
Of course, this culture could change under external pressure from AI tools. But, aside from cryptography and the applied fields, I'm finding it difficult to imagine any possible motivation for spending substantial effort on top-level math and then keeping it secret.