alt Hacker NewsTao's central point seems to be:
"In short, the indiscriminate use of powerful solution-extraction tools can achieve the immediate short-term goal of solving problems at hand, but at the cost of sustaining the ecosystem for the next wave of progress, or in understanding the progress already obtained. "
I am no mathematician, may have misunderstood his point and would be delighted to receive any corrections.
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How is this any different from people in any field that are impacted by AI and lose the utility of their skills and endeavors over the past decades? Are we saying that we're running out of problems to solve because of AI and hence it should be stopped? I am not underestimating the importance of the collective knowledge of the mathematics community and the role of mathematics as the enablers of other sciences, but opposing meaningful progress in that discipline or any for that matter feels counter intuitive. I would rather have the mathematics community start collaborating closely with the this newly evolving and powerful tool to expedite humanity's progress.
Seems to be it, though Im not particularly concerned about this problem personally.
The fact that we all readily accept that modern AI systems can likely solve any math problem that no living genius can, tells me that no task is beyond this system we just need the right harness around it. The exhaustion of meaningful math problems to motivate mathematicians minds seems to be the least of my worries at that point.
Inb4 someone suggests that this is not proof that these AIs generalize, I agree thats a popular opinion, but both sides are merely that, with no possible way to prove. I will wallow in my existential dread while you do whatever it is that gives you comfort.
Doesn't this seem to be where all domains are headed?
I get kinda freaked out when I feel like all the AI "utopianists" haven't taken the next logical step of thinking about what society looks like when humans are subpar in every domain (and you may argue this won't happen, though I'm becoming more and more a believer that it will, but my point is the utopianists believe that this absolutely will happen, and that it's also a wonderful thing). How motivated do you think folks will be to do the hard cognitive work to focus on things like math problems when there is a good chance AI will do it better?