alt Hacker News> solving problems is only a tool and proxy for achieving the primary goal of conceptual understanding and insight.
This is the effect of AI on most intellectual disciplines, and it’s a real worry.
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Playing a devil's advocate. Why do we need understanding ? To take an example i would say ~99% of the population do not understand how combustion engines or how semiconductors work, what say another 1% ?
Is the fear post-apocalyptic in nature ? We need some human priesthood to carry on tradition ? why ?
Let's assume in the next decade GPT-7 PRO Ultra is cheaply ubiquitous, inspectable, reproducible, transferable, reasonably un-constrained by any institutional interests.
What say the 1% ?
Just a thought.
Tao basically reiterating "AI is making us dumber" a bit more eloquently and applied to math.
I published a substack about this just a few days ago [1], my core theory here is that we will absolutely have what I call a "highly productive dark age" in mathematics where knowledge vastly outpaces understanding driven by publish-or-perish incentives, but additionally this will lead to the loss of the skills necessary to understand.
The hopeful note is that I do think we are entering a golden age for the curious casual/semi-pro mathematician and for niche mathematics areas that won't get the attention of the top labs. Everyone is sprinting to solve the millennium problems, but this is a very exciting time to be in a sub-sub-field where you and 4 others are keeping things alive.
Yeah. My other favorite example are books. Why do nonfiction books exist? There are some pathologies and corner cases, but fundamentally: to develop and share new ideas. Downstream from that, if it reads well and if you're lucky, you make some money.
But now, LLMs can generate hundreds of books per hour. They make up 80-90% of new arrivals in many nonfiction categories on Amazon. They short-circuit the system, allowing their "authors" to extract money from the system with zero effort by crowding out human work. And it's not even the question of whether these books are good or bad (although overwhelmingly, they're terrible). It's whether it's actually accomplishing anything worthwhile, or just destroying incentives for humans to write or go into any other sort of intellectual work.
In fact, I see many professions push back. Artists, writers, now mathematicians. And I'm amazed that our profession doesn't and that we have so many people who are hooked on vibecoding. I'm still waiting for that 10x payoff. All this velocity and somehow, the landscape of the software I want to use still looks the same as it did in 2021.