alt Hacker NewsIf you read any classic mathematics or computer science textbook, you get the sense that the author wants to impart the idea that this subject leads to an interesting and meaningful life. There are many famous quotes about being the architect or designer of an idea rather than just a technician holding a power tool following instructions someone else wrote. Now all of those adages have become effectively meaningless because so many involved in these careers are cool with the industry dying for some vague notion of progress due to a machine god. It’s a pathetic state of affairs that the elders aren’t speaking out more to protect the next generation of human thinking.
I say this as someone who uses LLMs in the physical sciences (one of the only areas where I would say it is ethical to use them).
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What exactly to protect? I really don’t get what this fuss is all about.
We still need math research just like we still coding or software or cpu research regardless of how many problems the AI solves.
To me it feels like a bio researcher complaining that his field has no future because AI started to cure diseases so now instead to spend 100 years to run experiments someone can do it in a day with AI(obviously it’s not the case yet).
Are they guys upset that people can “run math” without hiring a math guy?
Any classic book was arguing against religion which dominated the day
There was an intentional "marketing strategy" among scientists and such to convince young men to go into sciences rather than religious or nation state politics or just be bums fighting and drinking back in the day. They lifted heavily from the tone used by church and military recruiter propaganda
Different tone to the prose merely reflects the zeitgeist of the day. Should be seen as a tool like a wrench.