alt Hacker NewsI know why the mathematicians weep
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Those of us who loved programming have already been through this.
I hate programming these days - back in the day, the cubicle-hell nature of "popular" frameworks was at least offset by being able to think through and solve interesting problems.
These days most of us are stuck in the "endless-review" loop with LLMs. You can't afford to not use it given the inflated expectations. As with all of modernity, productivity doesn't yield leisure - it just proportionally increases your workload.
Hardly surprising that the other side of the Curry-Howard correspondence is now getting hit with this. Math was one of those depts. where slow/deep-thinking was possible (CS was already insane 10 years back - now it's just absurd) - now even this fortress will be broken. Tragic.
If understanding is so important and AI systems can only produce knowledge. Why can't mathematicians continue their work on better understanding?
The beginning of this article is decent, the end sounds like a tobacco lobbyist touting the health benefits of nicotine.
> If intelligence becomes less uniquely human, we may come to value more highly what remains uniquely human: our capacity to relate and to care for one another.
Lol. How does the author think relations between people work? (At least those outside the family). Relationships require something that fills them with meaning - a reason why you would want to have that relationship in the first place. Without meaning, no relationship.
I recommended reading this other post that was on HN earlier today: https://thetheorygirlie.substack.com/p/ai-was-great-until-it...
It describes in pretty grim words what happens to collaboration once you have nothing anymore to collaborate on.
> Mathematicians may still teach proofs, argue over what they mean, translate alien logic into human insight, and pass that understanding to students.
This would people to have time to understand and dissect those proofs - it doesn't work if there is a new breakthrough proof every week.
> "Earlier this year, Shanmu Jin, a Chinese medical resident, used ChatGPT to solve a problem called Crouzeix’s conjecture, which professional mathematicians had failed to solve for decades."
I note that that these conjectures being solved by AI are named after people, minds knowledgeable and and brilliant enough to come up with the question in the first place and recognize its value. What we have in these AI math solving systems is the equivalent of the chess and go software that can beat humans: something that can adhere to a set of rigid rules to reach a win state once given a starting point. But, as Pablo Picasso said, “What good are computers? They can only give you answers.” These AIs are a magnificent achievement and will change mathematics and coding but can they ask earthshaking questions? Could an AI identify conjectures that mathematicians recognize as a worthy question that will lead to new insights? Where is HAL9000's theorem or the M5 Multitronic's conjecture? Maybe they can someday but I don't see any immediate prospects for it.
Please spare us the "AI will surely keep getting better forever" (unlikely and don't call me Shirley), "moving the goalposts" (I myself haven't set any), etc. non-arguments.
I mourn the loss of comfy, intellectual, thinking jobs like those of the mathematicians where people could spend time pondering without the immense pressure that would come from doing something like that in a corporate environment.
I still remain hopeful that this is a step change in capability and capacity that we can adopt and adapt towards our own purposes. What was taking decades for us to do has been reduced to days and dollars. So while we’re witnessing a forest fire consuming entire fields of open problems in math, the best upside would be finding new problems that come from learning how to work with the new tools.
This is what it seems like so far for software. The speed limit has changed. It’s interesting to explore what that means. Extending the analogy, long ago you could be a race car driver part time; that would be pretty laughable for an F1 driver. It’s a very specialized skill and the optimal athlete is quite different for driving a car than for running, for example. That feels like what I’m seeing in software.
The most effective folks are much faster and better with these tools than average. It’s a different skill set.
I think that formal verification makes Math much closer to code than many other fields. But I’m eager to see the first mathematicians that are dramatically more proficient with the new tools than average.
This current moment we are in feels like something out of the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, bit instead of humanity becoming super depressed and hopeless about a future alien invasion we are super depressed and hopeless about LLMs destroying all our hopes and dreams.
I wonder how much this is like a tremendous telescope being invented which can see new worlds with utter clarity. We could verify that a planet was habitable... but it wouldn't bring us any closer to visiting it.
...except it is exactly the opposite of your big brother destroying your tower. Instead, it is your big brother showing you this method using a tool to build many more towers at astonishing speed!
I get the sadness (and, as a software engineer, certainly feel a real existential threat myself) and feeling diminished, but at the end of the day that is all just ego and I very my agree with the end of the article - who cares who came up with it and on what shoulders we stand, as long as it is saving lives and improving our understanding of the universe!
"I know now why you cry." - Terminator
These guys are still in the early stages of grief. They should look at coders; we've already been there. Coders don't assume coding is going to remain a profession. Why should any other profession be exempt from disruption?
Honestly, there are much bigger fish to fry, like how will everyone pay their bills, and how will we prevent catastrophic AI.
I strongly feel most angst is because Mathematics has become yet another capital intensive game to play. Rather than a noble, purely intellectual practice.
> Think about a world where non-mathematicians leapfrog the field after a few AI prompts. It would be a world with more knowledge. But it might be a world with less understanding.
This seems like a good summary of the article, and I think the answer here is obvious.
So what?
News flash folks: we do not have the knowledge to survive on our own. If a solar flare deletes the electric grid, the first thing that happens is 8 billion people die in the next year.
We survive on abstractions others have built, and we have a global dependency web.
AI abstracting knowledge is neither new or dangerous; if it is dangerous, this certainly isnt the argument to prove it.
>I wanted to talk to one of the mourners to understand their technological grief. I wanted to know if theirs was a familiar case of bruised ego or disappointment—akin to, say, a boy who spends an hour building a tower out of blocks and watches his big brother smash the thing to smithereens—or something stranger and more profound.
I'll be honest. The response to mathematicians, even this one, makes me concerned about the lack of empathy and honestly just theory of mind of many people in tech. It's not a mystery why people are upset that their field, for many the singular passion to which they've devoted their entire lives, is being annihilated so that a massive company can boost its IPO valuation. It's not "bruised ego" ffs.
Isn’t it deeply exciting that the proofs look so alien?
Isn’t that in itself the new frontier for human understanding?
I would have thought that mathematicians would have found alien forms of maths to be astonishingly compelling, must learn, must know, must understand.
Instead there seems to be a sort of shoulder shrugging lament “we don’t understand it”.
I would barely be able to sleep with excitement at the potential for where this could lead. Like finding an ancient tomb full of answers to our deepest questions along with the promise of more.
How deep does maths go? Is it “solved” or have we just been given tools to delve ever deeper?
Where is their curiosity - don’t the want to find the bottom?
I am curious.
Where or what do solving these math problems lead to?
Is there some suggestion that they lead to deeper understanding about something else? Do they solve physics problems?
What’s the benefit? What’s the point?
Of course the other Abundance guy joins in on the AI Inevitability Soothsaying.[1] It really is the perfect vector for the AI sirening. You just take the inevitability and awesomeness as a given. That’s the real point. But you write about the “grief” and the loss of “identity” and psychology—oh my the feelings. See, we are left-liberals and we care so much about people’s feelings. All the investor class and their hype is perfectly on track is about to fuck us the rest of us. But the feelings about people can’t “understand” and “discover” is what matters.
I have little sympathy, since I think it is a result of many decades of complacency when it comes to thinking about why want to people do what they do and instead just enjoying being the ones with the results and money. People who love the process and see the human as inherently valuable won't have a problem. I'm more shocked that there are so many brilliant people who are so results-oriented and don't even have a concept of value outside of that. I'm kind of disgusted by the tears actually
> we may come to value more highly what remains uniquely human: our capacity to relate and to care for one another
...under capitalism...
Sure we will...
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Getting those fields wiped just shows how unnecessary those fields where in the first place. I'm a programmer. I am the adapter between a stakeholder and a machine. I am just needed because the stakeholder lacks the knowledge to tell the machine what he wants. If he can use this new fancy adapter called Agentic AI now I happily quit my job and go on finding something that makes more sense in the first place.
The same goes for math.
Let's find some things that bring value other than just the price of a stock.
I want to sympathize, but most of the whining in the article seems like gatekeepers bemoaning their gates being blasted off the hinges.
Are there any mathematicians who are genuinely excited about this tremendous leap forward in mathematical knowledge? Where are those articles?
My take is that it is an exciting time to be a mathematician since the frontier for interesting math problems is about to explode, and without prior art or references, it's green field for both AI and human. Think of all the new discoveries we'll make.