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As the parent of a young adult currently half way through their maths undergrad, this kind of fills me with foreboding. I know that proof assistants etc have e
by andyjohnson0 3y ago
As the parent of a young adult currently half way through their maths undergrad, this kind of fills me with foreboding.
I know that proof assistants etc have existed for quite a while now, but what with this and the murmours about OAI's Q* model, I do wonder what will happen to maths as a human endeavour - and as a enabling skill for jobs that can financially support people like my child.
- adhocmobility 3y agoI think its pretty clear that in the coming decade intelligence and cognitive labor is going to become very cheap. So your kid should develop some skills outside of that to stay competitive in the job market.
- RugnirViking 3y agogeneral intelligence will become cheap? and so your suggestion is to develop skills outside of skills?
- nickfromseattle 3y agoAny suggestions?
- therealdrag0 3y agoPlumber
- airstrike 3y agoAI Software Engineering? Baker?
- realharo 3y agoStockpile metals and rare earth elements. Natural resources will be the beginning and the end of trade. (not actually serious, at least not yet)
- Davidzheng 3y agoPersonally i think markets will be so different from now that this question of where you'll have skills for jobs is less important than asking what will a job mean in 2040. But ok, maybe this is still a minority opinion.
- skepticATX 3y agoI think it's pretty clear that cognitive labor will become even higher value in the future, as our tools get better and allow us to become more productive.
- Der_Einzige 3y agoYou speak the truth but people here will hate you for it.
- slibhb 3y agoI wouldn't worry about it. We're going to need humans with specialized mathematical training in the loop. Besides, these things have a way of surprising us. Before compilers, people wrote machine code by hand. It would have been reasonable to think that compilers would reduce the demand for programmers, but the opposite happened.
- Davidzheng 3y agoIt's highly unclear to me what will happen. Probably learning math will be more accessible. But it's unclear how many humans will be involved at the forefront of math research. For example you can imagine a situation where in some parts of math large communities work in a direction guided by a few "visionaries". This sort of thing will not really happen after the commodization of theorem provers. Like instead of an advisor telling a PhD student a problem, they can just plug it in. On the other hand, in some sense the advisor and the student will be equal in the fact that the only thing you will need to do is ask questions?(last part is also speculative)
- falcor84 3y ago>Probably learning math will be more accessible. I'm not quite sure what you mean. Isn't math already pretty much the most accessible thing that could be imagined? I can't think of any story of someone in the past century who wanted to study math but was unable to, except for reasons prohibiting any sort of academic study whatsoever (e.g. girls in Taliban controlled areas).
- Davidzheng 3y agoI don't think research math is that accessible! Granted theoretically it's possible to just read papers and do research--and possibly it's theoretically as accessible as possible. In practice people learn better with teachers and access to experts at the research level. If this pans out, we can commoditize access to experts (or even experts).
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- auggierose 3y agoI wouldn't worry. What this means is that mathematics as a skill is going to be back big time, because now you can actually use it everywhere. Mathematics departments have been closing down for a while now, I think. I think this trend will reverse now. Mathematics itself will change in the process, but for the better.
- Davidzheng 3y agoI don't think it's true that "math departments have been closing for a while now"
- auggierose 3y agoIt's an impression I had, I don't know any hard data. For example: https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/l7yyir/not_joking_university_of_leicester_to_make/ https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/l7yyir/not_joking_uni... https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/15of64l/rumor_west_virginia_university_is_ending_their/ https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/15of64l/rumor_west_vi...
- Davidzheng 3y agoI think it's a very unfair assessment to make from these two examples. I think it's like saying Silicon Valley has been shutting down for a while and providing two examples of startups. I will say from my personal impression as someone in pure math, I disagree with this statement.
- auggierose 3y agoI don't know what "fair" has to do with that. These are two examples that caught my attention, and I might be wrong that this constitutes a trend. If you have data that says otherwise, please share.
- Davidzheng 3y agoI think the funding in pure math is not going down in recent years. Nor are math departments much smaller than they were say ten years ago. Otherwise I'm sure how best to give evidence of math departments not shutting down! Do I list healthy math departments?
- tomp 3y agoYou do realize that we still learn (and not unnecessarily) addition despite having had calculators for 50+ years? Math shapes your mind, that’s why we learn it.
- daxfohl 3y agoIn a way, all math proofs already exist. Humans just have to determine what is worth looking for and uncover them. AI will help us do the latter. But we still have to do the former ourselves. It will still require sound mathematical knowledge and understanding, to know what are the interesting questions to ask. Even if AI knows all the answers, it doesn't change anything because the answers already exist anyway.
- andyjohnson0 3y agoThat kind of Platonism also implies that all possible computer programs already exist: because any program is merely a very large natural number, the set of which has infinite cardinality. I'm not sure how helpful this is for the practice of humans doing mathematics or software development though.
- BeetleB 3y agoI hate to break it to you but most people with math degrees aren't doing math jobs today. The demand for such skills is low. While such an AI may displace some of the few jobs that do involve heavy math, it's likely your child will not be in that category. I wouldn't worry too much.
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- dxbydt 3y agoPerhaps this might cheer you up - https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2015/03/17/1980-math-olympiad-program-now/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2015/03/17/1980-math-... Or perhaps not. In that blog, Gelman speaks of Gregg, who ended up as a GS VP, and says - math olympiad = high school basketball star pro mathematician = NBA player Goldman Sachs VP = sports hustler I actually worked with Gregg in fixed income at that time :) Gelman's blogpost received sufficient notoriety, atleast within GS & the IB community.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y agoYet GS VPs salary is closer to NBA player's salary, while math pro's salary is closer to sports hustlers' ...