5 ms·

> Mathematics produces not only a body of results, but also understanding, clarity, and judgment among the communities of mathematicians who have shaped them, o

by andai 5mo ago

> Mathematics produces not only a body of results, but also understanding, clarity, and judgment among the communities of mathematicians who have shaped them, often in the context of their own autonomously guided research. This expert knowledge is essential, both to effectively use mathematics, and to continue to articulate new and significant research questions. In a word, the job of the mathematics department is not only to produce mathematics, but mathematicians. Similarly, the output of programming is not only a program, but also a programmer. It is you. Outsourcing the work deprives you of who you become by writing it.

kamaal 5mo ago
>>Similarly, the output of programming is not only a program, but also a programmer. It is you. This can be said about pretty much any job on earth. By that definition nothing should ever be automated. Everything thinks they are special, actually no one is. You become special by being rare. Find something that can be done by no one or only a scant few.
- delusional 5mo ago
  > Everything thinks they are special, actually no one is. That sounds very nice, but isn't true. Most of the people I know, myself included, don't consider themselves special broadly. They're special in their own community, but not globally.
- sublinear 5mo ago
  Yes, but we've already painted ourselves into a corner by almost a century of moving all that work onto computers. Why would we want to sever this last thread of human control? What is there to gain from it? I don't think I have to convince anyone how much there is to lose. The situation being created with an overdependence on AI is looking much more like the burning of Alexandria, and less like a utopian dream or even the oft-warned-about authoritarian hellscape. The AI hype is over and revealed to be delusional and politically motivated.
  - kamaal 5mo ago
    >>Why would we want to sever this last thread of human control? Trust me a fair bit of boomers and the generation before lost jobs to computer automation in the 1990s through the 2000s. And they used pretty much the same justification, every bit of work, take for example designing something like a machine spare that was earlier done through painstaking process of bringing the thing to life from the meticulous work on the drafting board till machining was now in the domain of computers. In India alone, banking jobs were considered those commanding tremendous prestige and income potential, got automated through computers. Tax consultants, accountants, postal services etc etc. The list is endless. AI is some what like that for us in this generation.
    - coldtea 5mo ago
      For many of those automations, we're worse off for them. Like not being able to get some actual human when you call support, and talking to some fucking automatic system. This includes many of the " 1990s through the 2000s" ones, and earlier ones too. Sometimes what was lost was an added layer of attention and quality that was previously required, but it was sacrificed away for efficiency.
      - Archer6621 5mo ago
        That really depends on who is the one that benefits from automation. Companies automate support systems in order to keep their support staff small, because apparently for many of them it is more profitable to frustrate their customers with crappy support than to pay more support staff to do a better job. In addition to your last paragraph: lots of things that we used to do the less efficient way had side-benefits that were not immediately obvious, probably because they compounded over time. Now that we're not doing them anymore, we notice all kinds of widespread societal problems (in particular among young people) that come up that were never there before.
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
- coldtea 5mo ago
  >By that definition nothing should ever be automated. Many things shouldn't. Understanding is one of them.
- AnthonyMouse 5mo ago
  > This can be said about pretty much any job on earth. That isn't really true. After push button elevators with floor-logic relays eliminated the need for "elevator operator" to be a job, nobody needed to be an elevator operator anymore. The equipment could do 100% of the job and if the equipment was out of order then you call a repair technician or install a new elevator rather than needing to find an elevator operator to pull out of retirement, since knowing how to repair or install elevators was never part of their job to begin with. The trouble with AI-generated code is that it can't do 100% of the job, so you still need a programmer to do the parts that it can't, but then you need the programmer to understand how to do the parts that it can't, which in turn requires them to also understand how to do the parts that it can.
threatripper 5mo ago
While you are right in a way, I think you miss the point. In the past "computer" was a job description and mechanical power came from serfs. They surely developed skills we are lacking today but I'd argue that overall the world is a better place with digital computers and electrical motors. It frees up these people to do something else, something of higher value.
- bluealienpie 5mo ago
  We argued that AI would free us to explore the arts. Instead it first came for written language and images. So what's left when it can write all the programs, drive all the cars, and AI sensors on farms can monitor and distribute nutrients. I remember watching TED Talks about how AI weapons need to be carefully studied, and instead we see them autonomously picking targets. I'm not seeing any higher values, instead I'm seeing how we're on a path to assured destruction.
  - noufalibrahim 5mo ago
    I see that point of view but there's another that I've recently been thinking about. Many of the fields that were traditionally considered for "smart" people (STEM etc.) are the ones that are being really hammered by AI. Whereas, things which people considered lightweight often involving social relationships and interpersonal skills are still beyond the scope of AI (much of it even theoretically beyond the scope although perhaps robots might have an effect there). There used to be a sysad T-shirt from the BOFH days "Go away or I'll replace you with a very small shell script" which pushed the idea that whatever could be replaced by a computer was something trivial. Now we find that the things which we thought were only for "smart people" are the very things being replaced by computer programs which is telling. Perhaps what we considered tough and smart really wasn't.
    - oblio 5mo ago
      This is actually a very old AI insight, acknowledged at least as early as the 80s, let me see if I can find the quote. Found it: > Rodney Brooks explains that, according to early AI research, intelligence was "best characterized as the things that highly educated male scientists found challenging", such as chess, symbolic integration, proving mathematical theorems and solving complicated word algebra problems. "The things that children of four or five years could do effortlessly, such as visually distinguishing between a coffee cup and a chair, or walking around on two legs, or finding their way from their bedroom to the living room were not thought of as activities requiring intelligence. Nor were any aesthetic judgments included in the repertoire of intelligence-based skills.
j-bos 5mo ago
The foundations of a great our mathematics came from landed gentry who enjoyed the work and were not paid for it. Today we prosper in our technologies and algorithms (not talking about recsystems) because of them. If math should once again become the pusuit of the curious and free but with even greater "skills", that does not seem to be an issue for math, or for those of us who benefit from math. An issue for people as a concept and for mathemeticians, yes. But that's a separate topic, like the anguish of not getting into the Premier league.
0xpgm 5mo ago
> Outsourcing the work deprives you of who you become by writing it. Just because AI can do something that resembles work should not mean outsourcing work to it. Mathematicians should not outsource their work to AI just like programmers should not outsource programming to AI. Humans working with AIs in a tight loop means intellectual work becomes more high-level and creative, but a human should always own the work, validate it and stake their reputation to it. Simply ban any humans who produce low quality work using AI.
- dyauspitr 5mo ago
  > Mathematicians should not outsource their work to AI just like programmers should not outsource programming to AI. There is a huge difference between the two. Mathematicians work on discovering fundamental truths of the universe that go into the corpus of human knowledge forever. Programmers create utilities.
  - 0xpgm 5mo ago
    I'd also prefer journalists not outsource their writing to AI and doctors not outsource their diagnosis to AI etc etc
    - Timwi 5mo ago
      I want doctors to outsource their diagnosis to AI if and only if the AI’s accuracy of diagnosis has surpassed that of the doctor.
  - orcasushi 5mo ago
    I know a PHD in math that claims math is invented by ourselves and not any universal true. So well, depends who you ask. Also some of these programming utilities may outlive some math proof. Time will tell
    - dyauspitr 5mo ago
      Of course they are universal truths. We may have made up the rules/abstractions/symbols to represent the underlying but a proof will hold in any part of the universe. Infact, math will hold in any universe. You could change every fundamental physical property of the universe and those proofs will still hold.

by andai 5mo ago

kamaal 5mo ago

>>Similarly, the output of programming is not only a program, but also a programmer. It is you. This can be said about pretty much any job on earth. By that definition nothing should ever be automated. Everything thinks they are special, actually no one is. You become special by being rare. Find something that can be done by no one or only a scant few.

delusional 5mo ago
> Everything thinks they are special, actually no one is. That sounds very nice, but isn't true. Most of the people I know, myself included, don't consider themselves special broadly. They're special in their own community, but not globally.
sublinear 5mo ago
Yes, but we've already painted ourselves into a corner by almost a century of moving all that work onto computers. Why would we want to sever this last thread of human control? What is there to gain from it? I don't think I have to convince anyone how much there is to lose. The situation being created with an overdependence on AI is looking much more like the burning of Alexandria, and less like a utopian dream or even the oft-warned-about authoritarian hellscape. The AI hype is over and revealed to be delusional and politically motivated.
- kamaal 5mo ago
  >>Why would we want to sever this last thread of human control? Trust me a fair bit of boomers and the generation before lost jobs to computer automation in the 1990s through the 2000s. And they used pretty much the same justification, every bit of work, take for example designing something like a machine spare that was earlier done through painstaking process of bringing the thing to life from the meticulous work on the drafting board till machining was now in the domain of computers. In India alone, banking jobs were considered those commanding tremendous prestige and income potential, got automated through computers. Tax consultants, accountants, postal services etc etc. The list is endless. AI is some what like that for us in this generation.
  - coldtea 5mo ago
    For many of those automations, we're worse off for them. Like not being able to get some actual human when you call support, and talking to some fucking automatic system. This includes many of the " 1990s through the 2000s" ones, and earlier ones too. Sometimes what was lost was an added layer of attention and quality that was previously required, but it was sacrificed away for efficiency.
    - Archer6621 5mo ago
      That really depends on who is the one that benefits from automation. Companies automate support systems in order to keep their support staff small, because apparently for many of them it is more profitable to frustrate their customers with crappy support than to pay more support staff to do a better job. In addition to your last paragraph: lots of things that we used to do the less efficient way had side-benefits that were not immediately obvious, probably because they compounded over time. Now that we're not doing them anymore, we notice all kinds of widespread societal problems (in particular among young people) that come up that were never there before.
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
coldtea 5mo ago
>By that definition nothing should ever be automated. Many things shouldn't. Understanding is one of them.
AnthonyMouse 5mo ago
> This can be said about pretty much any job on earth. That isn't really true. After push button elevators with floor-logic relays eliminated the need for "elevator operator" to be a job, nobody needed to be an elevator operator anymore. The equipment could do 100% of the job and if the equipment was out of order then you call a repair technician or install a new elevator rather than needing to find an elevator operator to pull out of retirement, since knowing how to repair or install elevators was never part of their job to begin with. The trouble with AI-generated code is that it can't do 100% of the job, so you still need a programmer to do the parts that it can't, but then you need the programmer to understand how to do the parts that it can't, which in turn requires them to also understand how to do the parts that it can.

threatripper 5mo ago

While you are right in a way, I think you miss the point. In the past "computer" was a job description and mechanical power came from serfs. They surely developed skills we are lacking today but I'd argue that overall the world is a better place with digital computers and electrical motors. It frees up these people to do something else, something of higher value.

bluealienpie 5mo ago
We argued that AI would free us to explore the arts. Instead it first came for written language and images. So what's left when it can write all the programs, drive all the cars, and AI sensors on farms can monitor and distribute nutrients. I remember watching TED Talks about how AI weapons need to be carefully studied, and instead we see them autonomously picking targets. I'm not seeing any higher values, instead I'm seeing how we're on a path to assured destruction.
- noufalibrahim 5mo ago
  I see that point of view but there's another that I've recently been thinking about. Many of the fields that were traditionally considered for "smart" people (STEM etc.) are the ones that are being really hammered by AI. Whereas, things which people considered lightweight often involving social relationships and interpersonal skills are still beyond the scope of AI (much of it even theoretically beyond the scope although perhaps robots might have an effect there). There used to be a sysad T-shirt from the BOFH days "Go away or I'll replace you with a very small shell script" which pushed the idea that whatever could be replaced by a computer was something trivial. Now we find that the things which we thought were only for "smart people" are the very things being replaced by computer programs which is telling. Perhaps what we considered tough and smart really wasn't.
  - oblio 5mo ago
    This is actually a very old AI insight, acknowledged at least as early as the 80s, let me see if I can find the quote. Found it: > Rodney Brooks explains that, according to early AI research, intelligence was "best characterized as the things that highly educated male scientists found challenging", such as chess, symbolic integration, proving mathematical theorems and solving complicated word algebra problems. "The things that children of four or five years could do effortlessly, such as visually distinguishing between a coffee cup and a chair, or walking around on two legs, or finding their way from their bedroom to the living room were not thought of as activities requiring intelligence. Nor were any aesthetic judgments included in the repertoire of intelligence-based skills.

j-bos 5mo ago

The foundations of a great our mathematics came from landed gentry who enjoyed the work and were not paid for it. Today we prosper in our technologies and algorithms (not talking about recsystems) because of them. If math should once again become the pusuit of the curious and free but with even greater "skills", that does not seem to be an issue for math, or for those of us who benefit from math. An issue for people as a concept and for mathemeticians, yes. But that's a separate topic, like the anguish of not getting into the Premier league.

0xpgm 5mo ago

> Outsourcing the work deprives you of who you become by writing it. Just because AI can do something that resembles work should not mean outsourcing work to it. Mathematicians should not outsource their work to AI just like programmers should not outsource programming to AI. Humans working with AIs in a tight loop means intellectual work becomes more high-level and creative, but a human should always own the work, validate it and stake their reputation to it. Simply ban any humans who produce low quality work using AI.

dyauspitr 5mo ago
> Mathematicians should not outsource their work to AI just like programmers should not outsource programming to AI. There is a huge difference between the two. Mathematicians work on discovering fundamental truths of the universe that go into the corpus of human knowledge forever. Programmers create utilities.
- 0xpgm 5mo ago
  I'd also prefer journalists not outsource their writing to AI and doctors not outsource their diagnosis to AI etc etc
  - Timwi 5mo ago
    I want doctors to outsource their diagnosis to AI if and only if the AI’s accuracy of diagnosis has surpassed that of the doctor.
- orcasushi 5mo ago
  I know a PHD in math that claims math is invented by ourselves and not any universal true. So well, depends who you ask. Also some of these programming utilities may outlive some math proof. Time will tell
  - dyauspitr 5mo ago
    Of course they are universal truths. We may have made up the rules/abstractions/symbols to represent the underlying but a proof will hold in any part of the universe. Infact, math will hold in any universe. You could change every fundamental physical property of the universe and those proofs will still hold.