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I think Terry Tao is a great litmus test for AI zealotry (both pro- and anti-). Just in this thread, we have people twisting themselves into knots about how he

by dvt 4mo ago

I think Terry Tao is a great litmus test for AI zealotry (both pro- and anti-). Just in this thread, we have people twisting themselves into knots about how he "sold out" or "not doing math the right way" or whatever. To him, AI is a tool, like any other. From the interviews I've seen with Tao, he's not some AGI maniac, he says things like here's where we can use this tool, here's where it's less likely to be useful. There's a lot of hallucinations, so we need to double check stuff. Most of the stuff the AI produces is nonsense, but there's occasionally a diamond in the rough. A very tempered attitude, and likely what most sane people are experiencing when using AI.

jplusequalt 4mo ago
A smart phone was just a tool at first, but over time society has become overly depedent on them. Most of us are now addicted to our smart phones in one way or another, and that has consequences that play out across society as a whole. AI not only provides potential to cause society to become overly dependent on it, but it's being developed by/pushed for by the same fucking people who caused our societies smartphone addiction. Once you recognize what we've lost already, it's hard to turn off your brain and just compartmentalize this away as a "just a tool". Nothing that is adopted so widely is "just a tool," and thinking of it in those terms eliminates the ability to analyze the potential downstream effects it will cause.
- dvt 4mo ago
  > pushed for by the same fucking people who caused our societies smartphone addiction Not sure where you live, but I would guess the West (where we have the luxury to be worried about "smartphone addiction"). I assure you that the net positive of smartphones, especially cheap Androids, have had a significantly more positive effect on society than negative, particularly in the developing world.
  - jplusequalt 4mo ago
    >But I assure you that the net positive of smartphones, especially cheap Androids, have had a significantly more positive effect on society than negative, particularly in the developing world. My point is that the tool which was meant to augment one particular aspect of life, has metastasized into being a cancer on many other aspects of our lives, and that has downstream consequences on society as a whole. Keeping this in mind, being a bullish on AI seems foolish. edit: Perhaps a better thesis for my reservations with rapid technological progress: smart phones were supposed to help us adjust to society, but society instead adjusted to them. AI is positioned to do the same, and we need to ask ourselves what those changes could look like, and if they're for the better, or for the worse. >where we have the luxury to be worried about "smartphone addiction" I reject this, and any similar framing that amounts to "because there are other, greater problems at play, worrying about this relatively lesser problem is worthless." A problem that impacts people is a problem that deserves attention, especially if an absolute terms the number of people impacted are in the tens/hundreds of millions.
    - 2snakes 4mo ago
      Social constructivism is tougher and tougher than “just tools.” Could the so-called “addictiveness” consist partly of the many other devices smartphones replaced? Sure, some attention economy but also just turn off the data?
    - bit-anarchist 4mo ago
      > My point is that the tool which was meant to augment one particular aspect of life, has metastasized into being a cancer on many other aspects of our lives, and that has downstream consequences on society as a whole. This is true of all important tools in history. From computers, to electricity, cars, steam, even agriculture. They reshape society and its practices. This has been documented multiple times. One I can remember on top of my head, but is not limited to, is historical materialism. From an misesian perspective, this seems fairly obvious: 1. smartphones are extremely useful (being miniature computers and all); 2. people tend to optimize their actions with the best tools available (i.e. smartphones in this case); 3. people will see others using smartphone increasing and will try to leverage that for their own goals, thus further adopting smartphones (even if indirectly); 4. the economy is the sum of human action, so this progressive adoption changes the economy and the culture. > A problem that impacts people is a problem that deserves attention, especially if an absolute terms the number of people impacted are in the tens/hundreds of millions. The real issue with your post is that you seem to be trying to fix smartphones addiction by getting rid of phones, ignoring the benefits they brought and the previous problems they fixed. Also, every problem impacts people.
      - jplusequalt 4mo ago
        >The real issue with your post is that you seem to be trying to fix smartphones addiction by getting rid of phones, ignoring the benefits they brought and the previous problems they fixed. No, my post is decidedly not that. I'm saying maybe we should stop and think about the consequences and plan accordingly.
        bit-anarchist 4mo ago
        My bad, then. If I may suggest something, give a small acknowledgement and avoid words such as "cancer", which is pretty loaded. Still, people (as in most individuals in the economy) can't simply be stopped, even less so to plan, specially in a free system such as enjoyed by most of the west. That requires a high degree of coordination and coersion that I think only Cuba and NK are currently capable of, slightly. Otherwise, people will just do their own thing, leading to a technological revolution again, given the material means. A more practical approach is to continuously nudge the direction of change towards a better direction, constantly reevaluating approach, but avoiding having to stop everyone else.
  - ForgotIdAgain 4mo ago
    I come from a developping country, and this whole schtick about "being concerned by tech addiction is a western luxury" is tiring.
  - pera 4mo ago
    As a person from the developing world I feel obligated to say that I find your assurance quite unconvincing: the negative effects of smartphone at this point in time is invariant globally, and whether they are a net positive or negative is at least debatable. And in relation to your first comment, most sane people would agree that "tools" don't exist in isolation - neither come into existence out of nowhere. This reductionist position of treating extremely complex machines with deep social interactions as a tool like any other is objectively wrong, and I believe the reasons are highly obvious but I can expand on this if you disagree.
  - ekjhgkejhgk 4mo ago
    I'm not the person you were responding to, but I could've written the same as they did, so here's my reply: I don't dispute that in aggregate the effect was positive. But I spend more time thinking about things which impact me directly, and I assure you that in my personal life it used to be a problem, and fixing it was an improvement.
  - breezybottom 4mo ago
    That's an extremely broad statement to make "assuredly". I'd wager you haven't figured environmental consequences into your calculation. All the toxic waste from production is being routed to the developing world.
  - witx 4mo ago
    These fking website sure loves to pull statistics out of the rear end
keybored 4mo ago
> I think Terry Tao is a great litmus test for AI zealotry (both pro- and anti-). Just in this thread, we have people twisting themselves into knots about how he "sold out" or "not doing math the right way" or whatever. To him, AI is a tool, like any other. That’s an Anti example. What’s a Pro example?
- dvt 4mo ago
  We've been flooded with "AGI is 6 months away!" for a few years now, mostly by Anthropic/OAI/XAI, which is clearly nonsensical hype. Also, almost everyone has been walking back their previous claims that "AI will replace ~80% of white-collar jobs."
  - menaerus 4mo ago
    In the last decade or so I have never seen so much layoffs across the industry. This may be suggesting that evidence supporting the latter hypothesis is not maybe too far fetched.
    - keybored 4mo ago
      Do we have to rehash CEO statements about causality versus objective reality yet again?
      - menaerus 4mo ago
        Objective reality is that many people have lost and are still loosing their jobs. If you don't have anything useful to add to your response please refrain from polluting the discussion.
        keybored 4mo ago
        Likewise with your "may be suggesting" unfounded correlation speculation. But I guess I’m not allowed to answer on the subthread that I started.
adsf_132 4mo ago
[flagged]
- antisthenes 4mo ago
  It's not deflection to take a reasoned stoic sense. That's just nonsense being pushed by social media to convince you to be upset (or ecstatic) about something.
  - dvt 4mo ago
    Calling my position stoic is kind of goofy imo (and fwiw, I personally find AI to be a pretty useful tool), but I'm not going to reply to some drive-by account literally made just to troll me.
    - oliculipolicula 4mo ago
      >in the new era of "proof abundance", it is increasingly important that we also debate the "soft" aspects of our field, such as our goals and values. Trying to upgrade the trolling to rational discourse, TT recently opined https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/116681024360293007 https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/116681024360293007
      - dvt 4mo ago
        Both the Leiden Declaration[1] as well as Commelin et al.'s announcement (Shaping the Future of Mathematics in the Age of AI)[2] are completely common-sense pieces, neither overstating the power of AI nor understating the capability of these tools to be misused (most acutely when it comes to attribution). I do think that ethically, OpenAI and Anthropic, by training their models on the entire corpus of human knowledge, have certainly broken some rules, but these rules were already broken decades ago by Google—unless we really want to start splitting hairs about if indexing + processing is different than training, which is imo a distinction without a difference—, so it's hard to see who to exactly blame. In any case, that cat is out of the bag. (And for the record, I'm technically a stakeholder: I'm part of like two class actions because of a few books I wrote.) But that's neither here nor there. [1] https://leidendeclaration.ai/#declaration https://leidendeclaration.ai/#declaration [2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.24914 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.24914
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
pcrh 4mo ago
I enjoyed the article. I'm not a mathematician, but I did notice one aspect: even with his enthusiasm for AI, Tao effectively showed that for the uses he describes, AI can currently only handle small chunks of a mathematical problem at a time. Humans, or non-LLM approaches are still needed to stitch these together. It perhaps isn't too different from LLMs being able to coherently output short, a few hundred words, pieces of prose, or code, but not being able to assemble them into functional output with constant "nudging". Happy to be corrected on this!

by dvt 4mo ago

jplusequalt 4mo ago

A smart phone was just a tool at first, but over time society has become overly depedent on them. Most of us are now addicted to our smart phones in one way or another, and that has consequences that play out across society as a whole. AI not only provides potential to cause society to become overly dependent on it, but it's being developed by/pushed for by the same fucking people who caused our societies smartphone addiction. Once you recognize what we've lost already, it's hard to turn off your brain and just compartmentalize this away as a "just a tool". Nothing that is adopted so widely is "just a tool," and thinking of it in those terms eliminates the ability to analyze the potential downstream effects it will cause.

dvt 4mo ago
> pushed for by the same fucking people who caused our societies smartphone addiction Not sure where you live, but I would guess the West (where we have the luxury to be worried about "smartphone addiction"). I assure you that the net positive of smartphones, especially cheap Androids, have had a significantly more positive effect on society than negative, particularly in the developing world.
- jplusequalt 4mo ago
  >But I assure you that the net positive of smartphones, especially cheap Androids, have had a significantly more positive effect on society than negative, particularly in the developing world. My point is that the tool which was meant to augment one particular aspect of life, has metastasized into being a cancer on many other aspects of our lives, and that has downstream consequences on society as a whole. Keeping this in mind, being a bullish on AI seems foolish. edit: Perhaps a better thesis for my reservations with rapid technological progress: smart phones were supposed to help us adjust to society, but society instead adjusted to them. AI is positioned to do the same, and we need to ask ourselves what those changes could look like, and if they're for the better, or for the worse. >where we have the luxury to be worried about "smartphone addiction" I reject this, and any similar framing that amounts to "because there are other, greater problems at play, worrying about this relatively lesser problem is worthless." A problem that impacts people is a problem that deserves attention, especially if an absolute terms the number of people impacted are in the tens/hundreds of millions.
  - 2snakes 4mo ago
    Social constructivism is tougher and tougher than “just tools.” Could the so-called “addictiveness” consist partly of the many other devices smartphones replaced? Sure, some attention economy but also just turn off the data?
  - bit-anarchist 4mo ago
    > My point is that the tool which was meant to augment one particular aspect of life, has metastasized into being a cancer on many other aspects of our lives, and that has downstream consequences on society as a whole. This is true of all important tools in history. From computers, to electricity, cars, steam, even agriculture. They reshape society and its practices. This has been documented multiple times. One I can remember on top of my head, but is not limited to, is historical materialism. From an misesian perspective, this seems fairly obvious: 1. smartphones are extremely useful (being miniature computers and all); 2. people tend to optimize their actions with the best tools available (i.e. smartphones in this case); 3. people will see others using smartphone increasing and will try to leverage that for their own goals, thus further adopting smartphones (even if indirectly); 4. the economy is the sum of human action, so this progressive adoption changes the economy and the culture. > A problem that impacts people is a problem that deserves attention, especially if an absolute terms the number of people impacted are in the tens/hundreds of millions. The real issue with your post is that you seem to be trying to fix smartphones addiction by getting rid of phones, ignoring the benefits they brought and the previous problems they fixed. Also, every problem impacts people.
    - jplusequalt 4mo ago
      >The real issue with your post is that you seem to be trying to fix smartphones addiction by getting rid of phones, ignoring the benefits they brought and the previous problems they fixed. No, my post is decidedly not that. I'm saying maybe we should stop and think about the consequences and plan accordingly.
      - bit-anarchist 4mo ago
        My bad, then. If I may suggest something, give a small acknowledgement and avoid words such as "cancer", which is pretty loaded. Still, people (as in most individuals in the economy) can't simply be stopped, even less so to plan, specially in a free system such as enjoyed by most of the west. That requires a high degree of coordination and coersion that I think only Cuba and NK are currently capable of, slightly. Otherwise, people will just do their own thing, leading to a technological revolution again, given the material means. A more practical approach is to continuously nudge the direction of change towards a better direction, constantly reevaluating approach, but avoiding having to stop everyone else.
- ForgotIdAgain 4mo ago
  I come from a developping country, and this whole schtick about "being concerned by tech addiction is a western luxury" is tiring.
- pera 4mo ago
  As a person from the developing world I feel obligated to say that I find your assurance quite unconvincing: the negative effects of smartphone at this point in time is invariant globally, and whether they are a net positive or negative is at least debatable. And in relation to your first comment, most sane people would agree that "tools" don't exist in isolation - neither come into existence out of nowhere. This reductionist position of treating extremely complex machines with deep social interactions as a tool like any other is objectively wrong, and I believe the reasons are highly obvious but I can expand on this if you disagree.
- ekjhgkejhgk 4mo ago
  I'm not the person you were responding to, but I could've written the same as they did, so here's my reply: I don't dispute that in aggregate the effect was positive. But I spend more time thinking about things which impact me directly, and I assure you that in my personal life it used to be a problem, and fixing it was an improvement.
- breezybottom 4mo ago
  That's an extremely broad statement to make "assuredly". I'd wager you haven't figured environmental consequences into your calculation. All the toxic waste from production is being routed to the developing world.
- witx 4mo ago
  These fking website sure loves to pull statistics out of the rear end

keybored 4mo ago

> I think Terry Tao is a great litmus test for AI zealotry (both pro- and anti-). Just in this thread, we have people twisting themselves into knots about how he "sold out" or "not doing math the right way" or whatever. To him, AI is a tool, like any other. That’s an Anti example. What’s a Pro example?

dvt 4mo ago
We've been flooded with "AGI is 6 months away!" for a few years now, mostly by Anthropic/OAI/XAI, which is clearly nonsensical hype. Also, almost everyone has been walking back their previous claims that "AI will replace ~80% of white-collar jobs."
- menaerus 4mo ago
  In the last decade or so I have never seen so much layoffs across the industry. This may be suggesting that evidence supporting the latter hypothesis is not maybe too far fetched.
  - keybored 4mo ago
    Do we have to rehash CEO statements about causality versus objective reality yet again?
    - menaerus 4mo ago
      Objective reality is that many people have lost and are still loosing their jobs. If you don't have anything useful to add to your response please refrain from polluting the discussion.
      - keybored 4mo ago
        Likewise with your "may be suggesting" unfounded correlation speculation. But I guess I’m not allowed to answer on the subthread that I started.

adsf_132 4mo ago

[flagged]

antisthenes 4mo ago
It's not deflection to take a reasoned stoic sense. That's just nonsense being pushed by social media to convince you to be upset (or ecstatic) about something.
- dvt 4mo ago
  Calling my position stoic is kind of goofy imo (and fwiw, I personally find AI to be a pretty useful tool), but I'm not going to reply to some drive-by account literally made just to troll me.
  - oliculipolicula 4mo ago
    >in the new era of "proof abundance", it is increasingly important that we also debate the "soft" aspects of our field, such as our goals and values. Trying to upgrade the trolling to rational discourse, TT recently opined https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/116681024360293007 https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/116681024360293007
    - dvt 4mo ago
      Both the Leiden Declaration[1] as well as Commelin et al.'s announcement (Shaping the Future of Mathematics in the Age of AI)[2] are completely common-sense pieces, neither overstating the power of AI nor understating the capability of these tools to be misused (most acutely when it comes to attribution). I do think that ethically, OpenAI and Anthropic, by training their models on the entire corpus of human knowledge, have certainly broken some rules, but these rules were already broken decades ago by Google—unless we really want to start splitting hairs about if indexing + processing is different than training, which is imo a distinction without a difference—, so it's hard to see who to exactly blame. In any case, that cat is out of the bag. (And for the record, I'm technically a stakeholder: I'm part of like two class actions because of a few books I wrote.) But that's neither here nor there. [1] https://leidendeclaration.ai/#declaration https://leidendeclaration.ai/#declaration [2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.24914 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.24914

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

pcrh 4mo ago

I enjoyed the article. I'm not a mathematician, but I did notice one aspect: even with his enthusiasm for AI, Tao effectively showed that for the uses he describes, AI can currently only handle small chunks of a mathematical problem at a time. Humans, or non-LLM approaches are still needed to stitch these together. It perhaps isn't too different from LLMs being able to coherently output short, a few hundred words, pieces of prose, or code, but not being able to assemble them into functional output with constant "nudging". Happy to be corrected on this!