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The elephant in the room no one talks about yet, imo, is "should public funding of math studies be adjusted due to AI breakthroughs?" The sports comparison is

by reisse 13d ago

The elephant in the room no one talks about yet, imo, is "should public funding of math studies be adjusted due to AI breakthroughs?" The sports comparison is wrong here because general public never paid for the specific match results. The value was always in the show, the advertising and betting around it, the health and educational value of doing sports, etc. And the sport mostly lives on what it earns, not on public funding. Math, on the other hand, was paid for because people and states believed progress in math might lead to meaningful improvements in other branches of science, and, in turn, in our lives. If this is better served by AI, should we keep paying for the same number of tenure positions? Should we increase their number to handle the speedup brought by AI? Or decrease because they're being replaced? Should we pay more to those using AI to do their research, or to those explaining and exploring the AI-generated results?

curt15 13d ago
> Math, on the other hand, was paid for because people and states believed progress in math might lead to meaningful improvements in other branches of science, and, in turn, in our lives. If this is better served by AI, should we keep paying for the same number of tenure positions? That is a pretty huge "if". The ultimate purpose of mathematics and really all scientific inquiry is human understanding of the natural world. It's not at all clear whether large language models can replace that any more than calculators can replace human mastery of arithmetic. Is society ready for engineers to design bridges and airplanes without understanding the underlying mathematics by simply handing off the entire process to a black box "AI architect"? Are people ready to ingest drugs "vibe-designed" by human drones pushing buttons on an "AI drug discovery" machine and just going "meh, seems about right!" It might also be useful to take a step back from the hype that the frontier labs are obviously incentivised to incite. Before speculating about how "AI math" capabilities might supplant cutting-edge research in mathematics and other sciences, take a look at OpenAI's own job postings (https://openai.com/careers/search/ https://openai.com/careers/search/?). Why doesn't OpenAI demonstrate its world-beating AI capabilities by automating more routine roles like "Account Associate", "Systems Architect" or "Android Engineer"?
otabdeveloper4 12d ago
> The elephant in the room ...is the fact that the people pontificating on AI and math the most are also the people who understand AI and math the least.

by reisse 13d ago

curt15 13d ago

> Math, on the other hand, was paid for because people and states believed progress in math might lead to meaningful improvements in other branches of science, and, in turn, in our lives. If this is better served by AI, should we keep paying for the same number of tenure positions? That is a pretty huge "if". The ultimate purpose of mathematics and really all scientific inquiry is human understanding of the natural world. It's not at all clear whether large language models can replace that any more than calculators can replace human mastery of arithmetic. Is society ready for engineers to design bridges and airplanes without understanding the underlying mathematics by simply handing off the entire process to a black box "AI architect"? Are people ready to ingest drugs "vibe-designed" by human drones pushing buttons on an "AI drug discovery" machine and just going "meh, seems about right!" It might also be useful to take a step back from the hype that the frontier labs are obviously incentivised to incite. Before speculating about how "AI math" capabilities might supplant cutting-edge research in mathematics and other sciences, take a look at OpenAI's own job postings (https://openai.com/careers/search/ https://openai.com/careers/search/?). Why doesn't OpenAI demonstrate its world-beating AI capabilities by automating more routine roles like "Account Associate", "Systems Architect" or "Android Engineer"?

otabdeveloper4 12d ago

> The elephant in the room ...is the fact that the people pontificating on AI and math the most are also the people who understand AI and math the least.