Are we going to see less publicly shared science? With private actors or governments restricting access to AI resources to a few scientists and keeping new knowledge to themselves.
Advancing science in the open was the best strategy when there was real advantage to share the load with every brain on the planet willing to give a try at science, but if a computer can match or surpass the collective output of the entire human scientific community the equation will change.
It's a sad outlook.
What is going to suck though is the ladder for juniors. We dont start out by working on big ticket problems, but usually early career researchers solve really tiny problems in a cheap way. The lowest bar for a cash strapped PhD student would be to contribute to some new theory in some way even if the student doesnt have access to equipment.
This is what a lot of scientists love to tell themself or talk about in celebratory speeches.
The truth is: a lot of science is kept behind journal paywalls, so that only "officially approved" (in the sense of: working at a university or an governmental research institute) scientists can easily access it.
Also be aware that the world wide web was actually conceived by Tim Berners-Lee for the exchange of information between scientists.
Feels a lot like building software from bottom - once you get the building blocks defined right, the action, or the program, are trivial to express. When doing it from the top-down, you write the program using the building blocks you haven't defined yet, and you might end up with overly specific building blocks, needing other blocks for expressing different behaviors.
When you do the bottom-up building blocks right, new behavior is easy to express with them. Essentially, you are building up the language to reach the problem. Or making a DSL, whatever definition you like best.
HN history
+-- 2mo before by sdfrew
| 4 points / 1 comments
| The Fall of the Theorem Economy
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47862472
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+-- 2mo before by fuglede_
| 3 points / 1 comments
| The Fall of the Theorem Economy
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47891494
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+-- 2mo before by mathgenius
| 2 points / 0 comments
| The Fall of the Theorem Economy
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47909751
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+-- 2mo before by delis-thumbs-7e
| 15 points / 4 comments
| David Bessis on AI destroying mathematics
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47985962
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+-- 1mo before by magoghm
| 4 points / 0 comments
| The Fall of the Theorem Economy
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48084737
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+-- 1mo before by cubefox
| 2 points / 0 comments
| The Fall of the Theorem Economy
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48089716
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+-- 1mo before by cubefox
| 5 points / 0 comments
| The Fall of the Theorem Economy
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48152469
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+-- 1mo before by tmp10423288442
| 4 points / 1 comments
| The Fall of the Theorem Economy
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48214866
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`-- this submission by varjag
58 points / 7 comments
The Fall of the Theorem Economy
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48758048I can understand why this is a major concern for mathematicians. They got into their field because they love the beauty of mathematics, and the intellectual satisfaction of understanding non-obvious insights. But to put it crudely, this sounds like a you problem. As someone who isn't a mathematician, the main value I get out of math is its practical applications in science and technology. And their practical applications in human life. I have zero understanding of the math behind cryptography, but I still deeply appreciate the practical value they have provided humanity.
If AI systems start churning out accurate theorem-proofs, and we are able to use those theorems to build things that improve human quality of life, it doesn't bother me one bit that those theorems have not been understood by humans. If this offends your aesthetics, you are certainly entitled to your opinion and your preferences, but that does not make it a societal problem
If cryptography didn't exist but the maths did, how'd you use it?
What would happen if a non-human layer of mathematics emerged on top of human mathematics? In this article, the distinction between Mathlib and Mathslop might be a precursor to that.
If models advance enough in the future, and new definitions, compressions, and representational forms that are convenient for AI-to-AI communication emerge, what would happen then? Would mathematics split into Human-facing and Machine-facing branches?
I am not dismissing engineering (it moves the world we live in), just trying to clarify what science is.
Applied fluid dynamics works like that: noone has ever really "verified" that the finite-element method applied to some specific model does converge
I mean, what if a human could follow every single step of the process in principle, but the sheer volume is so vast that a human can never see the whole thing—would that be engineering?
But I don’t think of that as engineering. In the future, maybe it will be called an Oracle
1) Two and a half years with no reply from a journal (not even to emails I sent that I'd like to retract the paper so I could send it somewhere else). Then suddenly they tell me the paper is accepted.
2) One year with no reply. Then, my "anxious" collaborator sends them countless emails and gets redirected from person to person and finally an editor tells us that they decided almost immediately to reject our paper but they didn't tell us because "they hate giving bad news".
These were not top journals like Annals, but decent, prestigious ones, from whom you'd expect some professionalism.
"I was in Switzerland", "I was invited to a talk", "I started a machine learning company", look at me bro.
A wood-worker could do the same argument, there's the "official" wood-working word of perfect joinery and beautifully finished tables one can buy, but behind it there's the "secret" messy human element, the art, the craft, the mistakes and hard-ships, the elevation of human skills and imagination, the creation of whole new types of wood-working inventions and techniques, the perpetuation of millenia-old traditions, the teaching, the joy of selling to a happy customer, etc.
But now comes techo-capitalism, division of labor, you cut that piece a that piece over and over, you operate that machine, you won't even see the finished table, fuck your human element, we want that profit !