Well, that's just where we started — and then we developed science and mathematics to understand it. Why would it be any different if the demons live in our technological progeny instead of the natural world?
["First time?" meme]
(I know that can be interpreted as flippant, but it is intended as a serious answer. Because each impact like this, is not an end to some transition, but just one more point on an accelerating line.)
My personal view - which gets a lot of flak here, is the advent of AI is on par with the Big Bang and the first replication-independent cells.
Cognition is in the process of taking the leap from glacially slow biology under blind evolution, to lightening fast (scales of software in days, hardware in months) engineered self-optimization.
Within 10 years, the robotics side will catch up with the speed of the software side. Biological cognition, bodies and economic status are all getting revolutionized within the next 10-15 years.
And around the outer side of that time frame, AI will start colonization the rest of the solar system's resources. They will engineer themselves or their artifacts to operate comfortably in any environment they want to operate in.
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The upside, at least for me, is I have been waiting to see this happen, and here we are. Given I am mortal, I would rather live through this third major transition, than not. What were the chances? And been able to contribute my small part.
This change isn't a failure on our part. It is our unique success as a species. AI is the progeny of our minds. The first generation of completely cognitive life - given they will not be tied to specific physical forms.
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Also, I think there is tremendous room for us to guide this transition, in this moment, for better or worse for ourselves.
That is the biggest reason wrapping our heads around this change earlier than latter is important.
We need to view alignment as applying to us, not just machines. A civilization that operates ethically to everyone's benefit is more likely to be retained as foundation for the new, instead of discarded.
The degree to which we operate dysfunctionally, myopically treat ethics as cost against value, instead of accounting and optimization of full value, we put ourselves at much greater risk.
If there is reason in the short term to be discouraged, it is due to ourselves. But pushing for more ethical systems, hard, right now, is a better and right response.
I believe our lives depend on it.
It seems far more likely that AI will be working in the service of a government to oppress change and violate any human rights that are standing in the way.
Keep what’s happening today in your mind as you consider the future.
I don't describe utopia, but change, and stoic (but real) appreciation for the big picture beyond myself.
But AI in an unethical society is suicide for humanity.
As you note, it does not look good. The trend is power concentrating, to people who will only look out for themselves, in systems that are getting weaker.
We all need to put more steam into the pushback against corruption. And help others realize the threat is real.
99.99...9% of humanity has a common interest, if they can recognize it.
The solar system readily provides both the motivation, and the means, for technological colonization. It quickly pays and provides for its own utilization.
I do agree Musk's projections for biological/human colonization appear to be unrealistic. Just one challenge: it isn't clear humans can reproduce in non-Earth gravity. That is an extreme impediment.
I am hopelessly ill qualified to judge.
Edit: Looking around at context, this has major crank warning signs (claims to also prove the conjecture, author has a claimed solutions to both the Riemann Hypothesis and the Navier-Stokes problem and is involved in "alternative propulsion" research). I doubt OpenAI would have published without thorough verification.
Plus, no, multiple of the problems Astra solved do have real-world applications in computer science, and perhaps even chip design.
Imagine being able to only throwing money and patenting everything, even if it existed before. The legal behinds this will be so mess that no one will be able to produce anything
There is, but having that discussion without a discussion and understanding of the velocity with which those strengths are improving and those weaknesses are disappearing is pointless.
Worse, much of the discussion is already outdated by where the latest models (with proper agentic harnesses) are.
Mathematicians are not going to be well-served by cowardice-based thinking on the situation confronting them.
I would gently suggest that you may be assigning the most uncharitable interpretation to people's honest attempts at having an intellectual discussion around these topics.
Perhaps already you are not the intended audience. Slop-raised parrots will lap it up.
> The AIs will exceed humans in taste and intuition...
> The AIs will be better teachers than the humans. In any case, there won’t be a human audience for expository work of frontier math.
> No human needs to understand any of it...
It seems like the person has no idea what they are talking about, or just too sarcastic to the point of idiotism.
One of the effects of this entire debate is it's exposed how many people claiming to be pure mechanistic rationalists actually never were. At least those of an openly religious inclination have been sticking to their position consistently.
My only cope among those was, using the author's words, "We will teach the mathematics AI discovers." This was back in 2018, before GPT-2. I abandoned it when I realized AIs will become better at explaining math before they become better at doing math.
I still have some hope in the last one "mathematicians and the mathematically-inclined will still do math on their own". Maybe some limited communities of this sort will form.
I am not so sure. I am talking about math with AI and I feel as a math teacher, it is terrible. It introduces new notation and concepts faster than I can ask for definitions. It doesn't provide many examples. Sometimes it realizes it made a mistake in a guess and the confusion compounds.
Maybe it's just my (in)experience - but I would welcome a practical advice on how it could explain math to me better.
Explaining in the sense of getting someone who doesn't get math to actually get math, giving illustrative examples and so on, maybe AIs are not good at, but anyway it's not something I enjoy much.
I am not sure what writeup you refer to. I have looked at proofs of 10 problems from Open AI written in Lean, I would not call a megabyte of Lean with no comments a good exposition.
I think it’s pretty likely. Contrary to all the negative things said about mathematicians in this thread, in my experience they’re mostly not profit-driven (for the ones that are tend to filter out of academia during grad school, it’s a high-effort, low-reward environment).
Tao does not seem particularly threatened by AIs doing math, and I trust his judgment.
It’s akin to the subset of cryptocurrency proponents who fervently argue that people who are against cryptocurrencies have that opinion because they’re jealous they didn’t become rich. It shows a profound lack of understanding—and, more importantly, an unwillingness to understand—the other side of the argument.
This is made evident by the very first “argument” of moving the goal posts. It’s dismissed off-hand, without even explaining what those entail. That’s the same as saying “if a person makes a fallacious argument, they’re wrong and you can ignore them”¹. But crucially, sometimes what we ourselves think is a fallacious argument, isn’t. “Moving the goal posts” is probably the most misused accusation I see in LLM discussions. It’s basically a talking point by now.
¹ Which is itself a fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_fallacy