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by aurareturn20 hours ago |
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upvoteby j2kun13 hours ago|
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> Did the theoretical math lead to the invention of GPS, cryptography, lasers, etc?

For cryptography, perhaps you would enjoy reading the paper of Diffie and Hellman that proposed public-key crypto: https://ee.stanford.edu/~hellman/publications/24.pdf

You will find they were inspired by the NP-hard knapsack problem, and inspired a bunch of later research that led to RSA.

I think the tapestry of history would suggest the answer to the question "is math responsible for this invention" a lot more complicated than it appears. For lasers, Einstein proposed the idea based on purely theoretical physics, and it was made possible in 1960. Is that "theoretical math leading to the invention of lasers"? Surely he was at least relying on a lot of additional theoretical work for that. On the other hand, much theoretical that came out of Bell Labs were responses to needs for better vacuum tube technology, better amplifiers, etc., which were a deep collaboration between theory, practice, and tradesman with a strong intuition for how to build with various materials and at varying scales.

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upvoteby GPerson19 hours ago|
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My point is that when the consumer application became apparent we already had the required concepts to build the technology on top of. In mathematics it still hasn’t happened that an LLM system has invented a conceptual framework. In most if not of the major AI announcements they’ve worked within known frameworks and assembled ideas across frameworks.

Moreover, it’s not clear that if (and when as I believe) they do, creating technologies with no human understanding of the framework is possible or desirable.

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upvoteby mrngld15 hours ago|
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Why wouldn't it be desirable? Is knowledge beyond that a child can understand undesirable because the child can't understand it? I think not, same with anything AI figures out that we can't easily understand ourselves. If GPT-10 Quasar grinds tokens out for 6 months and out pops a warp drive, and even it's executive summary is difficult for anyone to understand, do we get out the pitchforks and burn the data centers or do we go "Sweet, we've got warp drives!"
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upvoteby GPerson9 hours ago|
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Why is it always a false dichotomy between two ridiculous extremes? Maybe inventing some dangerous technology benefits from human understanding for a bunch of obvious reasons, like human beings being responsible it goes well?
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upvoteby NonHyloMorph11 hours ago|
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Maybe fix energy and heat on earth first. Fusion would be nifty. How's the AI progress there?
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upvoteby aurareturn19 hours ago|
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Do we know that AI can't invent a conceptual framework?

If we give it a real problem to solve, it may just have to invent a new form of math to solve.

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upvoteby GPerson19 hours ago|
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It might. It might not though. Would a 1300s superintelligence advocate for heliocentricism in the face of all institutional players advocating for geocentrism, or would it create the most refined epicycle model imaginable? I’d guess the latter.
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upvoteby NonHyloMorph11 hours ago|
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A lot indicates the answer to your latter question might just be 'no'
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upvoteby pixl9715 hours ago|
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>If we run into a real physical problem today, can we just have AI invent the math on the spot to solve the problem without a human having done the theoretical math in the past?

This depends on unanswered questions on what math actually is and it's causal connectivity.

Imagine we have problem A that needs to connect to math solution Z.

The problem is the A -> Z route can only occur in polynomial time in which you need to burn the visible universe to solve. So, that itself is not workable.

As you look at the problem space of A there are a potentially infinite number of paths you could take in the problem topology so again you'd have to brute force the path... mostly unworkable on a lot of problems.

The breakthroughs tend to occur when somewhere in between A and Z there is another mathematical construct M that can link them together. M was very likely discovered something so completely and wildly different you would never link them by brute force. By M existing you narrow the problem space to NP time. M might have sat in the toolbox 100 years unused before that point.

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