Bottom line, Tao is pushing for human understanding as the primary goal, with AI helping on all fronts. You are welcome to let Jesus take the wheel, but math is the most pure expression of human understanding. His point is that getting specific answers is rarely the goal, or certainly not the entirety of the goal.
Simply put, if we don't understand the answers we won't know what the next question should be.
> Bottom line, Tao is pushing for human understanding as the primary goal
100%. This applies to SWEs/math folks/etc. I do infra and I see many SWEs take their hands off the wheel. When they encounter perf issues they ask their agent and agent says GC and they say GC. It's rarely GC.
Now we might be well past the point where we need to remember the kubectl flags for rollouts etc. But basic human understanding of what their bots are doing as a goal has never changed. Humans are still liable for when bad things happen, and that hasn't changed over the roller coaster the last 5-odd years have been. LLMs, as astonishing they are at Navier Stokes, are still eminently capable of nuking your filesystem and saying "I can now see that that was wrong" with zero regrets. If you can't understand you can't sign off.
> math is the most pure expression of human understanding
This I don't know about. I think math acquires meaning when it contacts reality: like an iota is pointless until there's some circuit that it explains. Abstract math can diverge from that and can become an exercise in playing with symbols for their own sake.
Explaining nature causally using mathematical models isn't "the primary goal" of humanity. STEM people tend to have a weird misconception there, probably stemming from their misconceptualization of the humanities.
This in turns leads to this odd idea of "AI will think for us". That's pure (and pretty obvious) insanity. Logically minded people encountering it should ask, where the error in their reasoning is.
I have two issues with the implication of this statement:
1. Meaning is inherently subjective. Reality is just a canvas on which sentient beings create their own meaning.
2. There are many, many examples of where “playing with symbols for their own sake” have yielded deep insights. There’s actually some implicit structure (eg the structure of logic) that is intrinsic to the universe we live in.
After talking to a mathematician friend I can assure you that contact with reality is not the main goal of abstract math. It is mental constructions that have logical consistency and probably this is not the perfect definition either. It is somewhat of an art which is rendered in the logical mind. However physicists (me) and engineers will align with you.
The questions we asked were originally not about math. They were about a thing that we invented maths for to do or explain, a question that existed, because it touched us in some way that was already real to us. There is nothing that would not allow this to happen in the future. All this requires is attention and connection to the world around us. The maths required to answer our questions can be done and developed by something else.
To me, all you need to believe for this to be true is to agree that understanding maths is also not a stated requirement of reality to get a thing, if something else understands the maths (or something that does the same job). This is demonstrated by billions of people who do not understand maths and get things that, currently, require other people to understand the maths.
But the last part is entirely optional as it pertains to reality. That's just the best we can currently do (and in some important sense it is holding us back as a species, and in some other sense doing the opposite).
If that goal is understanding math, you certainly will be able to understand maths, more than ever before.
If that goal is something that required you to understand maths first in the past, you won't have to do that anymore.
I respect Tao and I believe he's trying to think deeply about the issues, but a lot of his thinking seems to revolve around preserving the current roles and prestige of mathematicians, and also makes a lot of assumptions about the capabilities of AI years or decades into the future.
This is not me being snarky, but all meaningful questions can be settled empirically---e.g., "what happens to my body if I jump off the cliff". But empirical trials have a cost (time, money, irreversibility etc.) and we model and predict because it's cheaper than the trial.
The idea that all meaningful questions can be answered empirically is known as "verificationism" and is philosophically quite dubious.
This is a logical positivist view, that not everyone agrees with.
> Simply put, if we don't understand the answers we won't know what the next question should be.
It won't matter, because it won't be us who will be asking the next questions anymore. Whether in math or anything else.
And no, domains that require real-world validation against physical ground truth won't save us, because AI gets to have the same inputs as we do (or better, if using specialized hardware), while beating us at reasoning.
And GP's likening this to previous massive economic shifts due to automation isn't really helping in any way, not anymore, because perspective won't feed us when we're hungry, and just as importantly, this one will affect every single field of human activity, so no one has any answers as to what the future will really hold for us.
That's the frontier labs' preferred narrative while they themselves are still hiring hordes of human "Account Associates", "Android Engineers", and "AI support engineers" instead of automating those jobs as a show of their AI strength. Of course it will be "us" asking the questions, because "AI" are computer programs, and humans build the computers and choose what computational tools to use for any application.
This is what it feels like to be disrupted. It's not the end of the world. You consider the evidence, ponder the path forward, and adapt. It's what humans do and their superpower. It doesn't have to be a negative thing, even if it is dislocating.
We don't need to be saved, there is plenty of agency to go around. Just grasp the opportunity and forge ahead. This sort of pessimism is self-defeating. Humanity has dealt with this before and come out on top, this time is no different. AI is being wildly oversold.
Tao is being entirely rational. He maybe has more to lose as anyone, but he's getting down to brass tacks instead of jumping at shadows and imaginary boogeymen.
What if AI knows better than us?
It might be that P=NP and the algorithms are handed down to us. We can apply them without understanding why P=NP, and we may never be capable of understanding why.
Where do you see signs of this happening?
Is OpenAI going to pay for the food and health of mathematicians who lost their job?
It might be alright to go into some post scarcity society and do math for fun. But it seems to be a pretty unlikely scenario unprecedented om history.
why not try? we'll learn something from it.
The companies and partners need to maximize payout. They go on this track of cost reduction via layoffs and basically saying - “the model can do everything”. They know it’s not the case yet they still flood the airwaves and cause fud among all clueless c-suite executives. Which is the goal to begin with.
The second category goes all out against it. Professors, educators, school districts whose operating processes have not caught up to all the cheating that can happen. Here these folks have a point. I am sympathetic to this. It is hard to change education and it requires careful thought.
I feel this presentation brings out a good middle ground. The tech is useful but it’s not all encompassing. The tech also has other concrete uses. As an example, I have always wanted to explore the intersection of category theory, formal verification and AI guardrails and prompting. Proof writing has been a chore because I have a day job. Maybe the AI can help here.
While frontier labs are supposedly on track to conquer human endeavors, they are somehow still hiring lots of human "Account Associates" and "AI support engineers" instead of automating those jobs as a demonstration of their AI's economic value (https://openai.com/careers/search/).
I don't think it's that surprising have you met many mathematicians?
Who says we have a purpose at all? The universe doesn't owe us meaning, nor even existence. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to shape a reality we want to live in. We may not succeed, or we may find that we'll be happy in a reality we cannot imagine yet, but que sera sera is tautological and therefore unhelpful. Obviously, no matter what we do or don't do, there will be some future, but treating that tautology as a prescription is just a call for passive resignation.
> This is what the late stages of scarcity feels like
Going from LLMs to "late stages of scarcity" is quite the leap (although I guess anything could be a "late stage" depending on the timeline). Even if we were to assume that "intellectual labour" is our most scarce resource (and I'm not at all sure that's the case), obviously it's not the only scarce resource.
> we need less people
Who's "we" and why do "we" need any people at all?
> This is what the late stages of scarcity feels like.
Late stage of scarcity of what and for whom is the question.
Who are you counting as being in "any position of power"? All the AI lab people are saying that the most likely and best outcome is we all live in a world of abundance where money doesn't matter anymore. Dario, Sam, Demis, and Elon have all said this loudly and repeatedly to anyone who asks.
None of them have articulated a coherent way to get there from here. But they all believe that the technology will make it possible, so the only unresolved question is how to transition us there.
And none of them ever spoke a lie. Especially not if it would further their goals at someone else's expense.
From what I've seen, UBI is just a carrot dangled in front of the poors by utopian Silicon Valley tech bro megabillionaires when they're trying to drum up some PR for whatever big idea they're pimping out at the moment.
There are a lot of discussions of socialization of health care and basic income approaches and sovereign wealth based on automation dividends similar to the Alaska trust.
I think the current spate of mean cruelty ala MAGA and a glorification of a mean and cruel past that was never a golden age is a death spasm of a deeply unpopular belief system. As the actual realities of the policies sink in 70% of the populace is revolted, which is a super majority. That’s more than enough to put a pin in the philosophy permanently. It is also greatly accelerating electrification, realization of the value of expertise in technocratic systems in current generations, etc. I think humans are socially adaptable animals at a cultural level, but for the individual the adaptation process can be awful. I hope it’s not, because it doesn’t have to be. We will see.
We have no choice, we must tax the common people.
The Uprising (2026)Matrix was a good point to this. They made the world a utopia and people couldn't handle it. Our monkey brains require pain give us a utopia and we'll just walle ourselves to death.
(The ones I've heard about, I'm fairly sure, didn't find anything of the kind. Which isn't to say that they show we should have UBI; there are big gaps between what has been tested so far and what an actual economy with UBI would look like.)
I think you've taken the "work less" that was found in some studies to suggest they needed "toil". They simply found it somewhere else.
I was thinking the same, that most of the opposition to AI's convenience is starting to smell like religious mysticism, the kind of arguments religious people made (and make) when Evolution and Natural Selection were introduced:
√ "Stop simplifying humans down to numbers!"
√ "This denies our spirituality"
√ "What do we strive for now if we're not special?"
+ (along with some borderline jihadish hate heh ..maybe Dune got it right)
Well, either there was nothing special about whatever you were doing after all
or, maybe there is still something special at a higher level you haven't looked at yet.
The Sendov example has a piece coders will hopefully recognize: he found a formalization that was 1/6 the amount of code of the original one. And the analogy with code goes further--the messy version will run/pass the proof checker, but the one that's been cleaned up and made sense of is a better foundation for future work. That's true even for future LLM-assisted work.
So it's not about whether mathematicians take advantage of LLM help (Tao favors that) but, more or less, whether the point of math is just to make a bigger version of the GitHub dump vs. everything else: readability/comprehensibility, negative results that fill in the map around a problem (not just 'lighthouse' theorems), organizing results to plan out future work, and so on.
The economics in the West feel very strained right now, and this incredible tool has come along just in time to threaten one of the last bastions of middle-class safety: white collar jobs.
Confront your leaders.
I think it’s reasonable for people to say “I like the way things were, I don’t like this new future you’re proposing, and I want to limit the technology that’s doing the thing I don’t like.”
There is nothing inevitable about AI. As a society we may decide it is fundamentally unhealthy or anti-human. We have banned or curtailed access and research for other technologies before.
Things are not settling, it's only acceleration from here on out. In fact things have never settled, technology has been on an exponential since humans tamed fire. The difference is we notice change faster. It used to take several human lifetimes to notice change. In the 20th century it was noticeable within a lifetime. Since the internet there has been a great revolution about every decade: web, smartphone, social media. But now great changes are noticeable within a year. It's not enough time for society to digest and adapt.
> we need less people and that’s why population is declining
This is the scary part. The Elon and Zuckerberg types that control the new powerful machines have proven they are not moral people. In America's highly billionaire-deferential culture there is no stopping them, at some point they'll be out of reach of democratic or even military control once they control private robot armies. They could decide to accelerate the decline of the undesirable useless population. Amazingly humanity's salvation could end up being China's communist system.