They may be a vanguard.
> find it hard to believe that AI doesn't represent a net potential benefit to human understanding of mathematics. Yes it can be misused
Have you read Tao’s criticism of AI in mathematics? The concern isn’t mis-use, it’s ecosystem collapse.
A good analogy would be offshoring. If AI causes higher mathematical thought among humans to stop happening for a generation, we could wind up in a state where the field stops progressing because AI is unable to generate new interesting questions or cross-link findings into practical applications.
More directly, the risk is that happens in America but not in a more-thoughtful country.
Just because AI is capable of churning out vomit inducing prose, doesn't mean we need to surrender to a future filled with it. Humans who actually care about what they're doing will use AI when and where it should be used. I trust the intelligence, curiosity and tenacity of mathematicians to learn to work with AI. I don't understand the sky is falling worst case scenario Tao and others seem to be taking as the most likely future.
…yes. That’s why the human mathematicians are having this debate. How to keep the human mathematicians and their founders motivated to keep doing math, potentially more productively with these new tools.
If AI saps motivation from some mathematicians, I question where their motivation came from in the first place. Maybe they're just too wedded to the traditional way of doing things and aren't fully appreciating the actual productivity gains AI makes possible.
Again, have you read Tao’s recent criticism of AI in mathematics? Nothing you’re saying is disputed.
> If AI saps motivation from some mathematicians, I question where their motivation came from in the first place
Question away. I care about results. If a substantial number of great mathematicians say this is a problem, and a substantial number of students agree, whether they’re unappreciative of their potentially pending unemployment is irrelevant to both that fact and the fact that they’re not going to be producing mathematics. (Again, here. The American mathematical ecosystem collapsing doesn’t mean the same will happen abroad.)
We don’t know this! We might just have no more American mathematicians because folks who aren’t mathematicians don’t understand that we’re turning mathematical breakthroughs from just a couple decades ago into real, working technology.
> It's not even clear if the human race can survive until then
It’s pretty obviously clear the human race can survive for hundreds more years…
"Climate change is going to kill everyone in 50 years so we'd better work fast if we want to burn all this coal by then"
Not in the same extinction-class event way. In large part because hiring developers is still profitable.
Also, not remotely as well organized or proactive as mathematicians anpparently are. So maybe less vanguard than the cannon fodder at the front.
You have to actively design society to accommodate for the dangers it poses.
Of course everybody should "learn to use AI", but the real questions here are wildly different: can everybody use AI? Do the big US companies succeed in capturing the system, effectively shutting out every competitor and how do you imagine to benefit from that? Etc.
knowledge workers are building their own gallows and it probably can't be stopped.
they’ve only had a few weeks to deprogram so I’ll let it shake out just a little longer