A lot of people enjoy making art as a hobby; very few of them have combination of talent, discipline, and luck necessary to achieve commercial success. When I walk through a local art festival, most of what I see is so bad that the artists would have to pay me to take it. While taste in art is highly subjective, those artists don't seem to get much attention from other customers either. Going forward there will probably be even fewer people able to make a living in the arts. I'm not sure what that means for society?
Everyone seems to wrap up their praise of AI by claiming that it will bring an era of abundance with UBI. Once we don't have UBI because why the fuck would we, you'll see most people's opinions of AI start to change from one of cooperation to adversarial.
The steam engine produced raw power but that still needed to be controlled and directed for a multitude of purposes, which required putting dirt farmers through education to turn them into factory workers. If machines now do both the thinking and the hard lifting, why exactly would their owners need us for? From where they're standing, they're now looking at a pragmatic solution to global warming: just reduce the "energy requirements" of the population.
For what it's worth, yes, I believe this, I think people should give each other the resources needed to survive because we have souls.
What benefit is a human soul to a feudal lord?
I don't see this as a toxic trait at all. Some people have the fortune and luxury to do what they love - I don't think that's a bad thing.
I think this quote from Gauss puts it very well: "It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, not possession, but the act of getting there, which grants the greatest enjoyment." So tons of mathematicians feel like AI is stealing this "act of learning which grants the greatest enjoyment", and I think it's fine that they are lamenting this.
This is inherently my whole problem with the "AI utopianists", who somehow think we'll all be happy once we're sitting around with no disease just eating bonbons all day or something.
Spoken like a true robot. For most of us, happiness (and I mean that broadly defined, e.g. "life satisfaction") is the only goal. I certainly thing happiness is a much more critical goal than "increasing shareholder value".
I don't know about Gauss, but when I am given a more powerful tool, I use it to tackle harder problems, the kind that were out of reach before.
Call me when you run out of those sorts of problems. I'll propose some more.
It isn't just about worrying if AI is going to wipe us out, it's trying to figure out how human kind survives itself as things so rapidly change.
The early 1900s also had very rapid change after the introduction of ICE vehicles and airplanes. We also had massive wars that killed millions and brought forth society ending weapons. What is this round of rapid change going to bring?
In the Russia/Ukraine conflict, Ukraine is holding on basically because of drones. They don't have enough guys to populate the front, so the gaps are plugged with drones. So that means the drone technology race is getting supercharged and we'll all get to live with the results of flying killer robots.
In Émile Torres' book, he references how the superweapons of the 21st century were things like nuclear weapons, biological weapons, chemical weapons. In the 21st century, those risks haven't gone away, but to them we add the "GNR Bundle" (genetic technology, nanotechnology, and robotics technology) which are characterized by their autonomous self-replicating potential (with AI falling under robotics). Of course, in his book, he is also being somewhat critical and descriptive of the "futurological shift" that causes certain people to become obsessed with cataloguing every form of x-risk to the neglect of real people's problems in the present.
This sounds horrible. Do you have an article where I can read about it?
If the sum-total of the activities you engage isn't "you", what is? The things you buy? "Your" sports team?
Plus a hypercompetitive academic world is a pretty good explanation for people identifying only with their vocation - how else to do you get to the top except putting your whole self into the challenge?
Note that this may include things that you don't think of as being a "skill". I've seen some people brag about being a particularly hard worker, or about a deep instinct towards Getting Stuff Done, with the clear implication that these things can't be automated the way mere mathematical analysis can.
n.b. I think math culture is probably one of the least toxic cultures that have ever existed. Its equanimity and principles are a big part of what drew me to math in the first place. But humans are human.
The person who is brutally honest enjoys the brutality quite as much as the honesty. Possibly more
~Needham
Since you've imputed intentions or inclinations-- once you see that "pattern matching", which, like a bastard "pigeonhole principle", has been seeing overuse in excusing bigotry -- you cant stop me from claiming to speak for _everyone _(TT)
Elsewhere here, people are imploring us to read philosophy, as if the LLMs haven't already mastered the one weird trick of enlightened stochastic parrots..
I'd recommend self-compassion/self-kindness for mathematicians (because contempt and pity [for mathematician, eg] are too cheap for far "right" and "left", respectively)
After you've felt those pangs of self-forgiveness you might be motivated to contribute to _distributed_ _crowdfunded_ LLMs that crater the value of datacenters instead...channel that brutality at uebermenschlichkeiten please!!
I will stick to my claim that math exists in the context of the hyper-competitive overall academic culture.
I should add that extreme competition combined with math being something people love, something with beauty unto itself, produces an especially weird world compared compared to a situation in, IDK, business school, where everything is about the money.
I mean, asking "who deserves to live the dream" really twists people's heads.
If you accept that as a premise then obviously you agree with their truth.
If you don't accept toxicity as somehow intrinsic to the subject but rather the structural conditions, say, of post-neoliberalized academia at large, and certain faculties being only a bit more susceptible (if even, or just different, say compare humanities vs STEM reactions in the future), then the whole comment reads as a conflation.
Instead the simpler answer is that academia at large values freedom of inquiry and other Enlightenment notions which are privileged compared to outside of academia. But that is not toxicity, it's just intellectual integrity and the academic autonomy in pursuit of one's interests avocationally. The toxicity comes from the intellectual profession having to function as a modern clerisy for socioeconomic reasons under post-neoliberal capitalism.
People may conflate the two attributions and that is a deep mistake, in my opinion. In fact the conflation due to internalized oppression easily creates and explains this kind of resentful, dismissive tone response that is a distortion of the true situation.
> The toxicity comes from the intellectual profession having to function as a modern clerisy for socioeconomic reasons under post-neoliberal capitalism.
Sure. And I think (Western, post-neoliberalized) math has resisted that corruption possibly better than any of its sibling cultures. But what makes the toxicity "distinct" is the emphasis on enlightenment, as if being a top-class mathematician brings you closer to the Godhead than does, say, being a top-class chess player, or a top-class defense attorney. Mathematical theories are treated less like robust human creations percolating over decades and more like divine revelation channeled through chosen disciples in fits of inspiration (c.f. Cantor, Galois, Godel, Grothendieck). A lot of this is projected from the outside the culture into it, but it is not outright rejected by the culture. Instead we still openly endorse what amounts to Great Man theories of mathematical history, attributing to almost every noteworthy mathematician a moniker of "genius" and praising them as paragons of thought, not as the unhealthy subjects of cults of personality.
In other words, the move to experience and cultural relativist statements about "math culture" is exactly the cynical ideological move that an academic cleric does. It deflects from examination of where these narratives come from and attribute it to e.g. "math history" or "math culture" or just "something specific to math itself" etc, etc.
Neoliberal intellectuals love to attribute toxicity to the Enlightenment. They can't help it.
Simpler conflation: need and ability
Eg
1. "from each according to his ability (the tyranny of academy)" with "from each according to his need (the freedom afforded to clerisy)"
2. "to each according to his ability to get rich" (meritocracy) with "to each according to his need to get rich" (post-liberal capitalism)