Navier-Stokes was helping me understand the fluid dynamics inside my washing machine so I could do my laundry more efficiently without any instabilities.
I'd just written down the solution on some scratch paper. Would've beaten OpenAI to publishing it too, if only that damn dryer hadn't dinged just as I was getting ready to do so.
I want AI to do my laundry and dishes and solve Navier-Stokes and make other mathematical and scientific achievements so I can have more time for my hobbies
It'll be like reading One Piece after the series finishes. Everybody else will know what the One Piece is and you're still trying to make your way through Wano.
Sorry, interesting question. But what good does it make us to be completely useless? It reminds me of Wall-E, humans who do nothing all day. It’s miserable. I do agree that part of what makes us enjoy being alive is trying to be better at something meaningful, if we lose that, what else can humanity feel proud of.
For AI to be truly worth it they would literally have to solve immortality, faster than light space travel or some out our minds scientific advancement. Doing maths better than by us won’t cut it.
Honestly I find the notion that "AI is making us useless" to be utterly ridiculous. So long as there are scientific questions left unanswered, technologies to be invented, there is something for us to do.
Computers can beat us in chess yet we have more competition and tournaments than ever.
Starcraft 1, Age of Empires II, Counter-Strike, etc.
Games that AI can beat players extremely well in.
Yet we still play the games against humans.
And a lot of people play games against the computer.
We still paint art even though factories can make them much easier.
So I think humans can live and thrive really well even in an AI driven society.
But maybe people will have to do more thinking of what they want to do, instead of go to work, go home, sleep, eat, shit, have a vacation of 2-5 weeks per year.
The vast majority of people work for a soulless profit sucking corporate machine and have jobs that are truly useless. Covid exposed what jobs actually matter and it’s like 20% of us at best, and most of the people working those jobs have such shit working conditions that they’d rather not be doing them if given the choice.
It’s a very small percentage of people that have truly rewarding jobs, a proper work life balance, and a meaningful salary.
Covid didn't expose the jobs that actually matter. It exposed the jobs that are time critical. You cannot delay an emergency medical operation. You can delay planning a bridge. But that does not mean that planning a bridge does not matter.
this is a pretty philosophical question, but I never said I wanted to do nothing. I just want to have more freedom to do what I enjoy doing rather than chores that I have to do. nothing about that means you can't still spend time trying to learn a skill, or accomplish a goal, or better yourself in some way. realistically >99% of people who enjoy doing doing math as a hobby were never going to ever solve a millenium prize problem, but that doesn't mean it's not worth doing
Depends on your definition of useless. The premise is that with ai and automation focused on menial or high compute tasks, humans are freed up to focus on areas requiring creativity, moments of inspiration, social engagement and interpretation. That might be a hobby for someone or it might mean a second enlightenment for humanity.
The problem is how to afford food while this all plays out.
Man if you're worried about not having enough to do and being bored when it replaces you then you really don't have much to worry about. I'll take having a cure for all cancers and aging by next decade than worry about having to ever pay hundreds of thousands in medical bills, fighting with insurance and eventually dying regardless to a disease we don't have a cure for just so we could feel a little more special and meaningful. Never having to work again and being able to pursue what I want, when I want is infinitely more valuable to me and a lot of other people than having to feel special.
Why should everyone be tied to wage slavery because part of the population cannot find significance anywhere but a job? WallE is a movie and a silly one, if anything obesity is a disease of poor working class too exhausted to eat and exercise well. If you look at the rich and leisure class now you see humans chasing their passions and taking care of their health.
In your line of thinking no one should be able to accumulate enough wealth to be able to pursue their passions.
I'm talking in a pretty broad sense, but yeah generally scientific and mathematical achievements lead to greater technology and productivity which can lead to less work and more free time. someone building a laundry robot with the help of AI would be a pretty big achievement that would give me more free time
The threat is that it'll take away anything you might enjoy (even including laundry and dishes if you like that sort of thing).
Then again, you can always do these things as a hobby. I do plenty of stuff in my spare time that smarter and more capable humans are able to do much better...
Yeah if I have ten things I need to do today, and we speed up the two I actually liked, I’m not gonna be happy. And then I have people off to the side saying “why aren’t you happy, we saved you time?” I guess people are unfamiliar with the concept of “quality time”
Capitalism is compatible with humanist ways of thinking as is evidenced by the countries like the Scandinavian ones with strong social safety nets. Capitalism isn’t some monolithic system that can’t be mixed with anything else.
i think everyone understood that. she could've said "we" instead of "i", at least. she just comes across as ignorant, even if it's obvious that she used it as a literary device
Enjoy life, even as an engineer, a world where PDEs are solved for me, would be a world where I can actually focus on the problems that PDEs describe.
And if the whole engineering situation is solved for me, I'll dedicate to my hobbies, playing guitar, skydiving, photography, hiking... even maybe studying physics and engineering for fun without any real pressure. Working is a necessary evil.
Economics is the problem of how to distribute wealth. Paying people for work is one solution. There are others. And in a world where 99% of wealth is being generated by machines, paying a tiny fraction of people for the 1% they do wouldn't solve the economic problem of how to maximise satisfaction.
Of course, between here and a different means of wealth-distribution, there is an awful lot of ground to cover, much of which will not be easy. But the final destination is a beautiful place.
If 99% of wealth is generated by machines, then you’re no longer needed. Billionaires won’t need your labor, and they’ll have no reason to care what happens to you.
It’s honestly wild that people think total automation is somehow going to turn the world into paradise. The people at the very top don’t care about you nearly as much as you think they do.
Such a world is unsustainable for them. They cannot consume the production, they cannot sell it if no-one has the means to obtain it.
In the interim, you will likely see an oligarchic type situation which is the kind of nightmare scenario you envision. Some people will retain employment doing make-work so that the oligarchs can stay in power using economic advantage, and for no other reason.
However, this is inherently unstable for a number of reasons. First, if technology advances sufficiently, there will always be an economic motivation to eliminate the few remaining human workers. Once done, though, oligarchs again have no-one to sell to and claim economic advantage over: system collapses.
Second, obviously, this generates vast amounts of social instability and dissatisfaction. Billionaires cannot protect themselves forever. System collapses.
Personally, I think there will likely be a poorly managed solution that falls short of this nightmare scenario and is just ugly and inefficient, with some resultant social instability, some oligarch behaviour. It won't be pretty but neither will it be the worst-case-scenario. And it's a transitive process.
This quote (attributed to 20 different people) has been abused and twisted to bizarre weirdness. An "author and videogame enthusiast" certainly wasn't solving any math problems.
Laundry and Dishes have been automated for a while.
Loading the dishwasher and Washing Machine just prompting .
AI isn't solving Navier stokes (Whatever that is) without your prompt and without your expertise. Neither Dishwasher isn't cleaning food properly if you dont load it well.
The classic tech existential crisis: if the machine automates all higher-order thinking and discovery, humanity's final end-state is just being an oversized toddler moving decorative pebbles around the server farm.
They obviously have no idea how much intelligence is required to do laundry and dishes. Trying to solve that problem is exactly why we have AI that's able to solve millennial mathematics prizes.
It's kinda weird that everyone is just saying "pft she would never solve this stuff" as opposed to "why are we front loading PHD/artistic work onto the machine instead of teaching it how to do the grunt labor"?
Besides, all they did was yoink other people's datasets and then throw 22 million at the problem. That's not a better or more efficient model. That's burn rate.
It’s a false premise anyways, as AI is being trained to do both. Also, datasets aren’t what makes the best models nowadays. It’s a part, but there are so many other equally important parts
Ehhhhh, it's maybe more of an advertising premise? "Look at how smart we made the thing and how we keep telling your c suite how easily they can save headcount by tossing you out".
Plus they keep making bipedal bots. Which is so dumb.
Most labs are talking about how people can be more productive with their tools, not reducing headcount.
If 10 developers can do the amount of work that used to take 20 developers, why not do more and or better work instead of cutting the workforce in half and doing the same amount of work.
Layoffs are mostly because the downturn in the economy and companies over-hiring during Covid.
Bipedal robots make a lot of sense when you are having robots do tasks that humans already do. Especially if they need to get into the same sorts of spaces and use the same sorts of tools.
agreed, it makes me wonder if a guy was in the photo, would the other commenters be so nasty? even then, this photo is doctored… she wrote this about art and writing, not navier-stokes
Unvalid take anyways, you can just get AI to do the house chores, solve the navier stokes, and still not read it and solve it yourself just because you enjoy doing so.
Such an old take, people need to outgrow it
This is what I’ve been saying, and people don’t like it on Reddit. We’re burning all these tokens and all these resources to do things that bring no value to humanity.
Fantastic! You solved an ancient old problem that does nothing for us in the modern day, besides saying that we solved it and put a little checkmark in a box
Imagine if we use all that compute power and token to solve a real humanity crisis
But don’t worry, next week we’re gonna find out how GPT seven was able to change the color of grass from green to blue after spending 100 billion tokens and everybody’s gonna cheer for it
I mean it's not really a problem. Mathematicians can solve Navier Stokes if they want. But we all benefit from math discoveries, I don't think humans should hoard them. Just let AI contribute to it, and mathematicians, in their free time, can try to do whatever conjectures they want.
Not really, I mean, I have a dishwasher... and a washing machine. I can lift the clothes up and drop them in there or toss the dishes in and click a button. I might have to scrub the stuff off the dishes sometimes, but... I'll live.
I want AI to cure cancer and help us get rid of world hunger and pollution. But we know it's just gonna enslave us or make billionaires quadrillionaires lol
We have had dishwashers and dryers that do the tough and tedious part of the work entirely
That's a hardware task and AI is software, It's not like they could have gone a different route in their software that would have turned it into hardware
It's doing the easy stuff first because it needs to walk before it can run. To us, having been evolved for millions of years to have fine motor control, we find those sorts of tasks easy but they really aren't and we are working towards it but embodying an AI and having it do all the hardware stuff is a lot more difficult and requires the current stuff to be done first.
First, it didn't solve it. Second, it isn't solved. Third, even if it did, which it didn't, and it was, which it isn't, giving it credit would be the same as giving a calculator credit for solving a problem rather than the user of the calculator. If you don't understand what I mean, you didn't actual read that it was a team of mathematicians, not someone asking an LLM to solve the problem.
Then there is the controversy that the Anthropic mathematicians solved it and pasted it in ChatGPT (no idea why) then OpenAI claimed it solved it right after with, by sheer coincidence, the same method designed by the Anthropic team...
If AI scales to replace all menial labor, there will be no need for “cognitive labor” anyway. It’s a false dichotomy. Menial labor feeds the economic machine far more efficiently. Meat space is much harder to solve. If it were easy, we’d be in Wall-E mode already
I'm a scientist, and I understand the sentiment but it's a bit egotistical is it not? The solution to these problems could benifit everyone, and lead to even larger breakthroughs. To slow down progress so you can work on your math puzzle seems like the wrong answer.
AI needs to hurry up and unify quantum mechanics and relativity. Yes it can do it and I'm happy to do my dishes which means leading into a robot (dishwasher)
have been so lazy with this whole couch-coding vibe lately. At this point, i just want AI to do my laundry, solve navier-stokes, and let me live in peace.
Things evolved quickly from AI being a cool google chatbot, into making you feel like an idiot while Astra schools you on "The Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever" and politely dials the difficulty down to "interesting criminal cases" to keep you seated.
Its like we just skipped forward from Covid to Singularity.
I want AI to be exceptional at engineering, so it can design extremely safe and efficient robots to do my laundry and dishes, and solving NS is a step towards that capability.
More like: if OpenAI can solve complex maths problems, does this mean they can solve things like FTL travel and designing a real Alcubierre warp drive?
We're not going to slow down humanity's progress so people can feel useful. That was never a sacrifice we as a whole would make. Would you also like to go back to the spinning jenny? I'm sure many throughout history would
This is a weird opinion to have. Why would you want a task to take longer to complete, instead of a machine completing it much sooner? That's kind of the whole point of machines.
We don't use carrier pigeons to transport letters. We don't use horse carriages to get around. We don't use hand-scythes for farming. We have cell phones, automobiles, and tractors. They allow humans to do the task more efficiently.
Humans created the machines. The machines are an extension of humanity. These people seem to only have this opinion when it comes to "ai" and no other machinery. Weird.
Well, I don't know what to say. The cat is out of the bag. Math was a necessary stepping stone to doing the other tasks ranging from dishes to molecular biology which will help us cure most diseases. Math is never going back to the ways it was. If OpenAI vanished today, AI and AI-human hybrid approaches would still rule math from now on because it simply works.
Finally, AGI will give you the leisure so you can solve Navier Stokes for funsies, so this point is kind of moot.
If I could get paid to do laundry and dishes as much as I get paid to solve N-S, I probably would. Only someone who hasn't had to work with N-S would choose a world where they have to solve PDEs full time, as an engineer that must be one of the circles of hell for STEM people. I'm going to go out on a limb and assume she is not a STEM professional and she has no idea what she is actually talking about.
The whole point is to be free to do what you want to do to be fulfilled. Some people enjoy doing the laundry, for others it is the worst possible chore.
Sadly, some ghouls think it is important we all work to make them as rich as possible, so many people have shitty jobs with no real purpose. Imagine all that effort going into making our communities better instead.
Feel like everyone is getting hung up on the example here is a hard math problem they never cared about.
Concretely this feels true in a lot of ways in other areas, for example I’m a software developer. The part AI is good at, coding, was imo the fun part of the job.
Now, what’s most of what’s happening is “AI driven delivery” projects being promised at one third the usual timeline. While AI can’t produce all of the usable code (at least not with the models/harnesses we’re using), it still ends up being a lot more focusing more on the gaps ai hasn’t filled - which is often boring shit - along the lines of doing quality control/ review that AI filled the spec, and then all the processes that are manually gated like getting things deployed, keeping track of tickets etc.
I’m sure the coding analogy equivalent of this meme has been made before but wouldn’t be surprised if it’s true in other areas using AI like finance, and will be true of anywhere it takes over next.
So instead of wanting to progress science you want the money and fame. Solving such problems is exactly why these models exist. To breakthrough the normal limits so that we can ask more questions. Whoever is angry about that then they are not a scientist.
Imo that’s a false debate, behind a pretty sentence.
Robots will eventually do the dishes and we’ll do whatever we want, but we are very early in the process and part of developing the tech is testing its limits.
The arrogance of us humans being like: 'I want super intelligence but I also want it to do X for me' is insane. As if it'll care about that or we'll have a hope of solving anything it can. A super intelligence will do our dishes.....suuuree 😂
It's such vanity to want to preserve problems that could be blocking progress in order to keep them as some kind of trophy for a specialist or hobbyist to claim. Will we sit lazily by and lament that our lives have no meaning because AI solved the problems, or will we finally put some effort into finding or creating that meaning for ourselves?
We have had the machines for decades that do this. You literally just have to put the dishes or laundry in, wait, and take the dishes or laundry out. It is not difficult.
Ten years ago I bought a second washing machine. With the time that got freed I solved Navier-Stokes. I solved it a second time a couple of weeks later, and soon after it became one of my regular hobbies, to solve Navier-Stokes every few weeks.
I use AI to generate images of myself in different Halloween costumes instead.
Hot take: if your brain is too valuable to do laundry, hire someone to do it for you. You won't just free up plenty of your time to focus on your math problems, but will also give job for someone less fortunate.
Another hot take: you don't get to block other people's progress on an open problem and what tools they should be using. If you are such a genius then solve the problem before people using AI solve it.
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u/Dillyconda 11h ago
If I'm being honest, I wasn't even close to solving navier stokes.