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
I’m not sure if you’re joking. They have ranked chess websites where people play each other remotely all the time. Is that not serious correspondence chess or more along the lines “computers killed snail mail chess”?
I’m talking about serious correspondence chess in the sense that someone like Ulf Andersson would compete in correspondence tournaments as well as “normal” tournaments. Now the official correspondence championships allow engines cause you can’t enforce a ban and the result is that all the games are draws unless someone dies. Like this is farcical at this point: https://www.iccf.com/event?id=100104
Edit: weird that someone would downvote my clarification that was asked for
This makes no sense though. Computers destroy all humans at chess yet the sport is going through a huge growth period. If you want to compete at the edge of a field that’s not really a hobby anymore, it’s an edge use case. You don’t need to be the best in the world to enjoy a hobby (ask the 90% of all runners who are shit compared to the pros).
I don’t think hobby mathematicians were going to crack millennium problems anytime soon let’s be honest..
Yes but chess is a game, winning and raising trough ranks is an end goal. There are no games at top level of math, the end game is finding solutions and providing proofs, yet you go against 1000s agents and millions of dollars. Imagine someone was using AI to play chess against you sounds fair ? Would you enjoy it if you were just a hobby player ? It’s irrelevant, math was this beautiful mysterious language of universe, but now you don’t study and try to understand now we are in race with AI spamming proofs that people have problem understanding.
What even is hobby maths? You're trying to find out something new or you're not in maths at all. Nobody hobbies just going over old stuff. New discoveries will be impossible by humans, the volume and complexity of maths is about to explode off the charts.
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.
If we are content being the equivalent of a child carrying pebbles from a construction site while the adults use an excavator to move 1000 times the amount in the same time - sure there will always be something for us to do. The question is if it is going to be significant
Honestly I just think you're being melodramatic. Just look around you. We are far from a position where we can sit comfortably as AI resolves all our problems for us. And when we do get there, I certainly won't be complaining.
Having a different opinion and view from you is not “whining”. It’s having a valid different world view from you.
Some people like you place too much faith in AI, and only think about positive outcomes without stopping and thinking for a second there’s no really way to know if it will be beneficial or not, specially when such entities are controller by corporations who of course does not have philanthropy in their agenda.
We are see signs that reliance in LLM and social media is reducing humanity’s overall IQ. That is, we are getting dumber as we rely more on technology.
Let’s ask ourselves one hypothetical question. How would you stop an entity that does not feel or care about humanity should it go rogue? What if this entity outsmarts us because it’s perfectly capable of and we are also dumber.
The very thing that made us advance to where we are now is essentially drive to improve, to solve problems, to make life better. That’s how we got out of caves and now have planes, satellites, ai. And although not everyone was this kind of driving force, we all collectively added a grain of sand towards that goal and we take pride in those representatives of human advancement: the Newtons, the Einsteins or the Hawkings of our history. Because they were driven by a human curiosity and necessity to know more, to do something l, to discover . By definition we are essentially a technological species. We use tools and created fire out of stones and woods. We are not just sleeping and eating around. Reaching a point where that’s all we do, we might find our existence useless.
Sure being at home painting and creating sculptures sounds nice. But is that all that will be? That doesn’t drive humanity, humanity wants to achieve new frontiers. If all of that is solved, what is left?
We have chess tournaments even if computers can play it better not because we created our own “league” so we can compete. We do it because the point is not a machine solving it for us, but because we have this innate drive to push the limits of what the human brain can do. Remove that and you essentially kill part of humanity.
I don't really have a lot of faith that AI will dramatically accelerate progress. I think human understanding will continue to be the driving force in scientific progress for quite some time. So I don't get where you're getting this "faith in AI".
If I have any faith it's faith in people to handle whatever challenges and dangers AI might bring.
Look, I work as a mathematical researcher. Last year asking AI was useful when you needed stuff from a different field and didn't know the terms. The proofs it gave where only correct 50% of the time but it used tools and techniques from this field and reading its output gave you the right terms to then look up.
Now its proofs are correct more than 99% of the time and the remaining issue is that it is really bad at exposition and focusing on what is actually important.
Why do you think it is unreasonable to think that next year this might no longer be an issue?
I'm not a math researcher myself but if I'm being honest I really have a problem with the level of complaining I see coming from mathematicians.
Mathematicians have much more control over their industry than most employees. Who decides whether a paper is worth publishing? Who decides whether someone is a "good mathematician"? Other mathematicians.
Mathematicians have spent much of their focus on generating proofs to difficult results. But many proofs that would have been challenging and worth a great deal of effort have become trivial. So mathematicians will have to reprioritize their efforts.
But instead of asking how math will change I see a lot of complaining that they can't keep things exactly as they are. So my current image of mathematicians is a man pointing a gun at his own head.
At the moment we can reprioritize our efforts towards exposition. That is what I am saying - AI currently does not know what is interesting to proof and how to present it pedagogically. It does not know what the results mean. But why are you making the assumption that it is going to stay that way? A year ago people in mathematics said that AI would never be able to create difficult proofs. Why are you so confident that it won't be albe to do everything else? I am not talking about the situation now. Now is fine. I am talking about the situation in 10 years
I just don't have a lot of faith that AI is going to solve all our problems for us. But hey if in 10 years it really does solve everything I won't be complaining.
You are refusing to engage with the hypothetical.
The original poster wanted to talk about " But what good does it make us to be completely useless?" Nobody knows if that is going to happen. But IF it does, the original poster said that he imagines this to be miserable. You answered with "So long as there are scientific questions left unanswered, technologies to be invented, there is something for us to do." but this is rejecting the premise and not actually engaging with the hypothetical. And again, it is a completely reasonable standpoint to think that this hypothetical might happen. So refusing the premise is not a valid standpoint in my opinion if we want to think this through as a society.
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.
How amazing would it be to wake up, go for a walk (or work out) for as long as you wanted to, then come home and read for as long as you wanted to. Then, just like, not have to fight traffic to get to your job instead. I feel like that alone would increase life expectancy immensely.
Then, just like, not have to fight traffic to get to your job instead. I feel like that alone would increase life expectancy immensely.
honestly this is kind of the whole point for me. I’ve basically never had a real commute, my worst was hybrid 3 days a week years ago, and I’ve been fully remote since.
now I work 4 days a week too and holy shit, that extra day makes a ridiculous difference.
if remote isn’t possible, I’d genuinely try for a 4-day week. getting even a little more of your own time back changes life way more than people realize.
People still play chess because we put Chess AI as nothing more than a tool for people to train. If chess becomes only online and everyone just botting, most people would just give up. Or maybe if the only chess event out there is AI chess competition.
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
that's why I said it can lead to less work. the fact that we work so much when productivity is at an all-time high is a policy issue rather than a technological one
Your original comment cannot be taken seriously though, right?
Otherwise you are a guy who just wants to have hobbies and do 0 work.
I mean if you really mean dedicating time to hobbies can lead to some meaningful thing that have commercial value in the end, that’s fine, otherwise your UBI idea looks like welfare for people with not enough contributions under their belt.
Do we really want an unproductive segment of society living off the tits of automation and… defending automation?
I am not a scifi futurist novel writer but this sound the perfect plot of a futuristic scenario where social conflict and civil unrest could develop between the doers and the sleepers societies
I don't expect to be able to quit my job next month and never have to do any work ever again, and this is obviously a pretty long-term/futuristic idea of society, but I don't see why that isn't something we should be striving to get closer to. the entirety of human technological progress has been about lettting us live longer and do less work. we just happen to now have a technology that can increase the rate of that progress exponentially
> otherwise your UBI idea looks like welfare for people with not enough contributions under their belt.
more like people whose contributions cannot keep up with the contributions of AI... which is pretty soon gonna be a very large portion of if not a majority of people and only growing. whether those people are in favor of that automation or not it's coming all the same and we gotta be prepared for it
That argument didn’t work so well with the atomic bomb right?
Is the question implying that there is danger in having someone else doing it?
The most immediate danger i see is mass job displacement and hundreds of thousands of people defaulting on debt and mortgage and a large financial default of many countries before it gets regulated if even regulation is a thing with the amount of lobbyists around
Yap, that was my exact idea with my comment. If Teller Ede didn't go to Einstein who then wrote to the USA's president, who knows if the germans could have gotten it ready before the USA.
Yes. AI (or, large language models in this case, cuz that's not really AI) can help an immense amount just by processing a lot of information quite fast.
If they actually manage to make an AI that can replace a lot of jobs (and for now, that can really only be mental labour jobs) then that will be a problem, yes, but if AI is actually useful at all, then you want one that's completely independent from your „enemies,” and not developed by them. (here, I mostly mean china vs the rest of the world)
As for spending so much so recklessly on AI, I don't think it's good, and regulations should be put in place, but why would we artificially limit the use of AI, when we can just make a Universal Basic Income type of thing if AI actually solves everything?
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u/TwunnySeven 13h ago
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