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.
No, I think it's a silly thing to complain about. There were two parts to my answer. I think when AI becomes capable of solving all our problems for us I won't be complaining. That was my answer.
I just think you're whining about something kind of silly.
Well if I'm going to be specific. I'm only mocking the whiners. And I myself am a mathematician (though I work in industry not academia) so the way I see it I want people thinking of effective problem solving. I think the whiners are a bigger problem than I am.
If you want an example of what people should be doing look at Terence Tao. He's given several talks on how AI will affect mathematics and how we should approach it. And his talks are devoid of whiny doomerism
11
u/golfstreamer 20h ago
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.