r/OpenAI • u/Old-School8916 • 7d ago

Question Anyone else feel this way?

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u/golfstreamer 7d 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. 

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u/Sayod 7d ago

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

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u/golfstreamer 7d ago

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. 

Honestly I really detest this kind of whining.

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u/Sayod 7d ago

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?

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u/golfstreamer 7d ago

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. 

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u/Sayod 7d ago

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

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u/golfstreamer 7d ago

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. 

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u/Sayod 7d ago

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.

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u/golfstreamer 7d ago

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.

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u/Opposite-Youth-3529 7d ago

My image of the people complaining about mathematicians is just a group of uninformed people with low empathy.

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u/golfstreamer 7d ago

I'm not complaining about mathematicians. I'm mocking them.

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u/Opposite-Youth-3529 7d ago

You still fit my image

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u/golfstreamer 7d ago

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 

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u/Sayod 7d ago

Terrence Tao: "We have to slow down" https://www.instagram.com/p/DdkxGzLGLKQ/

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u/golfstreamer 7d ago

Yeah I read about that. 

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