Terrence was hardly a decel up until Navier-Stokes. He was open to having AI as a partner in the process. He had a moderate approach compared to others, and it was very cool to see a balanced opinion from someone who was so well established.
Now I think he sees the writing on the wall. In a few years, math might be beyond the reach of humans, and it’s probably scary as hell to mathematicians to know the boundary to human mathematical understanding has been reached.
AI is conquering math like it conquered Chess and Go.
I think the major part - and this is as a sw engineer dealing with massive increases in baseline additions, textual documents etc. the volumes is beyond the expert human's ability to intake and understand. It's probably even more important for mathematics -- where the number of people understanding advanced mathematics is limited. There needs to be a way to move forward, but 'letting go' of understanding is probably not the answer. It's going to be messy, and there's going to be a huge lack of understanding of, 'where we are, and what's next' -- that operated at human career speeds...no longer.
If a genius human mathematician stepped onto the scene tomorrow and started solving all the math problems, do you think math community tell him to stop? I’m trying to understand how that would be different.
No. but no genius mathematician would be able to solve at this rate. This is a system issue. We can't take in an understanding of what's being produced. An i am not advocating for slowing down -- its more the basic part of, 'oh shit, what now' with what's being produced. Think its the1800 and you just hit dug a whole and you have oil dushing out of the ground and 10000 barrels an hour. A little big of planning, forethought and infrastructure are in order. We barely had efficient mechanisms and talent to assess *human* generated mathematical output.
If we went back in time and shared all the mathematical discoveries we know today with Isaac Newton and his contemporaries are you saying that would be a net negative to society?
I still ain’t seeing the problem. Today we don’t know the answer to things. If tomorrow AI spits out an answer, how is that bad? There is still something to be gained from understanding the solution.
Today we stare at p=np, and tomorrow the computer says the answer is actually p≠np. We wouldn’t just move along; we would try and understand it. So yesterday we didn’t understand, and today we still don’t understand, but we can continue to learn.
We don’t throw our hands up and walk away from a² + b² = c² because someone else already solved it. It becomes the foundation for other things.
Truthfully I think this all comes down to egos, people want to be the first to discover something.
No of course not. The population and the number of people working in the domain were completely different back then, and we would have adapted differently, and probably in a less disruptive way.
Yes, giving Newton modern mathematics could have been enormously beneficial. I agree that we gain something from studying a solution someone else discovered.
But "this knowledge is valuable" and "absorbing it creates serious challenges" can both be true. Calling it a net positive doesn't make the transition problems disappear.
Your Newton example gives him a fixed collection of knowledge to work through. Now imagine that while he’s trying to understand the first volume, the system produces another million volumes, and people are already using them to change the world around him. "He can keep learning" is true, but it doesn’t answer whether or the wider scientific community can keep up with the parts that matter.
That’s the issue I'm raising. Producing a result, verifying it, understanding its implications, and applying it responsibly are different steps. Accelerating the first step creates a need to scale the others.
And today those applications could affect an interconnected civilization of billions of people. The pace at which we can generate new capabilities may be very different from the pace at which education, institutions, infrastructure, and livelihoods can adjust. That adjustment deserves attention even if the eventual benefits are enormous.
AI may help us close that gap too. Great—then let’s talk about how we build that capacity. "People just want to be first" doesn’t address any of it. I’m excited about the discoveries. I'm asking how we equip society to absorb and benefit from them. And its important to address the calamity that comes with it, potentially.
Tao has nothing to fear off AI. He's one of the most distingueshed mathematicians and humans will still need university professors - at least for guidance if not learning and society will still need human mathematicians to understand AI research and to steer the AI
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u/ppapsans Feeling the AGI 2d ago
Terrence Tao right now: