While his concerns expressed here aren't new, it looks like the recent cases of scientific misconduct were enough to push for urgency:
> But in the immediate term, the most pressing issue is for the entire mathematical community to unite around our core values and objectives, and reject irresponsible and unsustainable usages of AI technology that only serve to advance nominal goals rather than the true underlying goals of the field.
I see this clearly at kids birthday parties whenever there is a piñata. Adults hate them. All they see is the goal and the incredibly inefficient path the kids are taking towards it.
But the kids love it, they don’t care when they miss, they are just enjoying hitting something with a stick. And every miss heightens the excitement for the eventual lolly scramble.
I can’t tell if you’re implying that those with ADHD are more likely or less likely to think and act in a childlike way. Or whether doing so or not is what causes the over representation in high level positions.
Could you please elaborate?
My understanding is that ADHD would make you more likely to behave in childlike ways as an adult, but not that that would necessarily lead to holding leadership positions.
What?!?!? Piñatas are awesome! And as people who emigrated from California it’s usually a fun novelty for the local Dutchies to see (though I see them in local stores now too!)
I remember reading once about how Astrid Lindgren's children's books were supreme exactly because she - contrary to many others - remembers what it is like to be a child. Not just what you did or thought when you were a child - how it felt. The endless curiosity and appreciation for what in an adult's eyes is trivial is really a special thing I hope most people carry throughout their lives. On the other hand, children also understand more than one would normally think, essentially a Moravec's paradox but in relation to adults.
Kids are so much smarter and more capable than adults give them credit for, and it is stunting society as a whole
I think infantilisation is a huge part of the reason we're where we are today - kids 100 years ago were working harder jobs than most adults today (not implying child slave labour is a good thing, just making a point)
Kids today, though, are given exactly 0 responsibility and treated like babies the whole way through their prime learning years
I'm not sure whether to interpret this as a statement about what we currently over/under-estimate, or as command that we should try what feels like over/under-estimation in order to counter our own biases.
I like Lemony Snicket's approach: he gives (obviously) wrong, but technically correct, definitions for hard words. These definitions are usually hyper-specific, or satirical. Children, who are still very familiar with learning vocabulary from context, can find this much more amusing than adults who have given up on learning new words except via dictionaries.
> The word “briskly” here means “quickly, so as to get the Baudelaire children to leave the house.”
> “Wipi!” Sunny shrieked, which meant “I’d much prefer gardening to sitting around watching my siblings struggle through law books.”
I like some of her books, but I am quite annoyed with kids most of the time coming from poor families with missing father/mother, it's like she couldn't write a book without some tragedy, of course the most famous Emil of Lönneberga and The Six Bullerby Children are from normal families (there is probably reason why these are the most famous and beloved), but already Pippi Longstocking is pretty F-ed up and don't get me started on The Brothers Lionheart, which is glorifying suicide and should be really banned for kids under 15, certainly not appropriate for 9yo, though I read it to my younger kid with appropriate commentary.
Remember that Astrid Lindgren was born in 1907, got pregnant at 18 and had to give up her son to a foster home for the first few years. She grew up in a completely different world, and it's no coincidence that a lot of her stories are basically about consoling traumatized children.
Not directly related, but infant mortality as probably ~10x current back in 1925. That would--from another direction--also affect what people considered to be the normal amount of trauma in parent/child relationships.
I think Tao correctly sees the problem with AI. It’s not that it is ineffective or has weaknesses. It’s that it’s not human.
Like, it ought to be enough to say that the problem with AI is that it’s not human. Unfortunately, we live in a world where many (most?) people have willingly put away the childish things, so as to achieve some goal.
The problem is that the point of life is to explore and have fun and have human to human experiences. I think math is probably fun because you’re working on hard problems with your collaborators.
It should be obvious to everyone, as it is to children, that the point of life isn’t the goal, the point is the experience one has of living. They say that when you die the only thing you lose is the current moment. The problem with AI is that it doesn’t have a current moment to live in or to lose, it’s an inanimate thing. So, it should be obvious to everyone that the problem with the AI is that it’s not human. Alas.
I think everyone wants the experience of living, but it's not a great one without money, and money commonly requires full-time work until financial freedom. But that point usually comes at 65.
So it's not that only children appreciate life, it's just that adults have to deal with that whole money problem, while children don't.
I take a 8 hour work day over being subjected to more or less random weirdness from "adults" every day. IOW, not everyone has this rose-tinted view of their childhood. I still remember adults saying "you will once look back at your childhood and miss the times". Turns out that was totally and utterly wrong. I even have bad dreams about my school/childhood time every few months. I am sooooo glad that time of being subjected to the will of others is over.
To be human is like being the training so much more than the execution. Like the parallel post's game where the speed of light is 5km/h, we always try to but never reach true "perfection" (setting aside the discourse what that even would be). Some overfit, some stop short of being good...
I agree that AI isn't human, but why does that necessarily mean it's a problem? The analogy I use is watching an octopus juggle - just because it's better than a human can ever be, definitionally, doesn't mean it's a problem or replacing people.
I think the impulse to use AI to replace human effort in cases where it's not drudgery, like art, math, etc is the issue, more than the fact that AI isn't human. Let AI do AI things, and humans do human things. I honestly hope that when everything shakes out we have a lot more room in the world for people doing things that are uniquely human, or amazing new collaborations that let humans do things they've never been able to do before.
To do the first one perhaps, although how many have really explored locally in full. To have fun is all dependent on your view on life and have human to human experiences can be had any time you step outside the door. Just talk to people and be friendly.
This reminds me of a video I saw from Alan Watts [1] where he talks about how from childhood it is hammered into our minds that we must work we must do this or do that or we will be punished. And he talks about how you can choose to change your perspective or mindset and see work as a form of play, where you live in the moment.
This is probably harder to do than to say, but this video resonated with me because your mindset is something you do have control over, and choosing not to get stressed about work, and choosing not to take things "seriously" and choosing not to do something for the outcome but just for performing the act, just like you would play music (an example he gave) or to see it as a game is something you can do.
And, as with many things, as soon as you stop forcing yourself past the point of ease and fluency, you somehow both enjoy it more and also are more effective.
You do have control over it, but the external pressure to be “normal” is enormous and insurmountable for a majority of people. There’d be no such thing as “normal” otherwise.
I look at my cohort who I schooled with, and they are all so terrifyingly sober and adult, and take themselves so very seriously. They toil, they spin, they die.
Me… I don’t really know what happened. As a child, the more I was told to be normal, the more I dug my heels in, not out of contrarianism but out of a still indefatigable conviction that all of these people were wrong.
And the proof lies in the pudding. I am in my 40s, still a child, still stop to explore incessantly, still enjoy poking things with a stick, still finding joy, still being told to just for the love of god be normal, when will you get a proper job, settle down and become a banker or a lawyer or a doctor, and all that jazz.
Maybe it’s just the (until recently undiagnosed) ADHD talking - maybe I have been graced with a surfeit of good luck - but I’m pretty content with how being a cast iron weirdo panned out.
On the remembrance of childhood, much of it is clear to me - and now that I have a toddler of my own, I so often find her doing X or Y and going “good god, I remember being that kid”. Her other doesn’t remember her childhood at all, and struggles to relate - whereas I’ll gleefully fill my pockets with sand and run around hooting Yankee Doodle at full blast. It’s fun. People don’t have enough fun.
> But modern AI tools, when directed without such expert supervision, can now be aimed all too easily at the ostensible goals of the field, without any incentive to take the slow, whimsical path.
IMHO, that's the whole point of AI: automate the fun, to leave people with more drudgery. Worker! Spend less (ideally no) time doing creative things like coding, spend your time instead doing code review!
classic, now I can have AIs make my games for me while I still have to cook and wash the dishes! Maybe AI can soon start playing the games for me, can't wait.
"C'est le temps que tu as perdu pour ta rose qui fait ta rose si importante" - "It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important"
In Firefox, all text outside the headline post, including the name and username that begin the headline post, appears to be in some kind of shrunken state which ruins its appearance. Zooming in solves the problem and causes the letters to appear correct rather than grotesquely malformed.
I don't know how the site was allowed into production like this.
I am not a Tao hater but also not a fanboy but this is spot on! He is right, I don't love AI in many states and feel it is used for pointless task, however the beauty of that helping hand supporting you do tasks that you have no idea how to do is the magic in it. As a child we all asked questions regularly of what if we did this instead of this, why do we do things this way, why not try something else. Work and adult life gets us stuck in a rut, so anything that gets us out of a rut is welcome.
All well and good. I agree with the sentiment, but why are we asking for permission? Does this not strongly demonstrate the inherent corruption of institutions?
He also just published this one: https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/07/finite-time-blowup...
While his concerns expressed here aren't new, it looks like the recent cases of scientific misconduct were enough to push for urgency:
> But in the immediate term, the most pressing issue is for the entire mathematical community to unite around our core values and objectives, and reject irresponsible and unsustainable usages of AI technology that only serve to advance nominal goals rather than the true underlying goals of the field.
I see this clearly at kids birthday parties whenever there is a piñata. Adults hate them. All they see is the goal and the incredibly inefficient path the kids are taking towards it. But the kids love it, they don’t care when they miss, they are just enjoying hitting something with a stick. And every miss heightens the excitement for the eventual lolly scramble.
It never occurred to me to consider efficiency in piñata, but I dislike them because it's making a game out of violence.
As a child I did not see it as violent
The British rock-band Traffic said it in their "Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys" : "... we were children once, playing with toys".
I wonder if it's true that people don't remember. People maybe remember but don't want to talk about it. It is such a cognitive dissonance.
Everyone remembers, but ADHD is overrepresented in the high-level positions of leadership.
I can’t tell if you’re implying that those with ADHD are more likely or less likely to think and act in a childlike way. Or whether doing so or not is what causes the over representation in high level positions.
Could you please elaborate?
My understanding is that ADHD would make you more likely to behave in childlike ways as an adult, but not that that would necessarily lead to holding leadership positions.
I’m genuinely very interested in your thoughts.
What?!?!? Piñatas are awesome! And as people who emigrated from California it’s usually a fun novelty for the local Dutchies to see (though I see them in local stores now too!)
I remember reading once about how Astrid Lindgren's children's books were supreme exactly because she - contrary to many others - remembers what it is like to be a child. Not just what you did or thought when you were a child - how it felt. The endless curiosity and appreciation for what in an adult's eyes is trivial is really a special thing I hope most people carry throughout their lives. On the other hand, children also understand more than one would normally think, essentially a Moravec's paradox but in relation to adults.
"Children heal the soul" - Dostoevsky
Overestimate their understanding, underestimate their vocabulary.
Kids are so much smarter and more capable than adults give them credit for, and it is stunting society as a whole
I think infantilisation is a huge part of the reason we're where we are today - kids 100 years ago were working harder jobs than most adults today (not implying child slave labour is a good thing, just making a point)
Kids today, though, are given exactly 0 responsibility and treated like babies the whole way through their prime learning years
I feel so sorry for the next generation
I'm not sure whether to interpret this as a statement about what we currently over/under-estimate, or as command that we should try what feels like over/under-estimation in order to counter our own biases.
I like Lemony Snicket's approach: he gives (obviously) wrong, but technically correct, definitions for hard words. These definitions are usually hyper-specific, or satirical. Children, who are still very familiar with learning vocabulary from context, can find this much more amusing than adults who have given up on learning new words except via dictionaries.
> The word “briskly” here means “quickly, so as to get the Baudelaire children to leave the house.”
> “Wipi!” Sunny shrieked, which meant “I’d much prefer gardening to sitting around watching my siblings struggle through law books.”
I like some of her books, but I am quite annoyed with kids most of the time coming from poor families with missing father/mother, it's like she couldn't write a book without some tragedy, of course the most famous Emil of Lönneberga and The Six Bullerby Children are from normal families (there is probably reason why these are the most famous and beloved), but already Pippi Longstocking is pretty F-ed up and don't get me started on The Brothers Lionheart, which is glorifying suicide and should be really banned for kids under 15, certainly not appropriate for 9yo, though I read it to my younger kid with appropriate commentary.
Remember that Astrid Lindgren was born in 1907, got pregnant at 18 and had to give up her son to a foster home for the first few years. She grew up in a completely different world, and it's no coincidence that a lot of her stories are basically about consoling traumatized children.
Not directly related, but infant mortality as probably ~10x current back in 1925. That would--from another direction--also affect what people considered to be the normal amount of trauma in parent/child relationships.
[0] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.IMRT.IN?location...
I think Tao correctly sees the problem with AI. It’s not that it is ineffective or has weaknesses. It’s that it’s not human.
Like, it ought to be enough to say that the problem with AI is that it’s not human. Unfortunately, we live in a world where many (most?) people have willingly put away the childish things, so as to achieve some goal.
The problem is that the point of life is to explore and have fun and have human to human experiences. I think math is probably fun because you’re working on hard problems with your collaborators.
It should be obvious to everyone, as it is to children, that the point of life isn’t the goal, the point is the experience one has of living. They say that when you die the only thing you lose is the current moment. The problem with AI is that it doesn’t have a current moment to live in or to lose, it’s an inanimate thing. So, it should be obvious to everyone that the problem with the AI is that it’s not human. Alas.
I think everyone wants the experience of living, but it's not a great one without money, and money commonly requires full-time work until financial freedom. But that point usually comes at 65.
So it's not that only children appreciate life, it's just that adults have to deal with that whole money problem, while children don't.
I take a 8 hour work day over being subjected to more or less random weirdness from "adults" every day. IOW, not everyone has this rose-tinted view of their childhood. I still remember adults saying "you will once look back at your childhood and miss the times". Turns out that was totally and utterly wrong. I even have bad dreams about my school/childhood time every few months. I am sooooo glad that time of being subjected to the will of others is over.
To be human is like being the training so much more than the execution. Like the parallel post's game where the speed of light is 5km/h, we always try to but never reach true "perfection" (setting aside the discourse what that even would be). Some overfit, some stop short of being good...
I agree that AI isn't human, but why does that necessarily mean it's a problem? The analogy I use is watching an octopus juggle - just because it's better than a human can ever be, definitionally, doesn't mean it's a problem or replacing people.
I think the impulse to use AI to replace human effort in cases where it's not drudgery, like art, math, etc is the issue, more than the fact that AI isn't human. Let AI do AI things, and humans do human things. I honestly hope that when everything shakes out we have a lot more room in the world for people doing things that are uniquely human, or amazing new collaborations that let humans do things they've never been able to do before.
> the point of life is to explore and have fun and have human to human experiences
To do all those things, I need money.
To do the first one perhaps, although how many have really explored locally in full. To have fun is all dependent on your view on life and have human to human experiences can be had any time you step outside the door. Just talk to people and be friendly.
This reminds me of a video I saw from Alan Watts [1] where he talks about how from childhood it is hammered into our minds that we must work we must do this or do that or we will be punished. And he talks about how you can choose to change your perspective or mindset and see work as a form of play, where you live in the moment.
This is probably harder to do than to say, but this video resonated with me because your mindset is something you do have control over, and choosing not to get stressed about work, and choosing not to take things "seriously" and choosing not to do something for the outcome but just for performing the act, just like you would play music (an example he gave) or to see it as a game is something you can do.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9BXvBJ2dWo
That's a nice story and all but it isn't a reality for most people. For most people on this planet it's work or starve on the street.
And, as with many things, as soon as you stop forcing yourself past the point of ease and fluency, you somehow both enjoy it more and also are more effective.
Really a nice perspective. Carry childhood with you as an adult.
You do have control over it, but the external pressure to be “normal” is enormous and insurmountable for a majority of people. There’d be no such thing as “normal” otherwise.
I look at my cohort who I schooled with, and they are all so terrifyingly sober and adult, and take themselves so very seriously. They toil, they spin, they die.
Me… I don’t really know what happened. As a child, the more I was told to be normal, the more I dug my heels in, not out of contrarianism but out of a still indefatigable conviction that all of these people were wrong.
And the proof lies in the pudding. I am in my 40s, still a child, still stop to explore incessantly, still enjoy poking things with a stick, still finding joy, still being told to just for the love of god be normal, when will you get a proper job, settle down and become a banker or a lawyer or a doctor, and all that jazz.
Maybe it’s just the (until recently undiagnosed) ADHD talking - maybe I have been graced with a surfeit of good luck - but I’m pretty content with how being a cast iron weirdo panned out.
On the remembrance of childhood, much of it is clear to me - and now that I have a toddler of my own, I so often find her doing X or Y and going “good god, I remember being that kid”. Her other doesn’t remember her childhood at all, and struggles to relate - whereas I’ll gleefully fill my pockets with sand and run around hooting Yankee Doodle at full blast. It’s fun. People don’t have enough fun.
> But modern AI tools, when directed without such expert supervision, can now be aimed all too easily at the ostensible goals of the field, without any incentive to take the slow, whimsical path.
IMHO, that's the whole point of AI: automate the fun, to leave people with more drudgery. Worker! Spend less (ideally no) time doing creative things like coding, spend your time instead doing code review!
classic, now I can have AIs make my games for me while I still have to cook and wash the dishes! Maybe AI can soon start playing the games for me, can't wait.
Relevant SMBC comic: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/imagination
> Father: "Ugh, how do kids enjoy this garbage?" [...]
"C'est le temps que tu as perdu pour ta rose qui fait ta rose si importante" - "It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important"
the post has unreadable font in Vivaldi
Might be a Vivaldi problem. It has "Computer Modern Sans" in Firefox which seems to be perfectly legible
I found Computer Modern Sans quite unpleasant to read. Disabling it and reading Mastodon Sans Serif was much more pleasant
In Firefox, all text outside the headline post, including the name and username that begin the headline post, appears to be in some kind of shrunken state which ruins its appearance. Zooming in solves the problem and causes the letters to appear correct rather than grotesquely malformed.
I don't know how the site was allowed into production like this.
I am not a Tao hater but also not a fanboy but this is spot on! He is right, I don't love AI in many states and feel it is used for pointless task, however the beauty of that helping hand supporting you do tasks that you have no idea how to do is the magic in it. As a child we all asked questions regularly of what if we did this instead of this, why do we do things this way, why not try something else. Work and adult life gets us stuck in a rut, so anything that gets us out of a rut is welcome.
All well and good. I agree with the sentiment, but why are we asking for permission? Does this not strongly demonstrate the inherent corruption of institutions?