>And now that AI has solved all our problems, we can devote ourselves to more important work: going into quantitative finance, vibecoding sports-betting apps, consuming AI-generated TikTok shorts, and arguing with political bots on Twitter.
Grim but this is exactly where society is heading.
There are no shortage of artistic pursuits, subcultures, pick-up leagues, and more that you're free to engage with. Get off the beaten path and you'll find humans enjoying life in a wide variety of ways that are uncorrupted by AI.
Are you by any chance born to rich parents in a western country?
Because most people in the world are working around the clock to supply food and shelter for their family. It's a bit unclear still how you are going to consolidate the two facts
We are referring to people in the context of "going into quantitative finance, vibecoding sports-betting apps, consuming AI-generated TikTok shorts, and arguing with political bots on Twitter.".
Those are hardly the "most people in the world are working around the clock to supply food and shelter for their family"
It's a bit unclear still how you are going to consolidate the two facts.
I've been looking for a baseball or softball league for my kid. He doesn't want to play school ball, doesn't play travel ball, but loves the game. It's impossible to find baseball or softball leagues after the age of 12 that are not attached to a school or travel. Volleyball is about the only thing that exists.
Except that engagement is not free. All of these things require money, and they require time that isn't already set towards the goal of making money to survive. And one of the selling points of AI is explicitly the redundancy of numerous workers, including ones parallel to myself.
For many things this is true nowadays. Where I live walking in nature or swimming in the ocean is still free. In Dubai nature as in a green park might raise an entry fee.
I get that someone wanted to let steam off but this just sounds like they don't have any arguments so they went for the good old "in the future, you won't have free will and social media companies force you to be online" fable. An addicting algorithm isn't the same thing as fentanyl, you can uninstall the app in 5 seconds and getting it back with signing in takes atleast two minutes, enough to reconsider whether you actually want to spend time on it.
The toxicity of apps like Tiktok comes from muscle memory, not the quality of the content. Your thumb knows where the app icon is and opening the app happens quicker than you can think (literally). So offloading or uninstalling breaks this very effectively. The only thing that would still keep you on the platform is social connections. If somebody gets upset over you uninstalling Instagram or Snapchat, they aren't a good friend.
I don't think this goes far enough -- its a best case scenario.
There is no Utopia for mankind at the end of an AGI that is the labor force because people need a purpose; without that, degenerate behaviours and vice are easy to fall into and the spiral is not big. The state of the human race - particularly the internet-native generations - is a testament to that.
The only way the AGI Utopia works is with a massive reduction in the human population with a Spartan/Helot relationship between those remaining.
Let's face it, the people who want AGI so badly aren't the wam cuddly people who want to feed the poor, house the homeless, and cure the sick. Their motives here are not pure...
I think the author is hiding the ball a bit. The problem is that, for a long time, humans have attributed meaning, value, and social status to great cognitive insights. Taking physics as an example, it has almost always been the theorists who develop new ideas, not the experimentalists that test and validate them, who have won praise and acclaim. The name Arthur Eddington doesn’t have the same cachet as that of Albert Einstein. But now that the creation of those insights can be automated, there is a great wrenching as esteem shifts away from the former.
Well, maybe it’s a good thing that we are seeing this shift. Maybe it is good and right that we begin valuing your ability to exist in the real world, rather than play math puzzles on a sheet of paper. Because, while the AI labs are receiving a lot of attention and excitement now, that’s a short run phenomenon. Ultimately, people aren’t impressed for long by a machine doing something novel. Once it’s up and running, it fades into the background just like the combustion engine, or the dishwasher, or electric lighting.
> The problem is that, for a long time, humans have attributed meaning, value, and social status to great cognitive insights.
Not really, they haven't. It's only when those insights can be communicated in such a way to other people that those other people can find utility (which could be enabling them to derive more insights that yet other people find utility in recursively) in the insights that they do so, and this is a huge difference. This is why AI is such a total problem to this mentality, because it disrupts not only insight production but the mechanism that values insight production.
> Looking up at the stars in wonderment, or enjoying a complex puzzle game, or being inspired by an encouraging teacher, and dreaming that one day an unfeeling corporate robot[1] will burn a rainforest to compile a list of 700 highly obscure barely-readable facts that might be true that nobody can understand as part of a marketing gimmick to raise hype for an IPO[2].
But if I am going to critique it's main point it would be this part:
> in the pursuit of advancing humanity’s knowledge as quickly as possible, many academics will recoil in anger at the suggestion that it is worth spending any time making results understandable to humans. It is inefficient to explain or check a result when those resources can be spent generating another.
While obviously ridiculous, I think this does not go far enough. The problem isn't that people don't care and resources should not be spent to explain AI results to human minds, the problem is that AI will soon be better at explaining itself than humans. The puzzle then changes from can AI formally verify and explain a proof to: do human minds trust the proof. Do we believe that the proof is correct and not an elaborate AI hallucination using tricks that are beyond our understanding. In order to trust it a formal verification is not enough unless it is human understandable. In fact human understandability is the only thing that matters. That is something that AI can never do on its own.
It may not be the most prescient or innovative sci fi series, but I read The Three Body Problem a few years ago and it's really stuck with me. Specifically the description of how humanity reached an inflection point in math & physics research that almost immediately unlocked novel innovations in applied science ... which then made space exploration & settlement practical. Moreover, that the antagonist society in the series decided their absolute best bet at avoiding complete annihilation was to hamstring humankind's scientific research -- and that's it.
It feels like frontier models are starting to approach an asymptote where what you suggest could become reality, and we'll begin seeing not just AI research but AI-designed & led applications of that research into fundamental parts of our society & culture. For better and for worse.
>In order to trust it a formal verification is not enough unless it is human understandable.
The whole point of formal verification is to remove the necessity of understanding most of the work. We only need to trust the formalization of the problem statement, the proof verifier, and the formalization of the result. We already have proof verifiers that humans understand to a high level, and the formalizations of the problem statement and the result are much simpler than the full proof.
I'm confident that the Navier-Stokes equations can blow up because I'm confident that Lean works correctly, and I'm confident that the mathematicians verified the problem statement and result correctly. This is despite the actual proof not being human verified yet (as far as I know), and despite the "human-readable" version not actually corresponding to the formal proof. The formal method still worked.
Some mathematicians are not confident in the NS verification because it is non-trivial to tell if the Lean proof matches NS. I would argue this requires "human understability" to make this claim. The Lean proof is a very useful tool, but it does not replace human understanding.
I'm all for advancing human understanding, even if it might lag behind machine understanding, but there is a way to have machines prove they understand something we don't: ask them to build something functional that we can't. If your hypothetical future comes to pass, and we ask the machine to build a cancer-curing healing ray, and it works, I'd say that's its own win. Then we can spend however long it takes trying to understand how it works. It's depressing and disempowering in a way, but I think overall I'd be happy with that future.
I once visited a town in Spain over which an ancient Roman aqueduct runs, elevated above most of the buildings, even today. It carried an essential ingredient foundational to life in the area, but after the fall of the Empire and the deaths of the architects and engineers who could understand it, the aqueduct stood in the midst of people who could not have repaired it. Relying on mission-critical technology divorced from human understanding is exceptionally risky. Obviously, people have done it before and will happen again, but it makes me nervous.
> an unfeeling corporate robot[1] will burn a rainforest to compile a list of 700 highly obscure barely-readable facts that might be true that nobody can understand
He'd have more of a point if a huge number of humans weren't occupied doing exactly this, and much worse on top.
Understanding math isn't just about "having a good explanation ready".
People fundamentally misunderstand the nature of mathematics: it's not "flat" like most of common people's daily pursuits. It consists of building upwards, on top of previous concepts.
In other words, AI is like an oracle: it can tell you all kinds of stuff, but since you probably don't understand, you won't act properly.
Well, we can try tying it to ground truth. AI does the math for magnetic field containment? Test it. AI predicts a particle? Test it. AI says P=NP? Ok, factor this in polynomial time.
And if it fails, and AI goes, "I don't know what happened. I relied on these papers" then I guess one of those must be wrong.
I'm not saying it'd be easy, but I think AI can also find the pieces of the puzzle that broke a pyramid of "discoveries" culminating in a disproval,
And the only other option is to simply never understand as much. AI has the potential to understand things humans cannot. Not necessarily a strict superset.
Humans can deal in 5+-2 things at once. AI doesn't have to, and can cut through leaky abstractions.
If AI says a new invention will do X, and it doesn't, it'll say "you're absolutely right" and try again until it does the thing.
I don’t accept this framing. If tools allow us to pursue ever more deeply into the mystery of being, and get to both questions and answers we never thought we’d see, that’s a good thing. I think the genuinely curious should have no problem redoubling their “freed up time” into further exploration. The library Borges describes is infinite. I won’t mind getting to read a few books I wouldn’t have otherwise.
Not a huge fan of the sentiment in this article, and the very cynical way it was communicated, but the references to the library of babel reminded me of this fun site.
I sympathize with some feelings the author is trying to communicate, but the cynical and sarcastic style really detract from the authors points in my view.
I work in construction now. Commercial Millwork/cabinets as a project manager.
It is so much harder and more stressful than my php/jquery mini saas coding days.
Often at work I start thinking "why are we doing all this? Why does anyone want this fancy reception desk?? This desk is not worth the human aggravation that it's causing."
I genuinely start thinking we should go back to concrete eastern European communist type buildings just for the simplicity and efficiency. Why all this fancy stuff that causes every project engineer, superintendent, and subcontractor Engineering department to get grey hair.
But I guess it makes the economy grow. I don't know.
> dreaming that one day an unfeeling corporate robot[1] will burn a rainforest to compile a list of 700 highly obscure barely-readable facts that might be true that nobody can understand as part of a marketing gimmick to raise hype for an IPO
The climate effect argument against AI is so intellectually dishonest. It’s the same as saying that Tao is on the side of stopping the advancement of Cancer research.
I thought the people clowning him were dumb, but the people arguing for either side are really fighting on a mud pit.
Why Ai? Because its development was pretty much free and paid by the pension funds. The objective is supremacy and being the first entity and country to collect rent via Ai supremacy and block every other entity in their analysis; reality who knows what will happen..
It started with internet which was subsidized through military for sake of military supremacy and then it transformed to become a utility connecting everything and collecting information and it subsidized by the markets to collect rent from the world using this utility and now it is subsidized to replace labor around the world and collect rent from its use to discount labor.
> From what I know about the academic community (mostly from Twitter and LinkedIn, which I assume are representative), there seems to be near-unanimous agreement that the purpose of math and science research is to gather a large quantity of potentially true factoids in a repository that nobody will actually ever read, in a ritual called “advancing humanity’s[3] knowledge”. That these results are well-written, understandable, pleasant to read or look at, or even completely correct is a secondary concern — in fact, in the pursuit of advancing humanity’s knowledge as quickly as possible, many academics will recoil in anger at the suggestion that it is worth spending any time making results understandable to humans.
Am I the only who thinks this is rhetorical? Modern mathematics is so far removed from the base average knowledge (lets just assume high school instead of going to axioms) that the only people who understand most (if not all new) mathematical achievement are the mathematicians themselves, heck not even all mathematicians, it needs to be spread and developed from "hot spots"?
Your math results are not "well-written, understandable, pleasant to read or look at" unless you literally operate with two or three levels within the proof paper compared to the average person who probably starts at an order of magnitude levels higher.
To the average person, asking a mathematician to explain something is the same as asking the AI/LLM. Both are asking an oracle to dumb it down to their level of abstraction.
To the person who are not career mathematicians, both LLMs and mathematicians do the same thing, pump out garbled output that they themselves understand, and to mathematicians, the difference is one probably explains using axioms rather than theorems.
As a mere software engineer, I found that many human written papers in my field (DSP, ML) aren’t exactly well-written, easily understandable or pleasant to read either, and it’s been the case for at least 15 years. In the past, I would frequently spend an hour or two trying to read a SOTA paper full of convoluted prose and dense pages of equations, only to realise that the algorithm is incredibly simple if visualised properly or even just written down as pseudocode.
Now with LLMs the process is much shorter. They can walk me through the algorithm step by step, translate it to pseudocode, explain equations, and most importantly, I can ask them questions and get clarifications, without worrying about seeming ignorant or exhausting their patience. With a paper, you’re stuck with whatever was written (and often, researchers aren’t good teachers, or intentionally over complicate simple concepts).
> many human written papers in my field (DSP, ML) aren’t exactly well-written, easily understandable or pleasant to read
Yep, my eyes glaze over at the convoluted mathematical explanations for pathfinding in worldspace, but when I see the pseudocode in the appendix it make so much more sense.
> First, they came for the artists,
and I did not speak out, because I was not an artist.
// actually FIRST they came for the programmers. and many of us were ultimately ULTIMATELY pretty tickled to get such a massive productivity boost. this anti-AI sentiment as seen here and in Jon Stewart's rant that all AI is good for is optimizing shopping carts or something... it's so upsetting see good folks buying into this and not realizing how much benefit it will bring. If anything, I've seen how much amazing power it has now given programmers such as myself... I can do what would take me years in an afternoon.
// Btw, can we retire the "first they came for the..." template, it's a little tired.
Diffusion models were the first gen AI tech to plausibly be able to replace humans, no? I feel like image generation was ahead of text generation 2015-2022, and prior to 2015 the best "gen AI" was markov chains which I don't think is within the scope of what we're talking about.
I remember being blown away by BERT and all its variations (BART etc) after the Transformers paper. For topic modeling and other semantic understanding of text, that was bee's knees. But certainly not replacing any humans.
Unlikable text. Just a rant with the usual “corporations” socialism-slop. Terry Tao’s blog rapidly diminishing in quality. I didn’t think that the way machines would approach top mathematics is to transform top mathematicians into boring Redditors.
Just hit "random." It's always gibberish. The odds of getting something that isn't gibberish are astronomically low, like winning the lottery.
The actual library Borges describes has 25^1312000 books, the very vast majority of which are utter nonsense. (As the simulator makes clear.)
Yet with AI, we're getting an abundance of very credible -- and, as Tao himself notes, frequently correct -- mathematical proofs. In these new AI math results, the ratio of signal to noise is high, which makes our current situation the exact opposite of the library, which is pure noise where signal emerges only by random necessity.
So we have the Fields medal, awarded for making "progress" in math.
Now we are told explaining, understanding things, asking new questions is more important than proving things. So where is the math community medals/awards for this job?
All the nihilism in the AI space is so tiresome. We have a tool now that can accelerate the technological development of our species and actually reach for the stars! How exciting! All these ruminations and lamentations about what it means to be human are downright laughable to people on the front lines of war, living in abject poverty, etc. "Oh, to be so lucky!", I'm sure they'd say.
The luddites and doomers should do the world a favor and go establish a commune in rural Alaska, then they can be happy and the rest of us can get back to building and playing with amazing technology!
So, would most people, and this would mean that very little housing would be built, very little health care provided, and very little food grown or harvested.
It's a nice rant that I think will become more common until everyone burns out and one important realization dawns upon them: the corporations doing these things don't really care about your plight, suffering, etc. You can write thousands of books using this kind of tongue-in-cheek-but-really-angry language, and they'll just laugh it off. Felix Reisenberg will make a new post about something he's doing with Claude, Boris will make a tweet and everyone will rush to turn it into LLM-generated images so they can post on their LinkedIn for their bosses to measure their engagement KPIs, and we'll forget about the rants.
So if you are suggesting that life is now meaningless at status quo, it suggests that life will find new meaning....perhaps it will come in the form of a realisation that if corporations are in no ones interest, perhaps the better life is the one fighting against meaninglessness through our own redefinitions of noble pursuits...perhaps the most noble pursuit will become war against companies and executives in a post-modern religious crusade to reclaim some purpose in ones life. Perhaps murder is not a problem when you murder companies
It's the same process that has been running - creation of complexity as a dissipative structure - but now with even less friction. Some say we'll transcend, I think we're spiraling into the language-navel of cartesian dualist logical positivist insanity.
I love the dissipative structure framing. It's the only logical explanation for all of this.
Datacenters in space are visionary -- they are maximally energy rate dense and they expand the area of energy absorption. Might be 100 years too early but that is where we are headed, after we turn all of the available biosphere of earth into computronium, that is.
The only superior technology left would be von Neumann probes.
> Of all the things we could be doing, why are we doing this?
Money. Capitalism. It's all a fucking grift. Always has been.
If you thought AI was going to usher in a post scarcity golden age of infinite wealth where all disease, hunger, want and inequality are solved and everyone gets to live their lives purely for pleasure and intellectual pursuit, where the Eschaton is in their Heaven and all is right in the world, and humanity spreads out amongst the stars as being of transcendent machine intellect or some shit you read in a sci-fi book then congratulations, you're the mark.
Dear friends: you may not like to hear this but the profit motive is what ruins everything.
I have a degree in Economics. I have read Adam Smith (and not just the Wealth of Nations, by the way!). I spent years on this stuff. I understand markets and for some things they are indeed the best solution. No argument there.
It is a FACT that some things in life should not be done for profit.
Some things cannot be done for profit, but need to be done. These are things that we consider moral or human rights, such as feeding the hungry, caring for the sick, or sheltering the homeless. This is the realm of charity, and it was once a serious obligation for the elite as well as a central focus of religion.
But for everything else, the profit motive is unsurpassed at allocating scarce resources to their most productive uses.
If we as humanity cannot protect fields like art, science, even healthcare and housing, from the ever-growing pressure to make a profit off of them, then we are truly doomed. AI is not the sole cause, it just expedites the process of destroying everything that is not maximally cost-effective.
>> reimagining what it means to be human. By outsourcing the burdens of curiosity, creativity, and understanding, we can finally focus on what matters most
... the fact that this shit doesn't even scrape the ass of more than 500 million people, 60% of which are utterly useless with or without (mit oder mit ohne) ... neither sacrasm, nor cnysims or inorys will uplift this worst of all narratives ever written.
>And now that AI has solved all our problems, we can devote ourselves to more important work: going into quantitative finance, vibecoding sports-betting apps, consuming AI-generated TikTok shorts, and arguing with political bots on Twitter.
Grim but this is exactly where society is heading.
There are no shortage of artistic pursuits, subcultures, pick-up leagues, and more that you're free to engage with. Get off the beaten path and you'll find humans enjoying life in a wide variety of ways that are uncorrupted by AI.
Are you by any chance born to rich parents in a western country?
Because most people in the world are working around the clock to supply food and shelter for their family. It's a bit unclear still how you are going to consolidate the two facts
We are referring to people in the context of "going into quantitative finance, vibecoding sports-betting apps, consuming AI-generated TikTok shorts, and arguing with political bots on Twitter.".
Those are hardly the "most people in the world are working around the clock to supply food and shelter for their family"
It's a bit unclear still how you are going to consolidate the two facts.
> Get off the beaten path
I would really push back on this
What you're describing _is_ the beaten path. People who argue with bots on twitter are actually, vastly, the minority.
Go to your local park or bar and have a drink and try not to talk about the internet.
Nice, fair enough.
I've been looking for a baseball or softball league for my kid. He doesn't want to play school ball, doesn't play travel ball, but loves the game. It's impossible to find baseball or softball leagues after the age of 12 that are not attached to a school or travel. Volleyball is about the only thing that exists.
Except that engagement is not free. All of these things require money, and they require time that isn't already set towards the goal of making money to survive. And one of the selling points of AI is explicitly the redundancy of numerous workers, including ones parallel to myself.
For many things this is true nowadays. Where I live walking in nature or swimming in the ocean is still free. In Dubai nature as in a green park might raise an entry fee.
I get that someone wanted to let steam off but this just sounds like they don't have any arguments so they went for the good old "in the future, you won't have free will and social media companies force you to be online" fable. An addicting algorithm isn't the same thing as fentanyl, you can uninstall the app in 5 seconds and getting it back with signing in takes atleast two minutes, enough to reconsider whether you actually want to spend time on it.
The toxicity of apps like Tiktok comes from muscle memory, not the quality of the content. Your thumb knows where the app icon is and opening the app happens quicker than you can think (literally). So offloading or uninstalling breaks this very effectively. The only thing that would still keep you on the platform is social connections. If somebody gets upset over you uninstalling Instagram or Snapchat, they aren't a good friend.
I don't think this goes far enough -- its a best case scenario.
There is no Utopia for mankind at the end of an AGI that is the labor force because people need a purpose; without that, degenerate behaviours and vice are easy to fall into and the spiral is not big. The state of the human race - particularly the internet-native generations - is a testament to that.
The only way the AGI Utopia works is with a massive reduction in the human population with a Spartan/Helot relationship between those remaining.
Let's face it, the people who want AGI so badly aren't the wam cuddly people who want to feed the poor, house the homeless, and cure the sick. Their motives here are not pure...
> offloading or uninstalling breaks this very effectively
For you, maybe. You can't assume that applies to everyone.
He forgot one, "creating AI slop games that no one will ever play".
guilty
I think the author is hiding the ball a bit. The problem is that, for a long time, humans have attributed meaning, value, and social status to great cognitive insights. Taking physics as an example, it has almost always been the theorists who develop new ideas, not the experimentalists that test and validate them, who have won praise and acclaim. The name Arthur Eddington doesn’t have the same cachet as that of Albert Einstein. But now that the creation of those insights can be automated, there is a great wrenching as esteem shifts away from the former.
Well, maybe it’s a good thing that we are seeing this shift. Maybe it is good and right that we begin valuing your ability to exist in the real world, rather than play math puzzles on a sheet of paper. Because, while the AI labs are receiving a lot of attention and excitement now, that’s a short run phenomenon. Ultimately, people aren’t impressed for long by a machine doing something novel. Once it’s up and running, it fades into the background just like the combustion engine, or the dishwasher, or electric lighting.
> The problem is that, for a long time, humans have attributed meaning, value, and social status to great cognitive insights.
Not really, they haven't. It's only when those insights can be communicated in such a way to other people that those other people can find utility (which could be enabling them to derive more insights that yet other people find utility in recursively) in the insights that they do so, and this is a huge difference. This is why AI is such a total problem to this mentality, because it disrupts not only insight production but the mechanism that values insight production.
This is so well written, deep, funny, and sad.
> Looking up at the stars in wonderment, or enjoying a complex puzzle game, or being inspired by an encouraging teacher, and dreaming that one day an unfeeling corporate robot[1] will burn a rainforest to compile a list of 700 highly obscure barely-readable facts that might be true that nobody can understand as part of a marketing gimmick to raise hype for an IPO[2].
But if I am going to critique it's main point it would be this part:
> in the pursuit of advancing humanity’s knowledge as quickly as possible, many academics will recoil in anger at the suggestion that it is worth spending any time making results understandable to humans. It is inefficient to explain or check a result when those resources can be spent generating another.
While obviously ridiculous, I think this does not go far enough. The problem isn't that people don't care and resources should not be spent to explain AI results to human minds, the problem is that AI will soon be better at explaining itself than humans. The puzzle then changes from can AI formally verify and explain a proof to: do human minds trust the proof. Do we believe that the proof is correct and not an elaborate AI hallucination using tricks that are beyond our understanding. In order to trust it a formal verification is not enough unless it is human understandable. In fact human understandability is the only thing that matters. That is something that AI can never do on its own.
It may not be the most prescient or innovative sci fi series, but I read The Three Body Problem a few years ago and it's really stuck with me. Specifically the description of how humanity reached an inflection point in math & physics research that almost immediately unlocked novel innovations in applied science ... which then made space exploration & settlement practical. Moreover, that the antagonist society in the series decided their absolute best bet at avoiding complete annihilation was to hamstring humankind's scientific research -- and that's it.
It feels like frontier models are starting to approach an asymptote where what you suggest could become reality, and we'll begin seeing not just AI research but AI-designed & led applications of that research into fundamental parts of our society & culture. For better and for worse.
>In order to trust it a formal verification is not enough unless it is human understandable.
The whole point of formal verification is to remove the necessity of understanding most of the work. We only need to trust the formalization of the problem statement, the proof verifier, and the formalization of the result. We already have proof verifiers that humans understand to a high level, and the formalizations of the problem statement and the result are much simpler than the full proof.
I'm confident that the Navier-Stokes equations can blow up because I'm confident that Lean works correctly, and I'm confident that the mathematicians verified the problem statement and result correctly. This is despite the actual proof not being human verified yet (as far as I know), and despite the "human-readable" version not actually corresponding to the formal proof. The formal method still worked.
Some mathematicians are not confident in the NS verification because it is non-trivial to tell if the Lean proof matches NS. I would argue this requires "human understability" to make this claim. The Lean proof is a very useful tool, but it does not replace human understanding.
I'm all for advancing human understanding, even if it might lag behind machine understanding, but there is a way to have machines prove they understand something we don't: ask them to build something functional that we can't. If your hypothetical future comes to pass, and we ask the machine to build a cancer-curing healing ray, and it works, I'd say that's its own win. Then we can spend however long it takes trying to understand how it works. It's depressing and disempowering in a way, but I think overall I'd be happy with that future.
I once visited a town in Spain over which an ancient Roman aqueduct runs, elevated above most of the buildings, even today. It carried an essential ingredient foundational to life in the area, but after the fall of the Empire and the deaths of the architects and engineers who could understand it, the aqueduct stood in the midst of people who could not have repaired it. Relying on mission-critical technology divorced from human understanding is exceptionally risky. Obviously, people have done it before and will happen again, but it makes me nervous.
[delayed]
Why not live in a cage then and have the zookeeper deal with catering to begin with?
The state you proclaim to be happy with is one of irresponsible dependency. A retreat to self-infantilization.
> Then we can spend however long it takes trying to understand how it works.
...unfortunately it took 57 years to unravel, but the cryptic exploit resulting in our telomeres suddenly expiring took a mere 42.
> an unfeeling corporate robot[1] will burn a rainforest to compile a list of 700 highly obscure barely-readable facts that might be true that nobody can understand
He'd have more of a point if a huge number of humans weren't occupied doing exactly this, and much worse on top.
Your last sentence: "That is something that AI can never do on its own."
Never say never...
I'm saying this as a tautology: the definition of human understanding requires a human.
Understanding math isn't just about "having a good explanation ready".
People fundamentally misunderstand the nature of mathematics: it's not "flat" like most of common people's daily pursuits. It consists of building upwards, on top of previous concepts.
In other words, AI is like an oracle: it can tell you all kinds of stuff, but since you probably don't understand, you won't act properly.
Well, we can try tying it to ground truth. AI does the math for magnetic field containment? Test it. AI predicts a particle? Test it. AI says P=NP? Ok, factor this in polynomial time.
And if it fails, and AI goes, "I don't know what happened. I relied on these papers" then I guess one of those must be wrong.
I'm not saying it'd be easy, but I think AI can also find the pieces of the puzzle that broke a pyramid of "discoveries" culminating in a disproval,
And the only other option is to simply never understand as much. AI has the potential to understand things humans cannot. Not necessarily a strict superset.
Humans can deal in 5+-2 things at once. AI doesn't have to, and can cut through leaky abstractions.
If AI says a new invention will do X, and it doesn't, it'll say "you're absolutely right" and try again until it does the thing.
I mean... doomsday scenarios aside.
I don’t accept this framing. If tools allow us to pursue ever more deeply into the mystery of being, and get to both questions and answers we never thought we’d see, that’s a good thing. I think the genuinely curious should have no problem redoubling their “freed up time” into further exploration. The library Borges describes is infinite. I won’t mind getting to read a few books I wouldn’t have otherwise.
Not a huge fan of the sentiment in this article, and the very cynical way it was communicated, but the references to the library of babel reminded me of this fun site.
https://libraryofbabel.info
I sympathize with some feelings the author is trying to communicate, but the cynical and sarcastic style really detract from the authors points in my view.
the cynical and sarcastic style was my favorite part
Great satire, it is nice to see people with a human spirit left. The NYT should ask to republish this.
I work in construction now. Commercial Millwork/cabinets as a project manager.
It is so much harder and more stressful than my php/jquery mini saas coding days.
Often at work I start thinking "why are we doing all this? Why does anyone want this fancy reception desk?? This desk is not worth the human aggravation that it's causing."
I genuinely start thinking we should go back to concrete eastern European communist type buildings just for the simplicity and efficiency. Why all this fancy stuff that causes every project engineer, superintendent, and subcontractor Engineering department to get grey hair.
But I guess it makes the economy grow. I don't know.
> (that’s philosophy, which I would never be a doctor of)
I'm in the office and was trying to contain my laughter next to my colleagues, but this tipped me over the edge
> dreaming that one day an unfeeling corporate robot[1] will burn a rainforest to compile a list of 700 highly obscure barely-readable facts that might be true that nobody can understand as part of a marketing gimmick to raise hype for an IPO
The climate effect argument against AI is so intellectually dishonest. It’s the same as saying that Tao is on the side of stopping the advancement of Cancer research.
I thought the people clowning him were dumb, but the people arguing for either side are really fighting on a mud pit.
Why Ai? Because its development was pretty much free and paid by the pension funds. The objective is supremacy and being the first entity and country to collect rent via Ai supremacy and block every other entity in their analysis; reality who knows what will happen..
It started with internet which was subsidized through military for sake of military supremacy and then it transformed to become a utility connecting everything and collecting information and it subsidized by the markets to collect rent from the world using this utility and now it is subsidized to replace labor around the world and collect rent from its use to discount labor.
> No rational person, least of all us masters of rationality in STEM, pursues these for the joy of creation, learning, or beauty
well yeah the purpose of STEM education is to be a factory to produce the correct worker for another factory
> This is a guest post by Rikab Gambhir.
Very much worth nothing for those about to read this! haha I got a couple of paragraphs in and shook my head.
> From what I know about the academic community (mostly from Twitter and LinkedIn, which I assume are representative), there seems to be near-unanimous agreement that the purpose of math and science research is to gather a large quantity of potentially true factoids in a repository that nobody will actually ever read, in a ritual called “advancing humanity’s[3] knowledge”. That these results are well-written, understandable, pleasant to read or look at, or even completely correct is a secondary concern — in fact, in the pursuit of advancing humanity’s knowledge as quickly as possible, many academics will recoil in anger at the suggestion that it is worth spending any time making results understandable to humans.
Am I the only who thinks this is rhetorical? Modern mathematics is so far removed from the base average knowledge (lets just assume high school instead of going to axioms) that the only people who understand most (if not all new) mathematical achievement are the mathematicians themselves, heck not even all mathematicians, it needs to be spread and developed from "hot spots"?
Your math results are not "well-written, understandable, pleasant to read or look at" unless you literally operate with two or three levels within the proof paper compared to the average person who probably starts at an order of magnitude levels higher.
To the average person, asking a mathematician to explain something is the same as asking the AI/LLM. Both are asking an oracle to dumb it down to their level of abstraction.
To the person who are not career mathematicians, both LLMs and mathematicians do the same thing, pump out garbled output that they themselves understand, and to mathematicians, the difference is one probably explains using axioms rather than theorems.
As a mere software engineer, I found that many human written papers in my field (DSP, ML) aren’t exactly well-written, easily understandable or pleasant to read either, and it’s been the case for at least 15 years. In the past, I would frequently spend an hour or two trying to read a SOTA paper full of convoluted prose and dense pages of equations, only to realise that the algorithm is incredibly simple if visualised properly or even just written down as pseudocode.
Now with LLMs the process is much shorter. They can walk me through the algorithm step by step, translate it to pseudocode, explain equations, and most importantly, I can ask them questions and get clarifications, without worrying about seeming ignorant or exhausting their patience. With a paper, you’re stuck with whatever was written (and often, researchers aren’t good teachers, or intentionally over complicate simple concepts).
> many human written papers in my field (DSP, ML) aren’t exactly well-written, easily understandable or pleasant to read
Yep, my eyes glaze over at the convoluted mathematical explanations for pathfinding in worldspace, but when I see the pseudocode in the appendix it make so much more sense.
> AI has solved all our problems
What about the Collatz conjecture? AFAIK, it requires some novel approaches to mathematics, which would be a real testament to AI creative skills.
I don't doubt it will be solved some day, but as of now it's too early to say that all our problems are solved.
You may want to reread the essay. Many of the statements in it are not the sincere beliefs of the author.
They're so butthurt about losing their social status of not being the top intellectuals anymore, I find it hard to take them serious.
> First, they came for the artists, and I did not speak out, because I was not an artist.
// actually FIRST they came for the programmers. and many of us were ultimately ULTIMATELY pretty tickled to get such a massive productivity boost. this anti-AI sentiment as seen here and in Jon Stewart's rant that all AI is good for is optimizing shopping carts or something... it's so upsetting see good folks buying into this and not realizing how much benefit it will bring. If anything, I've seen how much amazing power it has now given programmers such as myself... I can do what would take me years in an afternoon.
// Btw, can we retire the "first they came for the..." template, it's a little tired.
Diffusion models were the first gen AI tech to plausibly be able to replace humans, no? I feel like image generation was ahead of text generation 2015-2022, and prior to 2015 the best "gen AI" was markov chains which I don't think is within the scope of what we're talking about.
I remember being blown away by BERT and all its variations (BART etc) after the Transformers paper. For topic modeling and other semantic understanding of text, that was bee's knees. But certainly not replacing any humans.
Unlikable text. Just a rant with the usual “corporations” socialism-slop. Terry Tao’s blog rapidly diminishing in quality. I didn’t think that the way machines would approach top mathematics is to transform top mathematicians into boring Redditors.
Such a weird take.
There's a library of babel simulator here: https://libraryofbabel.info/
Just hit "random." It's always gibberish. The odds of getting something that isn't gibberish are astronomically low, like winning the lottery.
The actual library Borges describes has 25^1312000 books, the very vast majority of which are utter nonsense. (As the simulator makes clear.)
Yet with AI, we're getting an abundance of very credible -- and, as Tao himself notes, frequently correct -- mathematical proofs. In these new AI math results, the ratio of signal to noise is high, which makes our current situation the exact opposite of the library, which is pure noise where signal emerges only by random necessity.
Above: Literacy crisis casualty
Causes:
The metaphor was, in my opinion, far too badly strained to work.
Whoosh.
So we have the Fields medal, awarded for making "progress" in math.
Now we are told explaining, understanding things, asking new questions is more important than proving things. So where is the math community medals/awards for this job?
All the nihilism in the AI space is so tiresome. We have a tool now that can accelerate the technological development of our species and actually reach for the stars! How exciting! All these ruminations and lamentations about what it means to be human are downright laughable to people on the front lines of war, living in abject poverty, etc. "Oh, to be so lucky!", I'm sure they'd say.
The luddites and doomers should do the world a favor and go establish a commune in rural Alaska, then they can be happy and the rest of us can get back to building and playing with amazing technology!
This is not a very upbeat post. It does not say much about the AI Library of Babel but I have been wondering about the same thing.
I’m not doing it. Why are you?
...for money
if I had guaranteed access to housing, healthcare, and food I'd stop immediately
So, would most people, and this would mean that very little housing would be built, very little health care provided, and very little food grown or harvested.
It's a nice rant that I think will become more common until everyone burns out and one important realization dawns upon them: the corporations doing these things don't really care about your plight, suffering, etc. You can write thousands of books using this kind of tongue-in-cheek-but-really-angry language, and they'll just laugh it off. Felix Reisenberg will make a new post about something he's doing with Claude, Boris will make a tweet and everyone will rush to turn it into LLM-generated images so they can post on their LinkedIn for their bosses to measure their engagement KPIs, and we'll forget about the rants.
So if you are suggesting that life is now meaningless at status quo, it suggests that life will find new meaning....perhaps it will come in the form of a realisation that if corporations are in no ones interest, perhaps the better life is the one fighting against meaninglessness through our own redefinitions of noble pursuits...perhaps the most noble pursuit will become war against companies and executives in a post-modern religious crusade to reclaim some purpose in ones life. Perhaps murder is not a problem when you murder companies
Do you think this essay was written to appeal to the emotions of Sam Altman?
What if the rants slowly transition into violence?
"Data center death threats."[1]
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2026/10/12/politics/data-center-backlash...
When, not if...
That's the point - why are we doing this?
Of all the things we could be doing, why are we doing this?
Is it collective mental illness? Economic hysteria? A cult of virtual personality?
It's simultaneously irrational, obsessive, ecologically and politically catastrophic, and all-consuming - none of which are good things.
It's the same process that has been running - creation of complexity as a dissipative structure - but now with even less friction. Some say we'll transcend, I think we're spiraling into the language-navel of cartesian dualist logical positivist insanity.
I love the dissipative structure framing. It's the only logical explanation for all of this.
Datacenters in space are visionary -- they are maximally energy rate dense and they expand the area of energy absorption. Might be 100 years too early but that is where we are headed, after we turn all of the available biosphere of earth into computronium, that is.
The only superior technology left would be von Neumann probes.
> That's the point - why are we doing this?
> Of all the things we could be doing, why are we doing this?
Money. Capitalism. It's all a fucking grift. Always has been.
If you thought AI was going to usher in a post scarcity golden age of infinite wealth where all disease, hunger, want and inequality are solved and everyone gets to live their lives purely for pleasure and intellectual pursuit, where the Eschaton is in their Heaven and all is right in the world, and humanity spreads out amongst the stars as being of transcendent machine intellect or some shit you read in a sci-fi book then congratulations, you're the mark.
Now imagine what quantum computers will do. AI in polynomial time.
You can sense the fear and anxiety in the article.
Is existence not enough anymore? Do humans need more?
You will own nothing, and you will be happy.
Dear friends: you may not like to hear this but the profit motive is what ruins everything.
I have a degree in Economics. I have read Adam Smith (and not just the Wealth of Nations, by the way!). I spent years on this stuff. I understand markets and for some things they are indeed the best solution. No argument there.
It is a FACT that some things in life should not be done for profit.
Some things cannot be done for profit, but need to be done. These are things that we consider moral or human rights, such as feeding the hungry, caring for the sick, or sheltering the homeless. This is the realm of charity, and it was once a serious obligation for the elite as well as a central focus of religion.
But for everything else, the profit motive is unsurpassed at allocating scarce resources to their most productive uses.
If we as humanity cannot protect fields like art, science, even healthcare and housing, from the ever-growing pressure to make a profit off of them, then we are truly doomed. AI is not the sole cause, it just expedites the process of destroying everything that is not maximally cost-effective.
Narrator: But this was a fiction. In reality, evidence of any profits being made was extremely hard to come by.
> I spent years on this stuff.
All I needed was entering a game of Monopoly after a few rounds had already been played.
A corner stone of Economics is Game Theory and Prisoner's Dilemma. You can choose not to do things for profit, but other people will.
>> reimagining what it means to be human. By outsourcing the burdens of curiosity, creativity, and understanding, we can finally focus on what matters most
... the fact that this shit doesn't even scrape the ass of more than 500 million people, 60% of which are utterly useless with or without (mit oder mit ohne) ... neither sacrasm, nor cnysims or inorys will uplift this worst of all narratives ever written.
this is all soooooo baaaaaad