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- Hacker News
- This author has a natural talent for writing. That was interesting throughout.by dmix
- Related: Does one have to be a genius to do maths?
https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/does-one-have-t...
by arunix - As a middle-aged mathematician, AI is provoking a serious crisis among the better mathematicians I know. Many are only half jokingly talking about retiring. We use AI a lot in research already and it's obvious that whoever doesn't will fall behind fast. At the very least it gives access to the full library in a few minutes, serving as a kind of knowledge oracle generally more useful than the expert who ought to be in the office next door but isn't. And we see what can happen when it is effectively coupled with lean to automate theorem proving and discovery.
We aren't dumb enough to see this as the end of the profesión - Esther it's clearly a shift in how we will work - but we like doing computations and playing around with examples and how one does that just changed a lot. The other problem is we know we don't have the energy of youth to learn to use AI as effectively as the kids, although we are wiser and have better judgment and do know some things.
Mathematicians who are not taking seriously how to adapt to AI are deluding themselves.
by contubernio - > My physicist friend once asked me what the point of doing research was if someone like Terence Tao could have figured out everything in my dissertation in a tenth of the time. I answered by pointing out that Terence Tao didn’t. Terence Tao did not find a small open problem posited by my advisor and publish a bite sized result making incremental progress. He has only so much time and so many other fish to fry.
This reminds me of a post I saw recently, although I can't remember the platform. It said something along the lines of assessing the limits of AI by finding the dumbest questions it can't solve. I think that pairs well as an additional way to view meaning through one's work.
The linked post points out constrained attention as a way to bring meaning to novel work that no one else took on. With AI, this can still be applied to compute.
I'm just wondering if there are a class of problems that humans, at least in the short-term, where humans need to be in the loop to solve more efficiently.
- It's interesting that this piece stands well enough if you replace mathematics with probably any other intellectual profession, including software development or pretty much anything else.
Since “normal” people mostly don't understand what the software development job is about, handwaving in response to regular questions: “what do you do at work?”, “what do you like about your job?” – is pretty normal. I think that most of us have some prepared answers ready to use.And, I lie to anyone who asks me why I’m a mathematician. It is much easier to claim “I love learning the laws of life,” while literally handwaving, than it is for me to flashback to the twenty or so pivotal moments that lead to me walking out of Gainesville with a PhD in Arithmetic Geometry.
Just like the software development. I truly believe that the only people who can survive a software job are those who can tolerate the constant feeling of frustration caused by things not working or breaking for random reasons, and persevere in this environment to do the things you need to do.Mathematics is the thing you try to understand, don’t, get frustrated about, and then do.by ventana - > We're all frustration addicts. We just want to bang our heads against problems we don't yet know how to solve.
I've been tapering off AI lately. I think I've realized that conquering the struggle is the fun part, and accomplishments just don't hit the same if AI is smoothing over every friction and cordoning off all the pitfalls and rabbit-holes.
by randusername - As an ex-academic (not mathematician), this really resonates. Every generation of researchers has to outperform the researcher generation before them - there are fully tenured profs out there who, with their track record, wouldn't get a postdoc nowadays. It's just a ratchet where every generation has to be more outstanding than the previous one, so yeah, you suddenly need 'triple the conferences'. Eventually that ratcheting reflects on your self-worth and you start calling yourself mediocre, even though you vastly outperform the previous generation. It's an extremely unfair game designed by careless people.
Throw AI into the mix and your self-worth crashes. Just today I saw a Claude Science set of results that made my own work of the past 2 months completely superfluous, and I sit here and wonder what's the point.
by a_bonobo - Really enjoyable read. I escaped a career in Mathematics by being sufficiently bad at it that I only have a Masters. Fortunately, I escaped to a field immune to AI: CS and then a software engineering career. Well, not really, but I did get a good 15 years out of it so thank god for that.
About half of my friends are founders of various startups and the rest are executives of and almost all of them have the view that it’s better for everything to be a failure than to be in the “it could make it” category for half a decade or more.
In that way, I am glad I found that it wasn’t for me. I had the curiosity, but not the doggedness to face difficulty (not enough curiosity perhaps?) or the ability to not encounter such difficulty. And fortunately that meant I was never in the “I could make it” category. God bless clear and present boundaries and may the devil take the grey zone.
by arjie