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- Hacker News
- I haven't done math since college. Now the things I struggled with I was able to grasp. So much so that I was able to prove a conjecture, small one, but nothing in my life I thought I would of, its even getting peer reviewed.
Its drudgery to prove these things. But man it feels cool when you do.
I now have a better understanding of the entire physical mechanics of life around me, to a gravitational sort of understanding.
Simply because I thought I had a conceptual understanding of p vs np. And after weeks I was able to prove myself wrong.
People seem to worry that AI is going to take away everything. But my experience is that I feel more able to create even ideas before I would never imagine.
It feels more like in HG Wells where he's in the far future talking to the AI about his equations and the AI says "oh your talking about time travel, thats impossible"
It feels like that reality is now more likely than any other, anyone can invent anything now and have the math to back it up.
You can speak physics into existance. I'm excited for the future
by nadermx - and he shows us a pic of a ukulele, hardly a conservatory instrument LOLby fidla
- It's a good question.
Pure maths has foreshadowed a lot of physics, and a lot of Computer Science. We should probably keep doing it.
Does the current model (of highly-talented academics at Universities mostly arguing with each other) change because of AI? Does it invalidate human effort, or does it allow humans to push the boundaries further? Is there no point in training or paying for mathematicians because AI will take over the whole role?
Or, as we're finding with so many other areas, does AI do its best work when guided by someone who knows the area and subject well?
- What do you mean by invalidate? It means we no longer need to understand math, of course.
When Claude made progress on the Riemann conjecture, here are the kind of prompts used:
> Jarred's input was mostly limited to sending Claude messages of encouragement (mostly variants of “keep going” or “believe in yourself”).2 This seems to have helped Claude overcome some initial skepticism that it could make meaningful progress.
It seems like the kind of prompts a high schooler could come up with. The prompter is the creator of bun.js, a kind of janky JavaScript execution environment. It seems like we no longer need to know the subject well at all.
by a2ff6eeb0 - Well, I think one good thing we can conclude from the music world is that there are people out there who want to pay for humans to do things even when the computer could do it better. I.e. when you go to Vegas and go to a bar, you want to have a guy playing piano and singing, and are willing to pay a bit more for that. You don't want just a jukebox, even if the jukebox can play "Don't Stop Believing" better than the dude with the piano.
All that to say, there will be certain jobs that people will want to pay humans to do even if the robots can do those things "better".
by pianopatrick - The big weakness of the analogy from the OP is that music is universally accessible, while high level mathematics is not. The potential audience for the human playing the piano is far larger than the human solving complex mathematical theorems.
- I like the framing in the headline - really more than the article itself.
I think underappreciated in discourse like this is that of course we will still have "mathematicians" - people whose work is mathematics. The job might change, but at the very least someone has to choose where to spend the compute and the dollars, decide what theorems are worth investing in, what definitions matter. Someone still has to serve as the ambassador reminding people at the relevant points to look over at the field for productivity and correctness reasons, presenting fun riddles for entertainment and education, advocating to political bodies for funding.
Metalworking looks a lot different than it used to, but the end of a man with a hammer and leather bellows bashing out a nail didn't end the career of metal working either. The work sure looks a lot different though, and there are many fewer of them.
by gpm - They didn't mention coders but my idea is to have Silicon habitats of programmers recreating nineties professional programming on Pentium PCs in dimly lit cubicles. Tourists shuffle by watching live coding like watching a blacksmith at a Colonial Williamsburg.by djmips
- > Silicon habitats of programmers recreating nineties professional programming on Pentium PCs in dimly lit cubicles
God I miss those days.
by ur-whale - It's possible to have a career in classical music (I have one, for some definition of classical). But I suspect that streaming income from passive listeners (i.e. not fans) will disappear once the streaming services can eliminate those pesky songwriters and artists.by lukeh
- Our AI system don't just do things. They do it because someone asks. A lot of the boom in AI maths results are solving human formulated problems mostly for PR benefit. Once the novelty passes, would Anthropic or OpenAI keep spending? And without mathematicians to ask the right questions and able to appreciate the results, why would AI driven research continue?by nxpnsv
- First of all, because mathematicians themselves are now asking the right questions to the public models to solve problems.by bananaflag
- > And without mathematicians to ask the right questions
Here, I disagree. What makes you think the AI won't be able to ask the right questions without prompting?
> and able to appreciate the results, why would AI driven research continue?
Here, I think I agree. At some level, there has to be a human in the process that must understand / interpret the results.
I gotta say, however, that I'm not certain about my agreement. I'm worried that I'm missing something where the human can be excised from the process entirely.
by busyant - > Classical music has been institutionalized, sent to the conservatory as a relic. A small segment of society has decided the ability to perform it is worth preserving, and devotes a sliver of capital to that end: training young people, and paying a few of the best players in the biggest cities to do it professionally.
I had a whole discussion with a German friend whose husband works in opera (this was after Chalomet's "opera as a dead art" comments) and their view was mostly that this view of the world does not hold for at least chunks of Europe. To their mind, there is still both active input into this space, support in this space, and there's societal support to some degree or another.
I don't know the realities on the ground, but that annecdote did make me wonder if I simply assumed that the world of classical music wasn't as dire if you leave the States, at least in terms of job stability.
The comparison to popular music is kinda funy too... plenty of pop musicians that don't live off of their music, right? Maybe we're not generating "Taylor Swifts of Oboe"s but I feel like the measure is more about the median (or even the 90th/95th percentile?) when it comes to art, rather than the top of the top.
by rtpg - I think a lot of people just don't get how much of classical music was foundational for pop music. McCartney said blackbird was a twist on some Bach intro. Billy Joel said similar things. A lot of of good music was cooked in classical knowledge.by agumonkey
- The job stability in classical music is great. It's getting a job in the first place that's a problem. My partner, in an earlier life, was one of the best young flautists in Canada. There were about eight jobs in the entire country for orchestral flautists, and about a year before graduating, a few of them turned over, meaning it would probably be another five years before any more jobs opened up. Good time for a career change...by sdenton4
- I think he agrees it is popular, but in comparison to contemporary styles of music it’s tiny (in skilled performers, listeners, funding and revenue). Right? Even in Europe.by lokar
- We are largely having a reckoning with whether a discipline is the process or the outcome.
Music didn't enter the conservatory so much as the relative interest in various styles have changed over time. I get that the author was implying that by talking about pop music, but what was music doing before Mozart came around?
Every field is having this existential crisis right now, from art to math. Especially in art, the anti-AI hate mostly reduces to arguing that art is the process not the outcome.
The need for research-level math isn't changing (if anything, it may accelerate), but how we do it is. The languages, systems, and process I used to write code has changed a lot since I wrote my first line of BASIC in 1994. Mathematicians, I expect, have not encountered nearly the same amount of disruption in academia. I feel for them.
by madrox - > Especially in art, the anti-AI hate mostly reduces to arguing that art is the process not the outcome.
It's both. The outcome is bad (boy is it ever bad), and even if it were good I still would rather enjoy art produced by humans.
by bigstrat2003 - >the anti-AI hate mostly reduces to arguing that art is the process not the outcome.
The outcome is also bad though, once you scale past static images. That's why consumers, who otherwise are apathetic at scale, are extremely negative against generative AI. at least where they (perceive to) notice it.
by johnnyanmac - I think classical and symphonic music are helped in the US by school music programs. It's the best way to have 100 kids practice and perform for a concert. Breaking them into 25 jazz quartets is a lot more complicated.by jimmydddd
- I like this framing. I know that AI has it's place and in others it doesn't. I recognize I sound like an AI shill in personal conversations, but I'm a very outcome driven person. I simply want multiple, thousands of outcomes even, and those outcomes all coming together is my process/journey, which is different to a developer or musicians process may view their career.by Fordec
- >? Especially in art, the anti-AI hate mostly reduces to arguing that art is the process not the outcome.
That is not my objection to AI art at all. The value of art for me is that somebody has an idea to express and they're trying to communicate it to me. That's totally absent from AI-generated material. I'm not categorically opposed to AI, but my interest in automatically generated content tailored to indulge my personal taste is absolutely zero.
by hypersoar - > Our society does not support classical musicians in the same way that we support ‘popular’ musicians.
It really really does. Popular/rock/folk/classical musicians all earn much the same way now: a blend of teaching, occasional performance fees, functions performances like weddings and galas, music-related side-gigs (composition, arrangement and recording for commercial music), and non-music-related side gigs — teaching non-musical things, gardening, painting and decorating, bar work, office temp work, even full time jobs (doctors and lawyers, accountants). I know a couple of classical musicians whose actual money-making music is playing other instruments in funk/rock functions bands.
Even the "best" or most famous musicians, popular or classical, have side gigs. Approximately nobody makes their money only from performing or from recordings; that ended twenty-five or thirty years ago.
Elite soloists, maybe — but that is actually a pretty expensive life to live. I would be surprised if many of them risked a life where they had no other job.
The idea that a "conservatory" system exists that meaningfully supports classical musicians is nonsense almost anywhere in the world, I would think. Even the first-chair musicians and conductors have side gigs.
(ETA: I can't believe this is a workable model for mathematicians, either. Maybe for a couple of dozen the world over. But there is no performance, no regionality, little in the way of public dissemination, little in the way of reflected glory for benefactors. No, the "conservatory" will perhaps be the intelligence agencies, as it was before.)
by dofm - Modern 'classical' music is a myth. In their day, classical composers were essentially pop performers. Women used to throw their undergarments at mozart...
Today classical music is filled with people who want to pretend to be superior to pop musicians because they keep their repertoire confined to academically acceptable areas.
And then the LARPers that want to make new music make complete and utter arhythmic and atonal trash that demands humans subdue our own aural feelings of beauty.
You'll find classical musicians who complain about this stuff are usually incompetent musicians who really stretch the definition of artist.
Sorry spent almost a decade of my young life in a somewhat competitive music school environment. Lots of the other kids were upset I played what I wanted to and people liked it.
Actual modern composers in the classical tradition (I.e. people alive today who compose music that is similar in feel to older composers) are well compensated because they're often hired to score films, video games, and other capitalist interests that the supposedly 'real' classical musicians would scoff their noses at.
by anon291 - >I can't believe this is a workable model for mathematicians, either.
It already is. Pure math departments are largely service oriented. They exist to teach engineers calculus. They are already spending a great deal of time doing non-research tasks, just like musicians you described. The exceptions would be the very top researchers at R1 schools, and even then they often spend time advising students and teaching occasional courses. It's not super common to have people do nothing but research in a pure math department.
by viccis - >>> Elite soloists, maybe — but that is actually a pretty expensive life to live. I would be surprised if many of them risked a life where they had no other job.
Yes, they really did. Getting to that level requires training at an intensity that closes off the option of training for an alternative career.
by analog31 - i know some musicians, and it's how you describe it. They have multiple gigs all the time. Even 20-30 years ago. Most of the time one main job, one that pays the bills and is stable, like teaching, and more on the side. A conservatory is just a high-end agency for distributing classical live music.by IronyMan1
- I don't think fully employed opera singers, and professional orchestra musicians, tend to have side gigs. But it's also extremely difficult to get full employment in such jobs, and I think they're pretty intense: of the few people from my school days who succeeded in getting that, at least two of them quit/downshifted into teaching jobs after a decade or so.by vintermann
- On a side note: It's not called a "conservatory" because we are conserving the art in it. The name seems to originate from a place where orphaned children were taken care off (i.e. conserved) and part of that was through musical education.by babagan0ush