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  • https://thebhc.org/node/97369 "The Decline and Fall of the Horse"

    I argue that the Industrial revolution created 'unemployment' in beasts of yoke and burden at a larger scale than humans. So, there may be something instructive in that turn of events, even if it's not a highly representative analogue of the current ones. Of course, it's like saying what's a house cat to do when there's no more mice to hunt (assuming it remains fed). Maybe knowledge workers will become qualified pets if they prove cute enough.

    My border collie will be pretty depressed though, once it's out of a job (maybe replaced by a drone sheep-herd).

    by Eridanus2
  • > But do I “understand” the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, given that earlier this year I gave 22 hours worth of lectures on the topic?

    Even if no one human can understand the entirety of a complex proof, surely we can piece together multiple experts' separate understandings, so the community as a whole 'understands' the proof?

    Is there value in us 'understanding' a proof? Even if no single human can understand a complex proof soup-to-nuts, and we have to piece together several experts' understandings?

    If the answer is Not really, then the value of a proof is its utility, its utility in making new products/services, and its utility in making new proofs. If in the case of abstract math, all the utility is of the latter kind (making new proofs), then we have a pyramid scheme here.

    by dsubburam
  • Buzzard is such a good writer. Read it all the way to the end - it gets (even) better as it goes along.
    by dang
  • Jev says: .78 grieve, .22 no_grieve
    by JSR_FDED
  • Every time I read an AI article that uses the "stages of grief" analogy, I remember that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who created the model, said in an interview near the end of her life that anger was the only stage she personally felt.
    by poszlem
  • I share the optimism here. Connecting dots across knowledge, lived experience and purpose remains, to me, a deeply human pursuit. The more AI discovers, the more possibilities we have to connect those discoveries to questions that matter to us.
    by sachaa
  • I am also an optimist about AI, although I worry about the labor aspect as well (as a leftist I see the class aspect of this, on the other hand, as a computer programmer, computers were also originally meant to replace human labor, and we all see what happened).

    My view is, current top AIs do multiple different things:

    1. Interpret and output natural language

    2. Do formal logical reasoning

    3. Do informal logical reasoning

    4. Provide encyclopedic knowledge

    5. Discern vague instructions/statements and fill the most likely gaps (kind of error correction)

    6. Serve as a model of the human mind, a proxy for a person

    7. Translate between different languages, formal and informal

    All these things are combined in these huge, hard-to-understand blobs of weights. I think humanity would be better off by understanding each aspect separately, but disentangling them will take decades of philosophical research. So there is a lot of interesting work ahead of us.

    by js8
  • In contrast to what these philosophical pieces tend to convey, the main crisis in mathematics is a labour one.

    Mathematitians exchanged proofs for employment. That was the currency. Now they cannot use that currency anymore, so the question is how does someone know if they should hire an unknow person or not?

    Philosophicaly who cares if you like more theory building or theorem proving? You dont need to convince anyone. The only solution is to be curious and follow your interests and naturally humanity will redefine what the new mathematics feels like.

    You cannot convince anyone about it, its not something rational.

    by youoy

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