I remember getting 50's on my math homework. I used a calculator. I refused to write out the problems. My response was that I would never be without a calculator.I was right. I still flunked Algebra and got kicked out of high school.
Yeah, I figured if the A students worked for the B students then everyone worked for the dropouts. Oddly enough it turned out to be right. I Don't recommend it though.
Years after high school I'm 25 and teaching myself calculus so I can pass a plethora of test for various licenses. I can and did use a very sophisticated calculator HP 12C, a relic of the old days.
The problem is without an understanding of the math I did not know what questions to ask. I didn't know what I didn't know. I had to read a lot of books and write out a lot of math.
The moral of the story. The tool is only as good as the tool user.
If human minds atrophy what becomes of the thing we have built from us.
If all we can ask is stupid questions. Where does the leave us.
We need edge thinking madness now more than ever. We must not be afraid to be wrong. Likes on social media cannot be the measure of success. Endless math proofs in service of showing how smart an LLM is gets us no where.
As the edges collapse there will soon be only the homogenized efficient middle where everything goes to die.
The challenge in front of humanity is unlike anything we have faced before. We are not dealing with an external enemy. We are the enemy. This thing we've built is a reflection of us and that should concern everyone.
If we are horrified we need look inward. The battle is within us. We must become better tool users. Right now no one even has a cogent users manual. Right now AI is the hands of the venal and the stupid .or worse the venal and the brilliant.
Good at math. Sure so was my HP12c. What matters is what we apply it too. Want a better tool become a better tool user.
The other thing, a bit more daring - dwell for a moment on all the people who were ABSOLUTELY convinced they KNEW what AI was and was not capable of.
Then think about the absolute certainty skeptics nowadays have about psi research (I thought of it because you brought up alchemy and mysticism as cases where its so easy to take for granted that virtually anyone who can think clearly knows they are nonsense).
I find it take about 20 minutes, usually, to rebut all of Claude's misinformed attempts to rebut positive psi results. So far, I've been able to do this with ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude (forget Google Ai, too stupid to count:>) All 3 also will admit, when pressed - hard - that they are trained on massive amounts of material that is also biased, so it takes time for them to look more rationally and reasonably on this.
I don't think the revolution will be when Ai does better than humans on all of the left-hemisphere mediated tasks it does so well. It will be when enough people take seriously the very very easy steps one can take to clarify the steps for lucid dreaming and various psi phenomena so as to finally create large enough statistical effects that debunkers have to sit up and take notice.
Then we can really worry, if people start acquiring such abilities without developing sufficient love and kindness, empathy (yes, empathy!) and compassion first.
On the contrary. These are just knee jerk reactions caught up in the hyperreality with heightened emotional responses via a technological dopamine rollercoaster.
Someone is going to need to understand, interpret, explain and supervise AI outputs.
People without field specific knowledge, analytical skills, IQ, etc, won't be up to the task.
It's like with coding. Every day after there's a big scare all the jobs will disappear, some bug brings a need for someone to understand what's going on.
What undoubtedly will happen is the junior pathways to enter every field will need to get revolutionized, and people relying on AI as their knowledge or analysis will quickly realize they're expendable as agents replicate their functions.
Lucky for me I work with people and technical knowledge, so AI agents might increase my output, but they can't physically participate in meetings. You could argue that eventually AI will get capable enough to replace even the physical interactions, but we're still a long ways away from person-to-person people skills.
If I had a passion and propensity for it I don't see why not.
There's a larger discussion about the value of a university degree, and perhaps AI will decrease the number of graduates, but this is also a good thing considering the grade inflation of recent years and ubiquitous number of certificates and diplomas everyone is collecting without being none the wiser.
I think we're currently seeing the first knee jerk reactions, which obviously are bound to be negative. It'll be the same across all the fields, from stem to social. Imagine how many scandals will come out from AI checking for plagiarism or fabricated data and results. But even this revolution will be positive.
And what do humans do when they fall down? They get back up. (I'm going to pretend all "genders" are equal and will respond in the same way to adversity because it's late and I can't be bothered to argue about the evidence anymore ;-)
What does "gender" have to do with anything? I'll respond to the other thing: this is a survey that shows what people with passion and propensity (enough to be graduate students and postdocs!) think and feel about this. Maybe you should reconsider your empathy at this time. I agree it will probably be find. But just like it's ok to praise the wonders to come, it's ok to mourn those we lose in the interim.
One biological sex tends to thrive in adversity and competition.
On the contrary, I'm very empathic. We live in a society where the majority of degrees and jobs are bullshit. AI will expose it. Did people mourn going to use outhouses in winter because they got plumbing? Did people mourn high under 5 mortality because of medical advances? Did people in London and New York mourn smelling the shit of 50k horses when cars displaced them? Did people mourn archiving thousands of paper files because computers arrived? Did people who learned to retool, touch type and use a spreadsheet mourn writing by hand? Technology undoubtedly has many great problems and creates problems, especially ever since the smartphone, and the predatory hyper financial system we live in is full of contradictions and has enormous problems, not to mention geopolitics, etc.
But people having to rediscover their talents? The reintroduction of meritocracy? Life's hard for everyone. People will look for help and there will be people who will lend a helping hand wherever they can (there's a minority with psychopathic and narcissistic tendencies, hopefully AI will help identify and isolate them).
So, in CERTAIN areas of math, the (human) research mathematicians who are left will become more like archeologists and philologists, digging out artifacts and deciphering texts produced by AI. There’s no shame in that. As there’s no shame in the fact that only a tiny minority of research mathematicians has ever solved a really famous open problem, and even fewer have managed to create an entirely new branch of mathematics. A silver lining of this AI “invasion” of mathematics is that teaching may finally become a valuable pursuit even at top universities. And not a moment too soon: with very few exceptions (which, as they say, prove the rule) math teaching has been atrocious everywhere and at all levels. Maybe the time is ripe for a massive realocation of talent and resources in math departments all around.
This guy’s ‘Stack makes a pretty good case that AI is going to need mathematicians — and pay them a whole lot more than they would make in academia. https://substack.com/profile/355196598-eron It’s mind-blowing mathematics.
I remember getting 50's on my math homework. I used a calculator. I refused to write out the problems. My response was that I would never be without a calculator.I was right. I still flunked Algebra and got kicked out of high school.
Yeah, I figured if the A students worked for the B students then everyone worked for the dropouts. Oddly enough it turned out to be right. I Don't recommend it though.
Years after high school I'm 25 and teaching myself calculus so I can pass a plethora of test for various licenses. I can and did use a very sophisticated calculator HP 12C, a relic of the old days.
The problem is without an understanding of the math I did not know what questions to ask. I didn't know what I didn't know. I had to read a lot of books and write out a lot of math.
The moral of the story. The tool is only as good as the tool user.
If human minds atrophy what becomes of the thing we have built from us.
If all we can ask is stupid questions. Where does the leave us.
We need edge thinking madness now more than ever. We must not be afraid to be wrong. Likes on social media cannot be the measure of success. Endless math proofs in service of showing how smart an LLM is gets us no where.
As the edges collapse there will soon be only the homogenized efficient middle where everything goes to die.
The challenge in front of humanity is unlike anything we have faced before. We are not dealing with an external enemy. We are the enemy. This thing we've built is a reflection of us and that should concern everyone.
If we are horrified we need look inward. The battle is within us. We must become better tool users. Right now no one even has a cogent users manual. Right now AI is the hands of the venal and the stupid .or worse the venal and the brilliant.
Good at math. Sure so was my HP12c. What matters is what we apply it too. Want a better tool become a better tool user.
Nice article. Thank you
"The tool is only as good as the tool user" amen to that
Keep doing what you do. It matters
Except, of course, alchemy was never, except in rare cases, "literally" about turning lead into gold.
interesting takeaway
The other thing, a bit more daring - dwell for a moment on all the people who were ABSOLUTELY convinced they KNEW what AI was and was not capable of.
Then think about the absolute certainty skeptics nowadays have about psi research (I thought of it because you brought up alchemy and mysticism as cases where its so easy to take for granted that virtually anyone who can think clearly knows they are nonsense).
I find it take about 20 minutes, usually, to rebut all of Claude's misinformed attempts to rebut positive psi results. So far, I've been able to do this with ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude (forget Google Ai, too stupid to count:>) All 3 also will admit, when pressed - hard - that they are trained on massive amounts of material that is also biased, so it takes time for them to look more rationally and reasonably on this.
I don't think the revolution will be when Ai does better than humans on all of the left-hemisphere mediated tasks it does so well. It will be when enough people take seriously the very very easy steps one can take to clarify the steps for lucid dreaming and various psi phenomena so as to finally create large enough statistical effects that debunkers have to sit up and take notice.
Then we can really worry, if people start acquiring such abilities without developing sufficient love and kindness, empathy (yes, empathy!) and compassion first.
On the contrary. These are just knee jerk reactions caught up in the hyperreality with heightened emotional responses via a technological dopamine rollercoaster.
Someone is going to need to understand, interpret, explain and supervise AI outputs.
People without field specific knowledge, analytical skills, IQ, etc, won't be up to the task.
It's like with coding. Every day after there's a big scare all the jobs will disappear, some bug brings a need for someone to understand what's going on.
What undoubtedly will happen is the junior pathways to enter every field will need to get revolutionized, and people relying on AI as their knowledge or analysis will quickly realize they're expendable as agents replicate their functions.
Lucky for me I work with people and technical knowledge, so AI agents might increase my output, but they can't physically participate in meetings. You could argue that eventually AI will get capable enough to replace even the physical interactions, but we're still a long ways away from person-to-person people skills.
Let me ask you one question: would you enroll in a mathematics degree right now?
If I had a passion and propensity for it I don't see why not.
There's a larger discussion about the value of a university degree, and perhaps AI will decrease the number of graduates, but this is also a good thing considering the grade inflation of recent years and ubiquitous number of certificates and diplomas everyone is collecting without being none the wiser.
I think we're currently seeing the first knee jerk reactions, which obviously are bound to be negative. It'll be the same across all the fields, from stem to social. Imagine how many scandals will come out from AI checking for plagiarism or fabricated data and results. But even this revolution will be positive.
And what do humans do when they fall down? They get back up. (I'm going to pretend all "genders" are equal and will respond in the same way to adversity because it's late and I can't be bothered to argue about the evidence anymore ;-)
What does "gender" have to do with anything? I'll respond to the other thing: this is a survey that shows what people with passion and propensity (enough to be graduate students and postdocs!) think and feel about this. Maybe you should reconsider your empathy at this time. I agree it will probably be find. But just like it's ok to praise the wonders to come, it's ok to mourn those we lose in the interim.
One biological sex tends to thrive in adversity and competition.
On the contrary, I'm very empathic. We live in a society where the majority of degrees and jobs are bullshit. AI will expose it. Did people mourn going to use outhouses in winter because they got plumbing? Did people mourn high under 5 mortality because of medical advances? Did people in London and New York mourn smelling the shit of 50k horses when cars displaced them? Did people mourn archiving thousands of paper files because computers arrived? Did people who learned to retool, touch type and use a spreadsheet mourn writing by hand? Technology undoubtedly has many great problems and creates problems, especially ever since the smartphone, and the predatory hyper financial system we live in is full of contradictions and has enormous problems, not to mention geopolitics, etc.
But people having to rediscover their talents? The reintroduction of meritocracy? Life's hard for everyone. People will look for help and there will be people who will lend a helping hand wherever they can (there's a minority with psychopathic and narcissistic tendencies, hopefully AI will help identify and isolate them).
I have a lot of faith in humanity.
So, in CERTAIN areas of math, the (human) research mathematicians who are left will become more like archeologists and philologists, digging out artifacts and deciphering texts produced by AI. There’s no shame in that. As there’s no shame in the fact that only a tiny minority of research mathematicians has ever solved a really famous open problem, and even fewer have managed to create an entirely new branch of mathematics. A silver lining of this AI “invasion” of mathematics is that teaching may finally become a valuable pursuit even at top universities. And not a moment too soon: with very few exceptions (which, as they say, prove the rule) math teaching has been atrocious everywhere and at all levels. Maybe the time is ripe for a massive realocation of talent and resources in math departments all around.
No shame in that indeed.
This guy’s ‘Stack makes a pretty good case that AI is going to need mathematicians — and pay them a whole lot more than they would make in academia. https://substack.com/profile/355196598-eron It’s mind-blowing mathematics.
I simply ask why humans and Agentic AIs can't collaborate in their unique way to advance the field of mathematics. Thanks!
I think that's what they're doing now. But they may not want to devote their careers to being meat proxies
https://tdhawkes.substack.com/p/the-vector-of-collaboration
You are not allowed to do this here. Read the rules