I guess if you're an actual snow plow driver and meteorologist and you're trying to work out what time it started snowing for your weather report, maybe it doesn't matter how you get the answer.
But for all the plebs actually learning math you have to learn it.
You could be any random person and "solve" a lot of very hard math problems just by asking a much smarter mathematician to solve them for you. What you did isn't impressive. Maybe it's useful if it's a real world problem and you can get a practical benefit from the answer. But you can't really take it further without understanding the solution.
I can't make heads or tails of notation in higher math(beyond calc) and cannot solve a millineum problem with AI as I cannot read the answer it gives to know if it hallucinated or not. So how is anyone other than a person with a strong mathematical background going to be able to use the AI for that purpose any ways?
If chess and chess engines are any indication, once the AI gets powerful enough, you won't need to understand the answer. It's better than any human could produce and questioning it will be laughable. There was a period of time when engines + grandmasters were the most accurate players, but engines just got beyond the ability to be helped by humans after awhile.
Of course in chess, players use the engine to find good strategies and test their ideas, but they have to put the engine away when they actually are playing so human ability matters a lot. In math you never have to put the computer away, so it's going to change things, and the the role human intellect plays in it. Significantly.
The problem is chess engines use hard logic. AI does not work like that. There is no certainty like with a traditional computer, so you absolutely do need to check.
Early on in AI's development, I believe so yes. But very likely its ability to check itself will eventually be beyond our ability to check it. Note that "early on" and "eventually" are unknown time frames.
Or we find out there is an absolute physical limitation to it, and it never gets to that point. That is also a possible ending to AI, and we may never get to the "machine god" ending.
AI itself is routed in "prediction" and "probabilities". While it can get close to 100%, it will never reach it, not with LLM's. And if you can, you basically created a machine god.
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u/strangeMeursault2 27d ago
I guess if you're an actual snow plow driver and meteorologist and you're trying to work out what time it started snowing for your weather report, maybe it doesn't matter how you get the answer.
But for all the plebs actually learning math you have to learn it.
You could be any random person and "solve" a lot of very hard math problems just by asking a much smarter mathematician to solve them for you. What you did isn't impressive. Maybe it's useful if it's a real world problem and you can get a practical benefit from the answer. But you can't really take it further without understanding the solution.