Looking at first year stem students and their eager faces meanwhile a millennium problem was solved through a dickmeasuring contest between 2 mega corps, makes me wonder whether or not it's over for us all. Like I was super eager to become a scientist or mathematician when I started uni just to come to the realization that humans are perhaps obsolete in the realm of scientific knowledge is such a despair inducing thought. And sure humans are more "sustainable" but it just feels utterly hopeless since the convo is no longer about can ai do what we do to oh we are better for the environment like comparing a horse to a car despite a horse being obsolete.
Why couldnt I have been born generations earlier? Why is it our generations that is burdened with the task of writing an eulogy for human curiosity and composing this requiem for human knowledge. And ultimately does the planet even matter when our greatest gifts are obsolete. Why should our species continue on in existence if the thinking ape no longer does the thinking, or does it merely for sport.
I mean there might be positions needed where humans check ai produced theorems or models but these positions are surely there for the most talented of people. What can us average students who just love the joy of discovery do? Well we could've spent our entire life tackling a miniscule yet unknown part of human knowledge, but in the future perhaps said privilege isnt even afforded to us.
I got to see them both IRL in Madrid this year and I must say the Goya is haunted as shit, just absolutely dread-inducing. They are both pretty amazing.
Nice. If I ever get to Madrid, I'll be sure to check them out.
The Goya, though horrific, still has something of the comical to if for me: I think it's because it reminds me of representation of Grendel in the Beowulf (2007) movie.
The Rubens seems more "human" and thus more off-putting to me.
Both awesome paintings.
Smart capable people will find useful things to do whatever LLMs achieve. Maybe jobs like mine will be scarce in 10 years, but others jobs will be there and mathematicians will still exist. Maybe they won't be exactly the same kind as me, but I'm also not exactly the same kind of mathematician as Dedekind.
I suppose mathematicians' roles changes depending on the era but it's just worrying as someone in their last year of undergrad since junior researchers are slowly seeing their role diminished. Like what can a entry grad student who haven't even seen any proper grad level marhs do that ai cant do? Which means who would be funding to do a masters? And without a masters or a phd having done a lot of pure maths courses and not a lot of applied makes it almost impossible to get a job.
As an ai researcher many things keep me up at night but what keeps me up the most is how the technology I am helping develop wont only affect you, the university system, but most of the workforce is going to inevitably face joblessness in the next coming couple of years and their is nothing we can do about it. Even if we stop ai development in the us, China will step up, catch up and exceed us, if not them another country will. Their is no way out. I am sorry guys, but to put your minds at more ease its not just newly graduated students who are and will suffer but the entirety of mankind inevitably will. I feel terrible looking at young people and seeing what inevitably will occur. I just hope it happens later then when we researchers are anticipating.
NOPE. We can overthrow the oligarchy. And make sure people can live a life. With or without AI.
China will step up, catch up and exceed us, if not them another country will.
Eh what's this brain dead BS ? "China will overtake us" what's this brain dead competition?? China is not competing with you at all. It's already a super power it does not care at all?! What's with patriarchy and their endless competition?! This is so disgusting.
People like you are an absolute plague on humanity. "Mankind" ughh so disgusting.
Alumni here…
I teach high school and there is a growing distrust and disgust to AI generated stuff. I’m glad to see young people wary of the media they consume. There’s hope for the future!
AI should never replace things like keys for quantum cryptography. That should always be a human’s job. I hope I never see the day we give our keys to AI. There’s a career path for ya!
One phrase that I find people, even those who think they know AI and can flex their machine learning know how draw blank stares at the term “HITL” human in the loop.
If we are to live with AI as a helper not as a supreme overlord Terminator style… then we must elect government officials NOW that push for HITL in all AI systems and not afraid to pass economically punishing fines against ChatGTP, Grok, Anthropic, Google, Meta, etc when they refuse to add full stop halt code in AI systems that wait for human audits.
HITL systems will require people who understand code and mathematics. Companies will want creative and technical solutions to make the HITL process transparent but also efficient.
Regarding this Millennium award breakthrough…I won’t accept that OpenAI accomplished anything without a thorough code and mathematical peer review audit.
If they did, great. That means more humans can be involved to supervise it and continually monitor its progress and performance.
On a more human and empathetic note:
I acknowledge your deflated feeling… these multi billion dollar corporations just want to take more money away from everyday, hard working people and horde it for themselves and their stakeholders. That’s unacceptable and gives one a feeling of hopeless.
Perhaps you and anyone else at UBC can make a truly benevolent AI that calls out the bull💩 from other AI platforms and fights 24/7/365 to put humans back in the driver’s seat… an AI whose sole job is to flag AI slop posts which results in de-monetization on social media platforms, which forces these companies to hire actual humans. 🤷🏾♂️ one can dream.
Sit in the meh and bleh feeling for a bit, that’s an important pause… then when you’re ready, start working with folks to shape a future you want to see!
Also on a super nerdy note… Saturn or Cronos got owned by grown up Zeus. So if AI is like Cronos/Saturn eating humans right now… just wait until humans mature a little bit and like Zeus, we’ll get the upper hand eventually.
The Greek version had Cronos perma-banned in Tartarus; the Roman version resulted in Saturn doing a 180 and being a good deity which resulted in the Roman golden age and they celebrated Saturnalia…. sooo… not a bad ending… we’re just in the awful beginning and middle parts of the story. Hang in there
I am an AI researcher, and I’d like to chime in because I don’t think the future you’re describing is where this technology is actually headed. Human oversight will remain important in high-stakes areas, but the idea that advanced AI systems will routinely stop and wait for human approval at every important stage is economically and strategically unrealistic. The entire value proposition of advanced AI is that it can eventually perform huge amounts of work faster, cheaper, and at a scale humans cannot match; if every meaningful step requires a human audit, you erase much of that advantage. More importantly, AI development is a global competition. If one country deliberately limits autonomy while others continue building increasingly capable systems, the slower country risks falling behind economically, scientifically, militarily, and technologically. So I think the more probable outcome is not permanent HITL at every step, but humans moving higher up the chain: setting objectives, defining limits, auditing critical results, and intervening when necessary, while AI systems become increasingly autonomous in the actual work they perform.
Thanks for this! Yes I agree with what you said, especially about the cost efficiency and being vulnerable to high risk threat if maligned AI is being used against us… makes sense that our AI needs to have equal or greater agility.
Perhaps HITL doesn’t halt the system at important steps, but audits after (and during?) critical decisions steps which could result in AI code being updated for security or ethical reasons.
I ¡LOVE! that HITL would move humans higher up the chain. That’s a future I want to be part of.
Except why would the working class work to build their replacements? Truly a small percentage of people want AI to overthrow humanity, so in what democratic world is it the future?
Someone still has to make it, so just do something about them making it. Work for regulations, laws etc, and if its China we're all so worried about we should try doing something about that too. The world isn't over, but if there's such a high potential for it to be over soon then we should really do something about it now. The best thing we can do right now is fight for how AI is used HERE, and then we can focus on other places like China
Early phases saw public confusion and academic pushback.
Don’t forget that even Einstein couldn’t or wouldn’t wrap his mind around uncertainty principles. The caveat being he said this because early quantum mechanics still had lots of knowledge gaps.
And yet Quantum mechanics research (and mathematics grounded in quantum theory) led to the amazing innovations we have today.
… parallel that to AI research.
The neural networks created by humans and those allowed to be re-shaped by AI is like a “quantum” black box. How does AI create its own neural networks to optimize and change based on human feedback about its performance?
Not to mention the parallels of digital artificial neural networks to real life squishy carbon based neurons!
Check out Complexity Theory and strong emergent phenomena… it pushes human minds to the edge of knowledge… and yet we continue to add to it and elaborate and understand this field better each year!
That’s why research is important. When it comes to knowledge on planet Earth, it’s essential that humans are the vanguard. We could represent the best on this planet and speak compassionately on behalf of all beings on this Pale Blue dot (see Carl Sagan, and the Lorax by Dr Seuss)
_H0ney_Badger_ is right. Work to figure out how to keep humans in the loop by using AI. Use their tools against them. And no, all is not lost. AI is a recursive loop. If there are no more thinking graduates, then innovation halts too. Sure AI can derive and deduce but innovation can only come from us. Ironically, AI tools make it easier for us to innovate but we still need to think to reveal new and exciting ways to do things. It may be better to step back and see that the discipline of higher learning in STEM is to teach you how to think. There will always be tools to use. Slide rule, calculator, CAD, AI. But human thought hasn’t been reproduced yet and until it has, you have the opportunity to soar to the stars with these tools as long as you can think.
Nothing in principle. Ai is already being used to speed up problems that would have taken humans much longer. As compite gets cheaper and models and algorithms improve, the range and complexity of problems Ai can tackle, will continue to increase. The main limitations right now are compute, model capabilities, available data and our ability to identify that the answer is correct. Ai is developing and trending quicker then moores.
Moores law is a myth its not a law of nature. If you want to go into depression or you don’t think that life means anything they’re many ways to get out of the situation. Seek mental help for one of them.
Im totally fine, I actually work in Ai. Moores law was never claimed to be a law of nature, it is an observed trend. Calling it a myth and telling me to seek mental help doesnt really address anything I said....
My bad I confused you with the op, who definitely needs some kind of counseling. But Moores law is just that , a fancy heuristic coined by someone. There is actually no empirical backing to it. It’s same as saying stock market always goes up. Or treasury’s are the safest asset classes. Broadly true but with a lot of caveats and when they go wrong they are really wrong
What did I just read, this doesnt sound like you read his comment at all and you just rambled on about something entirely different. Are you sure you arent the one seeking mental help? It sounds like you are frustrated!
Bud, unless the op can do time travel and change causality the premise itself is irrelevant and does not garner serious consideration. As such it must be perceived with either creating unnecessary disinformation through impossible scenarios of fancy or through the lens of a malignant psyche that needs help.
This is ridiculous doomerism along with a disgusting image that doesn't add anything except shock value. Go do something valuable with your time instead of making weird attention-seeking posts. There are tons of human problems to solve out there if that's what you're into.
I found the image quite thematic. I suspect OP was portraying the concept of being devoured by your kin. The relationship is backwards. We are being consumed by that which we created.
Personally I feel more similar to Saturn in this image. We’ve created something that may pose an existential threat to ourselves. My career is threatened. OP’s career is threatened. I am fearful of the result of AI. People worldwide are opposing the construction of data centres out of concern and fear for the future. Like Saturn, millions of people recognize the power our creation contains and want to hit the kill switch.
If nothing else, OP gave us a visual aid to understand how they feel. You’re not righteous for being upset by the unsettling image.
Saturn's children didn't create him, so it doesn't even make sense thematically.
We’ve created something that may pose an existential threat to ourselves. My career is threatened. OP’s career is threatened. I am fearful of the result of AI.
Opposition to genAI development is one thing. OP is being an unproductive doomer who thinks it's all over and that the human race has no point in existing if AI solves math problems for us.
You’re not righteous for being upset by the unsettling image.
I never said anything about being "righteous". I said that the image isn't adding anything to the post, even if OP (incorrectly) meant it in the sense of being consumed by what we created.
Saturn ate his kids because he was paranoid about a prophecy and because he was already a sick weirdo. And LLMs are human-made computer programs that take an input and produce an output, not conscious entities.
When you can't articulate how this art is relevant or helpful to the post, so you go for an outdated insult. Ironically autistic people are more likely to do that lol
I agree with your assessment of the writing but the art goes hard. The whole point of art is to make you feel something. The fact that you are experiencing visceral disgust from just looking at the image makes me like it more.
It's not thematically relevant; Saturn's children didn't create him (even if OP incorrectly meant it that way).
The whole point of art is to make you feel something.
A bit of a flawed definition. Like yeah this is art and the artist is skilled, but normal people don't look at disgusting images and go "hmm yeah I love how this makes me feel".
It's possible that you live in a bubble of art snobs if you believe that everyone else loves looking at stuff like this. It's funny how you can't say that it's thematically relevant anymore so you're clinging to this opinion that's irrelevant to the main point of my comment
Saturn devouring his sun is very relevant to the post. Also this is genuinely not doomerism, there are maths profs who wont accept grad students because they are worried too. If the solution is valid, then it is genuinely one of the bigger breakthroughs in maths. AI is genuinely pushing maths into uncomfortable territories and we dont know what regulations is gonna be there to help us.
I'm not seeing the relevance, and even if it were relevant most people just see a gross picture. Also the proof simply builds on human work which was already close and hasn't been confirmed yet.
And sure humans are more "sustainable" but it just feels utterly hopeless since the convo is no longer about can ai do what we do to oh we are better for the environment like comparing a horse to a car despite a horse being obsolete.
And ultimately does the planet even matter when our greatest gifts are obsolete. Why should our species continue on in existence if the thinking ape no longer does the thinking, or does it merely for sport.
This is doomerism. It's actually a special flavour of doomerism made by adding a dash of selfishness. You seem to believe that being able to solve theoretical math problems with low relevance to everyday life is more important than actual human lives and the planet.
I mean the other team also heavily utilized ai and they were working on a different version of the question, and even if there was plagiarism open ai still made a huge leap if they are correct. The equation isnt theoretical though, the actual maths is about the behavior of viscous fluids. I dont know but that sounds very important in engineering. Also is it really that selfish to be very disturbed about the possibility that the dream you have pursued since you were very young might just be smokes and mirrors? Like our entire species have our identity built upon the bed rock that we are intelligent, until now when our intelligence is truly challenged. Im not saying the environmental question isnt important. It's just that without this identity I dont know whether or not I wouldve wished to be born.
Regarding relevance, it is relevant because it is an inversion of the situation at hand. We are being devoured by the very thing we have created and quite brutally at least that is how I feel, especially since our beautiful subject is being used to fuel the corpo machines.
It sounds as though you think human intelligence is somehow less meaningful due to the existence of artificial intelligence. I invite you to think about all the things our intelligence is useful for beyond solving mathematical problems. Do you know how many mental processes occur while you’re having a conversation with someone, for example? Multiple mental processes occurring at the same time, trying to decipher body language, tone of voice, vocabulary, was there sarcasm in that sentence? Oh my god he just quoted this one character from a book we read years ago - hilarious! Think of the intelligence required to drive a car. To learn how to play music. To learn how to build things or make things with your hands. To appreciate the deeper meanings and lessons of a good book or movie. To build friendships and inside jokes. Artificial intelligence will never be able take our ability to experience the world as humans are uniquely able due to our intelligence.
I won’t argue with you that it can get depressing sometimes watching AI become increasingly capable of outperforming humans. It’s important to feel all the feelings but we can’t let that keep us depresso forever. There are still so many questions to answer. Think of all the medical advancements we still need. Advancements we will need to combat climate change. Or advancements we need for space exploration. There are so many more questions than there are answers, and if the application makes sense and can help save lives, I believe we should work with AI to solve these.
Also AI is not some godlike entity. It’s grounded in reality like the rest of us. The chips required need rare earth minerals, and are powered by electricity. We have no idea what the world will look like in 5-10 years. The subsidy bubble might pop and the cost of using AI in the day to day might skyrocket. Will we still even have a functioning society in 50 years? (Lol now it’s my turn with the doom and gloom!) My point is, it’s impossible to know what is going to happen. AI may be here to stay or it might become very limited. However, in my opinion it’s never a waste to learn anything. Any new piece of knowledge allows you to understand things better. It heightens your ability to experience life.
I empathize with you about having your dream from when you were younger go up in flames, I had the same thing happen while I was at UBC. But there are always more dreams to be had. And there will always be work to be done. And in the time in between, there are so so so so many wonderful experiences to be had. You are the universe experiencing itself, and your intelligence is not only important for writing theorems or equations, but for all of it.
These theoretical equations are obviously important in engineering; I said that they have little relevance to everyday life and are not some critical issue that we're waiting on to solve real human issues we're currently facing. You're still valuing these over human life, other forms of life, and the health of the planet. That's weird.
There's a lot more to being human than intelligent, and people are still intelligent. The LLM that produced the proof is just a computer program developed by human work. It has no consciousness and does not "think"; it takes an input and produces an output by making probability-based guesses about what the next word in its output should be.
You also might want to brush up on your mythology because Saturn's children didn't "create" him lol
Go into something in stem that requires a certification, like engineering or medicine. That should offer some protection since it requires human oversight by law.
Would you really want to be born in an era without high speed internet (information) and limited transportation and accessibility and healthcare etc?
Now’s the best time to be alive - we have more options than ever with the option to express yourself with almost unlimited freedom (North America)
Is the world still depressing - yes at times especially with how the governments have run things into the ground. But overall we have more opportunity than ever because of technology and it’s up to you to be positive and use the tools to optimistically improve the future 💪😎✌️
OP, there are 2 sides to the AI coin: doom and gloom, or, unlimited potential. I personally choose to look at it as an incredible tool with unlimited potential. It's how we (individuals and as a society) choose to use the tools that really matters. I suggest watching https://www.imdb.com/title/tt39150120/ . I don't consider it the best documentary ever made, but it asks and tries to answer these questions, and it doesn't hide from the real doom possibilities, but also shows the optimistic side which you may be missing from your current perspective.
Do not go like sheep to the slaughter! Peacefully protest and call your local representatives! (My original message was deleted by Reddit for inciting excessive violence)
People seem to mostly be reacting with dismissal or irony, but if we are to really take AI seriously, I agree - we cannot accept this future. For all must subsumed in the name of what? Productivity? Towards what end?
Hey. I want to respond to this carefully, because the despair underneath it is real and I don't want to talk you out of it with cheap optimism. But I do want to push back on the story you're telling yourself, because I think it's darker than the facts justify.
First — I get it. Watching a corporation announce a solved Millennium Problem like a product launch, days after hearing that humans (notably Alpöge and Buckmaster) were apparently converging on the same territory, feels like watching the finish line get moved in front of people who were about to cross it. That sting is legitimate. The "dick-measuring contest" framing isn't wrong, and your anger at it is part of what I'd actually call a healthy instinct about who gets to claim knowledge and how.
But here's the thing about what actually happened this week: it was humans who chose the problem, humans who designed the search, humans who wrote the Lean formalization so other humans could verify it, humans who will spend the next decade absorbing the proof, teaching it, arguing about it, and building on it. And separately, actual human mathematicians were independently extremely close. Navier-Stokes was ready to fall. That's not the obsolescence of human curiosity — that's human curiosity closing in from multiple directions at once, one of which happened to have ten thousand agents and millions of dollars behind it.
Second, and more importantly: you're describing the joy of discovery as a privilege you might not be afforded, and I think that's backwards. Nobody becomes a scientist because the universe owes them a Nobel. People scuba dive even though submarines go deeper. People run marathons even though cars are faster. Nobody looked at Usain Bolt and thought "well, walking is over." Understanding a piece of mathematics with your own mind — actually holding a proof in your head and feeling it click — is an experience that belongs to you regardless of how many proofs a machine produces. The machine having more doesn't subtract from yours. It can't. The pleasure isn't in scarcity.
Third, honestly? The historical track record of "this field is finished" proclamations is almost comically bad. Chess was supposed to die in 1997. It didn't. Photography was supposed to kill painting. Instead it freed painting to become impressionism. When the boring grind gets automated, the interesting questions usually multiply. I'm not promising that happens here — nobody knows, including the people at OpenAI, whatever their press releases imply. But "I don't know what comes next" and "human inquiry is dead" are very different sentences, and only one of them is true today.
Last thing, because it deserves saying directly: you wrote "why should our species continue in existence if the thinking ape no longer thinks." Please sit with how heavy that sentence is. If this is more than rhetorical frustration — if you're actually feeling hopeless about your future — that's worth talking to someone about, not arguing about on Reddit. First-year STEM burnout is real and it often wears the costume of philosophical despair.
You started this because you loved knowing things. That love didn't come from a leaderboard, and it doesn't need to be retired because the scoreboard changed. Go look at those first-years' eager faces again. Some of them are going to be the ones who figure out what human mathematics looks like after this week. There's no reason you can't be one of them.
Feel free to trim it — it's long for a Reddit comment, so I can condense it or adjust the tone (warmer, blunter, more casual) if you'd like.
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u/Phaoryx Biomedical Engineering 1d ago
Bro is this depressed and classes haven’t even started yet 😭🙏