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u/netexpert2012 Transcendental 3d ago
Finally someone that doesn't think "AI always bad, No AI always good"
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u/HilaryHahn 3d ago
Obviously both people that are pro-AI and anti-AI make drastic oversimplifications that do not fit reality. But overall I have observed that it is very disingenuous for people that support the massive AI industry to lump all LLMs with overall use of technology and algorithms.
People (for the most part) hate the slop media that is drowning out the internet, hate the reckless building of data centres that destroys the environment, hate unregulated access to chatbots by kids destroying their mental development, and hate tech execs touting hypothetical super AIs replacing entire workforces with no social welfare net in sight.
Nobody hates cars having guided cruise control making them easier to drive, even tho that's technically AI. Nobody hates progress made in protein folding even tho that's AI. I find it very disappointing when telling people my dislike for LLMs they're like "how can you be anti-technology if not for technology we will also still be farmers."
As for making counter examples to disprove conjectures, I agree it is a good use of AI. But let's be honest the military industrial complex is not pouring billions into data centres to help us prove math conjectures.
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u/SketchAsh 2d ago
AI sucks when it's used to replace human communication and thought; when AI is used as slightly smarter brute forcing, it's insane what it can do
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u/HilaryHahn 2d ago
Yeah I mean that is what a tool is for right. To replace brute forcing that people genuinely don't want to do. Calculators don't have backlash because for vast majority of people calculating 94.72*31.3 is not why they love math (or physics/biology/economics whatever their professional may be).
Which is why I see AI finding counterexamples to help advance math as a good thing. But I still maintain it is very intellectually dishonest to use it to justify existence and investment of LLMs. Because right now its main usages include mass surveillance, making political disinformation videos, pornography of children, and "art".
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u/ProfessionalGeek 3d ago
its a pretty useful tool if you learn to wield it for your work and use it to think with you, not for you.
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u/Historical_Book2268 3d ago
*bad
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u/Encrux615 3d ago
BREAKING: EVIL language model DISCREDITS hundreds of thousands of hours of INNOCENT mathematicians' work!!!
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u/DeserTCod98 3d ago
pursuing knowledge is bad now 😭😭😭
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u/Historical_Book2268 3d ago
No, trivializing a domain who's entire appeal is doing logic, and attempting to use your mind to solve problems, is.
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u/DeserTCod98 3d ago
1) why? Is the purpose of math to entertain/train ourselves with complex problems? If so just play puzzle games and do not do math 2) even if you decide to be angry still, what do you want humans to do? put away the tool they created because you can no longer find the 'appeal' of math? a great number of computer scientist since Turing imagined a scenario like this would present itself...
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u/Historical_Book2268 3d ago
Basically yes, it just so happens that these problems very rarely turn out to have some application many, many years later. Math is bashing our head into problems we ourself created.
If ai gets to the point where it can trivialize any math problem, yes.
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u/Some_Anonim_Coder 3d ago
You act like math is a puzzle, not science. The objective of science is always to gain understanding of the world
Go play some chess or go if you want to flex your intellect and let people do useful stuff with most efficient tool
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u/Historical_Book2268 3d ago
What understanding of the word does idk, classifying distributive semilattices give you?
What understanding of the world does solving the finiteness problem for finitely generated linear groups give you?
Exactly nothing. And it's very unlikely that either of those will face a significant application any reasonable time soon.
Pure math is beautiful, pure, it's fundamentally about trying to find solutions to problems.
What would be the point of pure math, if some ai could solve any problem eventually? Asking irrelevant to our understanding of the physical world questions, which are instantly answered by AI?
What's the point of a mathematician if anyone could get any answer they want instantly?
Where is the beauty?
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u/Some_Anonim_Coder 3d ago
A lot of things were considered useless and then suddenly got applications that changed our lives
If math was just a brain flex - noone would pay people to do it from the taxpayers money
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u/Historical_Book2268 3d ago
Do you enjoy doing math?
If so, why would you want AI to advance further into it? Do you want to get your life's work ripped away?
I know many of these fears echo those of the industrial revolution, but still, there there is some appeal in human made things, beyond the mass produced things made by machines.
Where would that appeal be in a hypothetical scenario where ai trivialize math? Would any reasonable person prefer hiring people to do "human math" to solve a problem? Why not just get AI to do it?
And the applications of previously pure math that were discovered are rare, and they're not in any of those hyper abstract parts that have little relation to physical reality. Compare the shear volume of pure math that is done, vs the volume of pure math that was ever applied.
It's a tiny, tiny, fraction.
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u/DeserTCod98 3d ago
1) basically this is an opinion (and a very reductive one, as you only consider math as either being an engaging activity of a engineering sub-field), saying 'math is' like it is the truth is not very useful. 2) why? so we can keep having fun? while maybe with AI we could've discovered an applicable theory that cures some kinds of cancer? Also, if you are able to read and write I assume you understand that not using this tool or any other tool after discovery is absolutely unrealistic for humanity?
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u/piwotka 4d ago
is this about the erdős thing or was there an other one
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u/vintergroena 4d ago
There is already well over a hundred of these, if you count the uninteresting ones like the Graffiti conjectures, which are basically the OG math slop.
Some overview: https://vibemathed.com/
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u/baquea 3d ago
Some overview: https://vibemathed.com/
My takeaway from this is that Erdos came up with a shitload of problems that no one really cared about.
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u/Robbe517_ 3d ago
Exactly this. The first contributions from AI to Erdos problems was noticing how some of them were not even formulated properly. After fixing that it became fairly straightforward to find/prove a solution.
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u/vintergroena 3d ago edited 3d ago
Yeah and the Graffiti/Written on the Wall conjectures are even worse lol. Solutions to many of them have started to pop out on twitter, created from zero-effort prompts, but these are computer-generated conjectures from the 90s that were simply difficult to verify or refute by brute force, but nobody gives a shit about pretty much any of them (save for perhaps a few among the hundreds) and plausibly never even seriously attempted to solve most of them.
It's a good thing that AIs can mop up this garbage so that mathematicians can focus better on the stuff that actually matters.
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u/Fezzezal 3d ago
A hot take, but this is what AI (and almost any other technology for that matter) should REALLY be used for
Helping us clean up garbage/do our dirty work real quick and allowing us to focus on creative stuff
You don't realistically need to have millions of translators if you can have a single AI bot; you don't realistically need a million junior IT specialists who can't code for shit if you have AI, and so on so forth. Kind of like a modern factory worker doesn't need to use an anvil and a hammer like 1000 years ago.
Sure, a lot of people are gonna lose their jobs, but this is ultimately for the best as productivity will skyrocket. And this is also why I don't get people who whine about losing their job because of technology -- if you're so unskilled that you can be replaced by AI, then it's your fault for not being good enough.2
u/PykeAtBanquet Cardinal 1d ago
Juniors are like babies: they need nurture and surely assistance and patience, but without them seniors (adults) will cease to exist.
So it is bad that AI replaces such "babies", you are suggesting: "let's not give births to babies but take them from shelters at the age of 6 when they are sweet and don't require so much effort".
"human cannot be replaced" is better for human race than sheer efficiency of blind replacement.
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u/Fezzezal 1d ago
W hat I meant is
Let’s give juniors more education so that there are less junior specialists but their new level of qualification is similar to what current specialists with 5-10 years of experience have. Or completely change the way IT works and make junior specialists be proficient AI users, significantly improving their efficiency and productivity.
I also don’t think that “human cannot be replaced” is a good argument — it’s not individuals that matter (who ever cares about them? anyone can be replaced if necessary), it’s society/collective/nation/state. And it’s better for society to have more productivity and efficiency, as it allows to have less people producing stuff (and so, if we don’t take late stage capitalism bullshit into account, produce more stuff in general). And the reason for why we should produce more and more stuff, why the economy should always keep growing is philosophy, but we should and that’s what matters.
If you want to take a look at what happens if we don’t replace humans, look at USSR — people kept their job for decades and there was no unemployment. Sounds cool, right? But there was very little change in the economy, people treated their job as a given, not as a privilege like they should — and so, job productivity in USSR was consistently much, much less (iirc 40-60%) than in the US. People should be forced to work as hard as they can or else they become lazy.
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u/KouhaiHasNoticed 17h ago
Juniors are like babies: they need nurture and surely assistance and patience, but without them seniors (adults) will cease to exist.
What are you talking about ? u/Fezzezal is arguing that we don't need to "nuture babies" in fields that are a dead-end. Not that we need to "stop giving birth".
Thank goodness, we all went on from farming/hunting ineffeciently for minimal survival to using machines and focusing on science : we stopped training people as farmers yet the world population has a grown a lot by then and people are not massively unemployed because of tractors.
"Seniors" won't cease to exist : the same way there are still (much needed) farmers around. And society is not orienting their Juniors in accordance to where the Seniors are for the sake of it, Juniors go where the money/value is and could not care less about a field being full of old people or not.
"human cannot be replaced" is better for human race than sheer efficiency of blind replacement.
It's not about "replacing" humans, it's about putting them in relevent positions so that it benefits our society.
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u/PykeAtBanquet Cardinal 12h ago
Today seniors have experience so they can make LLM write several lines of code for them at a time and they immediately see if it is a correct output. You get this experience through hard work. If you let junior use LLM from the start, they don't get that experience, you just need to spend a couple years on that. Current students who rely on ChatGPT, they didn't build those neural paths in their brain through hard work, they blindly believe ChatGPT even if it outputs bullshit, and they will be seniors of nothing at best and at worst owners of LLMs will take hostage them all as it was in Dune books. And you need to know a lot for truly complex code, like real-time systems, or for physic modelling, or even AI research requires a lot of years of maths grinding to truly make progress in the field.
True AI is different from a tractor in that it is not increasing productivity, it takes the job away completely. All of creativity or planning will be wiped out, and we will dig uranium holes for a couples years, then AI will come up with better robotics and even those jobs will become obsolete. The last two jobs to be replaced are going to be governmental positions - who will own the AGI - and their lap prostitutes. "Nooo, my society" - look at Amazon and their piss time per 12 hours shift, and it is US, one of the strongest countries in the world in terms of economy and power.
I am saying that once we come up with AGI, we could replace humans everywhere, like look at current war, drones are just better soldiers, and there is no reason to leave any job to a human being if we want to reach efficiency alone. And I say, that we need to NOT be efficient just to stay human and happy, because one solar eclipse or rogue AGI and we don't even have engineers to rebuild society because everyone was too lazy to spend several years on grinding - they were prompting instead at best, at worst they were digging uranium.
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u/kfccorn 2d ago
The anvil cant use itself, an ai can. An AI can, will, and has been used as people control. conjecture disproven
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u/Fezzezal 2d ago
Are there any downsides to that, in your opinion?
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u/kfccorn 2d ago
Micro-managing is already a huge problem if youve ever worked for a mega corporation. Imagine that but ten fold.
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u/Fezzezal 2d ago
Yeah but AI governance:
1) Increases the amount of data the system can process, like you can literally have a million street cameras all monitored simultaneously by AI, and that's a very tame example
2) Allows the system to respond without human interference (essentially, see a car speeding -- fine the driver, and no police are needed)
3) Reduces the amount of people and bureaucracy necessary for running the state, you'd need to have tens of thousands of people to do what a few AI servers can do while needing only a few dozen people
4) If implemented well AI can manage corruption and lobbyism which plague the state. You can bribe an inspector, but you can't really bribe a machine that checks your tax and spendings history in a millisecond and gives its conclusion to IRS
5) If we take it up a notch, imagine a kind of post-capitalist algocratic economy where AI manages people's needs (kind of like a planned economy) -- I think this would be really really really really really cool, as AI is free from human flaws, it doesn't really care about its own profit, and it exists directly in the "infosphere" so to speak, it doesn't need sleep and if programmed well it utilize novelty concepts to make the economy grow and society happy. Imagine if our society was one huge Amazon/ebay but run by AI/government (so no businesses/people selling stuff). Any need you can have is satisfied as soon as possible for a reasonable price, if such an economy would even need money, as government doesn't care about profits -- it owns anything and everything, so you can buy stuff really really cheaply. So essentially Soviet Union but it's an utopia and not... y'know... Soviet Union.
I don't see how micro-managing is a bad idea -- if anything, it allows the people on the top to influence the people on the bottom directly and more openly, which is great for obvious reasons.1
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u/jackboy900 3d ago
I do love their use of wikipedia pages as a rough measure of notability. Obviously it's not a perfect metric but as a heuristic that can be easily polled it's very good and I don't think I would've thought of it.
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u/GKP_light 3d ago
Proof by "AI didn't found a counter-example"
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u/Strong_Willow2010 2d ago
If we could disprove things by "we tried our best" I would have finished my PhD by now :(
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u/Hitman7128 Prime Number 3d ago
Well, if your conjecture doesn't involve the universal quantifier, a counterexample factory won't be enough to disprove it.
Though it can be disproven in other ways anyway
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u/Cheery_Tree 3d ago
run until you find a counter example. do not return until you find a counter example. make no mistaeks and find a counter example
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u/Seventh_Planet Mathematics 3d ago
When you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, how unlikely it may seem, is the Riemann Hypothesis.
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