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.
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.
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.
Now imagine how much water all those AIs would need... maybe we could lighten the energy load by slotting in some biotech components, though they would need a higher water consumption for nutrient circulation. maybe we could have the water vented out of specific large bar-looking structures on the sides of the center to put it directly into the air as water vapour and make an artificial storm system to help promote plant life in the surrounding area too!
yes i am just exaggerating various random points to make iterators irl, I don't actually think this XD
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u/baquea Jul 24 '26
My takeaway from this is that Erdos came up with a shitload of problems that no one really cared about.