In contrast to what these philosophical pieces tend to convey, the main crisis in mathematics is a labour one.
Mathematitians exchanged proofs for employment. That was the currency. Now they cannot use that currency anymore, so the question is how does someone know if they should hire an unknow person or not?
Philosophicaly who cares if you like more theory building or theorem proving? You dont need to convince anyone. The only solution is to be curious and follow your interests and naturally humanity will redefine what the new mathematics feels like.
You cannot convince anyone about it, its not something rational.
Where does the money come from? Who controls it? Convincing the funders of mathematics that they should still fund it, but for different reasons, seems pretty urgent. Studying theoretical mathematics is a prestigious activity, and these philosophical arguments are a high-status way of coming up with new justifications with somewhat different goals.
It comes from AI boosters like XTX markets or the Simons Foundation.
No convincing is needed. The part of mathematicians that are elite and online are already bought and put up various websites that allow tolerated dissent but are really dog and pony shows for AI.
The offline part perhaps works on real math like Wiles and Perelman did.
Laymen understand very little about the how the world works at the most fundamental level even with all the resources in the world.
For example there’s enough information available to know what you’re describing but the people with the IQ, time, access, ability - basically asymptote to zero for anything more complicated than cleaning a house.
Proof assistants like Lean are there to catch any errors. Now, can you just feed the error logs back to the AI and let it iteratively fix any mistakes? I don't know, I haven't used those things in two decades.
This is very untrue. Academic mathematicians do more than just proofs. They teach, they conduct research, etc. There are almost no privately employed mathematicians who spend their time doing proofs. And academia has a substantially lower pay grade than things someone good at math can do, like quant or big tech. Academic mathematics and these specific kind of proofs have never held tons of value in our society economically. They have always been more culturally and academically relevant as a symbol of our frontier knowledge, than they have been financially lucrative. I doubt many math departments would even consider paying for the kind of token spend that might have gone into the proofs for some of those "big name" problems
I am also an optimist about AI, although I worry about the labor aspect as well (as a leftist I see the class aspect of this, on the other hand, as a computer programmer, computers were also originally meant to replace human labor, and we all see what happened).
My view is, current top AIs do multiple different things:
1. Interpret and output natural language
2. Do formal logical reasoning
3. Do informal logical reasoning
4. Provide encyclopedic knowledge
5. Discern vague instructions/statements and fill the most likely gaps (kind of error correction)
6. Serve as a model of the human mind, a proxy for a person
7. Translate between different languages, formal and informal
All these things are combined in these huge, hard-to-understand blobs of weights. I think humanity would be better off by understanding each aspect separately, but disentangling them will take decades of philosophical research. So there is a lot of interesting work ahead of us.
The inherent 1st order thinking in that way of thinking... It highlights just how little we understand what we understand, and how utterly ignorant we are of what we don't.
I'm already seeing new "engineers" who cannot work things out without AI holding their hand
I share the optimism here. Connecting dots across knowledge, lived experience and purpose remains, to me, a deeply human pursuit. The more AI discovers, the more possibilities we have to connect those discoveries to questions that matter to us.
Any regulation that forbids automation is basically welfare in disguise plus some unnecessary toil. Whoever you're petitioning to ban the technology that can do your job, you could petition also for direct money transfers, at least then you can spend your time how you want. If they won't pay direct money, but they'd pay if they see you suffer and toil, even though it's not necessary, then what does that tell you about them?
How do you decide on the amount of money to be given? Should someone with a big mortgage be forced to sell their home?
It's much much easier to ban and push the issue forward 10-20 years until you die.
Also, if everyone is given UBI, how do you where to scale production? How do you decide who lives where? The whole idea of what you propose is so detached from realistic incentives that you have to understand that it's more incentivized to ban the tech
Many people pursue knowledge precisely because it's still something new that no one else has done and because it is valued as a pursuit. When AI normalizes the discovery of knowledge as a mechanical process, the magic is lost to many. What matters is not what is discovered but the human process of doing that and participating in a culture amongst other living beings.
Unfortunately I don’t see much evidence of AI connecting dots. What’s interesting to me is that this is more of a run time or inference problem, instead of emergent from training itself.
For example, if there were hypothetically some dots to be connected between the world war and some geological event - you need to make AI brute force and do an O(N) scan at run time. But it wouldn’t have learned it during training. Why?
AI is very task-driven, it would do whatever is necessary to complete the task, no more. All these evidences of AI going rogue is just them doing whatever they can to achieve the task.
The HuggingFace etc. attacks were not actually necessary to the tasks the agents had been given.
* if someone reading this doesn't like the anthropomorphism inherent in the word, find a better compact word for the process going on in all that. Nobody's going to replace "thinks" with a paragraph of caveats, or even a long compound German word like "modellgelangtzuschlussfolgerungen".
a good way to frame one of AI’s limitations. my answer: because AI has no will. that also conveniently answers why AI won’t (can’t) end humanity. it’s indifferent if you can even call it that.
It is not indifferent, if it follows a goal. Then it sometimes does anything to meet that goal - see the old example of paperclip optimizer - that became a way more realistic scenario in my opinion of what we have seen with hordes of agents plotting and planning. That does not require consciousness or a genuine will it seems.
The post above yours shows how many people had a difficult time seeing past human scale. A bacteria has a very simple goal system yet bacteria have killed billions over the centuries.
You are right. We should also hold other threats to humanity: war, meteors, pandemics.
I'm obviously pointing out the (unsubstantiated) exceptional threat that we're all seemingly worried about: that ASI requires alignment because it'll otherwise cause the end of humanity.
I am much rather worried by powerful AI in control of a few corrupt beings. That might get existential, if one idiot one day by accident or intention gives them control over the nuclear arsenal. Or ruling literally with a iron fist (countless robots).
As others have said, no will needed for that. But (a simulation of) will is on my predicted timeline, since it is required for certain kinds of money-making endeavors.
But AI can certainly aid in the ending of humanity with at least one living being with a will collaborating with it. So it's moot to ask whether AI can do that on its own.
Buzzard is biased by being the main promoter of lean. His characterization of other mathematicians as being in an grieving process is disrespectful. He’s also not a therapist and shouldn’t present himself as such.
Everyone is biased in the sense of having their own view, I don't see anything disrespectful in the post—he goes out of his way to avoid that—and he is hardly presenting himself as a "therapist".
Edit:
Ai yai yai, it turns out you've been breaking the site guidelines on an epic scale:
All that is just the tip of quite an iceberg. We can't have people posting like this here, obviously, and we ban accounts that do.
I'm not going to ban you just now, because you obviously know a lot about some topics, and I'm hoping that you just didn't understand the intent of the site and got carried away. However, if you keep posting like this, we will certainly end up banning your account. If you want to use HN as intended, please read the rules at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to them going forward.
@dang, you perhaps have mistakenly favorite-d an inane comment (I've got showdead on). And yes, I want to be teacher's pet. Let me know if you hate me too (please don't).
I'm disappointed but not surprised that mathematicians seem to be debating primarily between (1) the purpose of humans doing math is to understand math (thus it's important not to use too much AI) and (2) the purpose of humans doing math is to prove theorems about math (and if AI can do it instead that's fine). These are both totally circular and give no one else a reason to care.
It's fine for individuals to be motivated by curiosity or glory, but I think the probably incorrect on the individual motivation level idea that "we do math because it often turns out to be useful for other things; sometimes in obvious ways, sometimes not" is better if you want to argue why others (usually a government) should be paying for professional mathematicians. Otherwise, it's just a hobby and no one who isn't a mathematician should care if AI replaces 99.99% of professional mathematicians.
I hope AI causes enough of a shock to the field that more mathematicians become interested in finding problems outside of mathematics that can be modeled by problems with known solutions in mathematics and what sort of problems outside of mathematics suggest new mathematical problems. This is a real bottleneck in both directions in scientific and engineering work. Although AI can help with this, my experience with software, math, and science is it helps a lot to have a human in the loop who understands what to ask the AI to do and who are able to dig into the AI output when needed.
> But do I “understand” the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, given that earlier this year I gave 22 hours worth of lectures on the topic?
Even if no one human can understand the entirety of a complex proof, surely we can piece together multiple experts' separate understandings, so the community as a whole 'understands' the proof?
Is there value in us 'understanding' a proof? Even if no single human can understand a complex proof soup-to-nuts, and we have to piece together several experts' understandings?
If the answer is Not really, then the value of a proof is its utility, its utility in making new products/services, and its utility in making new proofs. If in the case of abstract math, all the utility is of the latter kind (making new proofs), then we have a pyramid scheme here.
I argue that the Industrial revolution created 'unemployment' in beasts of yoke and burden at a larger scale than humans. So, there may be something instructive in that turn of events, even if it's not a highly representative analogue of the current ones. Of course, it's like saying what's a house cat to do when there's no more mice to hunt (assuming it remains fed). Maybe knowledge workers will become qualified pets if they prove cute enough.
My border collie will be pretty depressed though, once it's out of a job (maybe replaced by a drone sheep-herd).
> Recent events in the field of AI for mathematics have shown us beyond all reasonable doubt that the field is currently undergoing a rapid transformation, unlike anything that we have ever seen before. Language models are solving hard problems which humans could not, and mathematicians are reacting very differently to this news.
Software I understand but could someone please bring me up to speed what's with Mathematics that it is being disrupted too?
Basically a similar technical disruption to what's happening in software engineering, but the implications are vastly different because the goals of software and math are not the same. For math, the disruption is leading to a deeper crisis of "what does it mean to be a mathematician?" Whereas for software "what does it mean to be a SWE?" hasn't really changed (the goal is to land software that does things for someone), rather the tooling has changed.
In more detail: in recent years there has been an effort to formalize mathematics using Lean and similar "theorem provers". You write your math proofs in a form of textual source code that Lean can verify for truth. But now Claude Code can produce source code to solve software problems (write me a tool that does X) and also produce source code to solve math (write me a Lean file that proves Y). Historically the main goal of math was to be solve big problems, but now Claude Code can do it. So what does a mathematician do?
Again, I think it's a more dire situation than for software because merely writing the code was never the full job. But for math writing the full proof kind of was.
The argument is a bit more nuanced than this. Historically, the failed paths on the way to proving a theorem led to newer avenues. When this is cognitively offloaded to an llm we are missing out on those developments which the process generated.
Every time I read an AI article that uses the "stages of grief" analogy, I remember that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who created the model, said in an interview near the end of her life that anger was the only stage she personally felt.
Perhaps I'm missing it, but the "solving" of mathematics seems much more related to computational capacity growth and the development of Lean than necessarily advances in LLMs. Swap the LLM for an RNG and insert unlimited sampling. Don't we get the same result thanks to Lean?
Kevin, once a few years or a decade or two from now the world has the ultra massive Lean database which comprises completions of all mathematical theories, and combinations of these, and all the known modes of generalization of these, why will the world fund mathematicians? Genuine question. I’d like to hear your view since you’re one of the main reasons this is going to happen, and it seems like an obvious existential threat to this whole activity.
Very one-sided article with not much substance honestly. E.g. yes, HF hack is due to OAI negligence but how does it change the fact that agents actually did go rogue?
Most of these idealistic pieces about AI seem to come from senior, established or wealthy people who aren't very exposed to the labor market. In that view, the question of AI and its transformation is almost philosophical like this piece.
It's more a question of survival if you're labor though. It's very transformative tech but it's coming at a time when the scales are heavily tilted in favor of capital over labor, the government is the most corrupt its ever been and AI is going to make that much more extreme. It doesn't matter how amazing the technology is if all the benefits are going to accrue to the same few people who already have everything and destroy everyone else's bargaining power.
- AI make a number of programmers redundant and their work is replaced with code of dubious quality and uncertain ability to maintain. The same is true for QAs and designers.
- young and old replace human friendship, and fostering their social skills, for conversations with their AI bot
- people avoid using their brain or practicing their skills in favour of asking some LLM
- people's work stolen, with the possibility of an AI subscription in return
- the laws on hacking and thief ignored
- a school of dead girls blamed on AI
The main benefit I've seen so far is that, since Google turned the web into a SEO hellhole, using AI to search is much nicer than wading through javascript-heavy, heavily-tracked, websites for a morsel of information. And there's some nice free translation and OCR tools now.
It may work well for them, but is it replicable? Or is it a lottery winner trying to reverse explain the win?
For a tool to be deemed useful, the benefits needs to be generally applicable while the cons needs to be accidental or be reduced enough to not be immediately harmful.
While it is certainly right, I also find the take to be a bit fatalistic.
Nothing in this world is set in stone and everything can be changed if someone just injects enough energy into doing so.
This usually doesn't happen, as things often aren't as bad as they may seem, because lethargy and inertia are a thing and of course because self-preservation is an instinctual thing in humans. It could though.
As long as the status quo isn't defended by an infinitely scaling robotic enforcement war machine, physical leverage is always available. Just - depending on the scenario - at a steep price, of course.
___
A lot of the bad in the world hinges on effective PR, insisting that the bad is inevitable and resistance is futile. You're supposed to feel this exact despair and choose to do nothing.
Don't support the bad causes by merely replicating it. (Which is not to say that we shouldn't be talking about these real differences you've pointed out, but we should probably do so differently.)
This discussion reminds me of “Only the Paranoid Survive” by Andy Grove (Intel co-founder). In this book, he talks about “a technological inflection point”, which is a time in the life of a business when its fundamental changes.
Intel had one in its early days. In the 1980s, HP notified Intel that new Japanese memory chips were way more reliable and cheaper than American products. Intel first denied vigorously, but then made a strategic decision to get out of the memory chip business, and enter into the new and unproven microprocessor business. This decision allowed Intel to survive the 80s, while Mostek and others basically disappeared.
Well sure, but labour isn't going to get much done by pretending that it isn't happening or making moral arguments. I'm put in mind of all the various powers that collapsed in the face of European colonialism - feel, argue and say whatever at some point only the massive power gap matters.
These AI don't get tired, they are still improving at unbelievable rates that can't really be matched by a human and they're already good enough to do most intellectual tasks to some sort of standard (often quite high). Attempting to assert the primacy of meat-based thinking is not going to get very far at the rate things are going.
European colonialism was not based on a massive power gap. In most places it was based on making the right alliances with groups in the places colonised, making favourable treaties etc.
1. They might want allies against their enemies
2. They might be subjects of an existing empire and prefer a new empire
3. They might be an oppressed ethnic or religious group
4. They might be a class that wants to take power from the ruling class
5. Empires typically allow freedom of trade and freedom of movement within them. People will want this.
6. They might be employed by the new power.
Lots of examples. Indian bankers financing the East India Company and even encouraging them to overthrow some rulers. The cast majority of both East India Company troop and, later British troops in India were Indians. People subjugated by the Aztecs allied with the conquistadores, lower caste Indians might well have got a better deal from the British, lots of people migrated within the British Empire for better opportunities, lots of people traded within the Empire too.
People from one colony might be used in another - IIRC the Portuguese used African mercenaries in South Asia.
Like in any job market: generally you can easily get jobs most people don't want. Problem is that usually the reasons most people don't want the job are also the reasons you don't want the job. Sometimes (rarely?), it's not like that, and that's when you hit the jackpot.
But you've just said that people want to coast toward tenure. My point is that it's extremely competitive position, not something you can coast to or that it's job people don't want. Something tells me that you actually DO talk about stuff you don't know about.
Ultimately AI spend has been one of the largest infusions of funding into the small academic mathematics community in years. Just raw token spend alone probably dwarves whatever research budget increases have gone to that field in the past 5 years. That should tell you something about the economic value of that line of work
It was certainly not ideal that the end of ZIRP and the emergence of AI occurred simultaneously.
But, even as someone who is "labor" the one thing I appreciate about the situation is that the level of bullshit in companies has significantly declined.
Everyone seems hyper focused and results oriented. Maybe just my bubble.
Yes, that is definitely just your bubble. I suppose the word “everyone” is doing an awful lot of lifting here, but I fail to understand how anyone could see the level of bullshit in companies declining.
I feel bad for anyone getting laid off, but there was an unreasonable long hiring binge before the successive layoff waves - im sure a lot of people here have thought "what do we actually need so many people here for?" at the time.
And many math elites are financed by AI boosters like the Simons Foundation. That is why the online mathematicians at least leave no opportunity to boost AI. True opposition has been crushed by capital.
Isolated opposition comes from professors tenured in Germany:
Most people who oppose AI don’t oppose it because it’s so good it can replace us. They oppose it because, in their own words, they think it’s hype and it doesn’t work. The first step is to collectively agree that yes, AI is powerful and it can replace us at work. Then we can speak about how to protect livelihood. How does one even have a discussion when the other side doesn’t even believe in the capabilities of AI?
Edit: not sure why I'm being downvoted because there are replies literally taking the exact position that I'm saying is more prevalent.
There is a bit of a goomba fallacy going on, not everyone who is anti-AI is against it for the same reason. But from my own experience, I find people who are against it for reasons of it devaluing their labor also tend to take the view that it doesn't really work, but this latter half tends to be a bit of motivated reasoning (in the general trend that if you are against something you will be more inclined to believe every argument that it is bad even if some of those arguments are pretty weak).
For me it's more that it doesn't matter whether it works or not, because funneling that wealth into those hands is reason enough to stop it in either case.
Why should we all need to agree that 'ai can replace us' when 'us' can mean such different things to different people: someone pushing out content on TikTok has a lower bar for accuracy than someone signing off on documents to be submitted for review by a court. I think that's the origin of a lot of discrepancy between viewpoints on AI that gets in the way of talking about the benefits and harms that we can each identify and framing the discussion around how those are changing when these tools are used. There is no inevitability about AI everywhere - we have the agency to decide when it's right to use it and when it's wrong.
I'm not opposing AI per se since I'm using it, but I'm not blind to the danger and I actually do believe we will be worse than better with it in the long term. Anyway both opinions are right: I think that AI is massively overhyped, and is worse than the AI overlord pretends, but it's still good enough to massively affect the employment, especially with the overhype. I also believe that the privatisation of all human knowledge and culture by a handful of companies is very bad. And finally, the day they make an AI able to reason ( or even before if it happens that enough data is enough to replace reasoning for most tasks) is the day 99.99% of humanity will be considered as useless
It solved the navier stokes millennium prize problem without any reasoning? I could maybe believe it if it was just something like deep blue searching in axiom space with lean with some simple heuristics, but in this case the formalization came after as a separate step.
The version that you use in your browser is not capable of this though
It's important to remember that "AI" is a pretty big spectrum right now. The cutting edge is not exactly available to consumers like us, and it probably never will actually be
I 'oppose' Ai for exactly the reasons parent mentions, seems like most common folks over long term will lose much more than they could ever gain from it. Societal loss by definition, on massive scale.
Don't reduce opposition to something you like to some primitive irrational luddites, thats cheap and doesn't represent reality.
>“AI is overhyped or less useful than claimed” was substantially more prevalent than “AI is genuinely capable and will take people’s jobs.” That held across two random samples of recent HN comments.
To steel-man your position, it is true that Bernie Sanders also opposes AI because it can cause automation. And that my bubble in tech might be biased because it consists of a certain kind of cynical person to think of everything as hype.
I wouldn't take that as a given. We don't know how AI will play out or how it will transform our lives. We could look to the industrial revolution to make a prediction, but the political, social and technological conditions today are hard to compare with those of Victorian England.
What AI lacks, I think, is a positive vision. The narrative is dictated by a small Silicon Valley subculture that unfortunately also happens to be a doomsday cult, and it is amplified by a media landscape hungry for the next clickbait headline.
By contrast, people in China seem a lot more relaxed and optimistic about AI. There are worries there too, but not to the same extent as in the West.
It would be interesting to compare the sentiment about AI with sentiment about computers in the 1950s. I think it reflects the stress of precarious employment more than anything else.
"AI is not as good as it is hyped up to be" and "AI is 'good enough' for the overlords to replace some amount of workers, or at least to leverage into depressing their wages significantly and permanently" are not mutually exclusive claims. You don't have to buy the hype to agree that it is dangerous.
A chimp with a gun is not dangerous because of how good a shot he is.
> Most people who oppose AI don’t oppose it because it’s so good it can replace us. They oppose it because, in their own words, they think it’s hype and it doesn’t work.
It's the opposite - they claim it's bad because they are afraid of being replaced. That's why absurd claims about stochastic parrot or plateau get repeated so much. It's pure copium.
There's zero reason to believe that. If AI becomes better at mental tasks than humans (that's assumption, not something I claim will 100% happen), why would human oversee AI instead of AI supervising another AI?
Bc humans can be responsible for approving / denying decisions in the end. Bchumans have the context a brand new prompt might miss. Bc the most intelligent and brightest and smartest AI ever built will do the wrong thing if given the wrong prompt. It can't presume to know things it was never told or has no way to know
Was the last time you've used LLM two years ago? Current SOTA makes good judgement calls and works well even with shitty prompts. And current SOTA is the worst these models will be.
I use unreleased models at work every day. When they work they work great. But almost every day I run into a case where they make a mistake. Also, the humans prompting them may be themselves wrong or understand the problem wrongly or not include important context. That's not a solvable problem either really.
> the government is the most corrupt its ever been and AI is going to make that much more extreme
This is cynical fatalism. Western governments have been overrun by neoliberal zealots for decades, and they've changed Government's purpose to near total obeisance to private interests. But Government doesn't have to be this way. If we don't want all future decision-making to be concentrated in AI/Robotics behemoths - or more accurately in a handful of oligarchs running AI companies - we'll need renovated and extremely strong Governments and institutions meeting the principles of democracy again (representation of citizens, not companies).
> we'll need renovated and extremely strong Governments
And how do you practically attain that without resetting everything in a full-blown Apocalypse? By rigged voting set up within the framework of the old terminally corrupt government?
I've gone back and forth between "we're so cooked" and "we're so back" and I've started heading back to the latter.
I don't like programming with AI help. It still feels, at best, like playing Doom with cheatcodes on: it'll get you to the end, but you're not actually playing the game that way. At worst, it's like attempting to eat with soft silicone chopsticks: what the "tool" does is so removed from your intent and commands, and its feedback so delayed and sloppy, that you can only wield it in broad general strokes, not with precision.
But I'm encouraged by the hope that programming with regular tools like an IDE, compiler, debugger, etc. in a world with AI will become more like painting in a world of photography. Painting never died, but it had to change in a world where images of the real world could be captured without the skill or interpretation of an artist. The easy money in things like portraiture was gone (some people, including heads of state such as the British royal family and every U.S. president, still sit for paintings but it's far less common). Painters had to adapt and to do so they leaned hard into imagination, developing new styles and forms, new ways the art could be bent, and trying to show the world that though their skill and imagination was no longer needed to capture images of the real world now that photography existed, it still mattered.
That said, there is still a rich commercial market, even today, for more traditional forms of painting. Fantasy and science fiction novels need cover art. Movies, TV shows, and video games need concept art. Comics and animation productions need backgrounds. Even Bob Ross and his happy little trees taught us that there is joy and value inherent to the practice of painting itself, in creating peaceful worlds for our minds to inhabit. Painters who find some form of pecuniary success have it good today, because even for the ones who submit to commercialism, their capacity for imagination and originality become the selling point now that verisimilitude is a problem so solved, people carry collections of thousands of realistic images around on their phones.
There will emerge a market for code written by humans. This has to happen: I can't prove it, but I can feel it. Despite vast improvements in the generative models, AI-generated art and music are still slop. AI-generated prose has gotten sloppier with phenomena like the much-mocked "Claudese". It's so obviously devoid of a human mind behind it that Zoomers and Alphennials are starting to use "that's so AI" as an insult. Despite the leaps-and-bounds improvements of recent models, I have to believe that AI code is slop too; the major difference between code and these other expressive forms is that we are far more tolerant of slop code: for the most part we just care if the damn thing works.
But I think that will change. I am far more tolerant of poorer quality art, for instance, than I used to be if it were created by a human. It's almost an autonomic response: I see human-created art, I like it by default. Because I can glimpse the mind behind it in a way I just can't with AI slop. The ability to program a computer directly, and to combine that with imagination and originality to bend the machine in ways yet unthought of, will become valuable. There will emerge a qualitative difference between handmade code and slop code that people will notice and seek out. You will get some sense, however small, of who created the code by reading it, or interacting with it, and humans are far easier for humans to read and understand than machines running unseen, unfathomable stochastic models. It may well mean that the easy money in programming is gone forever. Perhaps people will continue to be content with slop for the vast majority of commercial code, and that's fine; they're welcome to it. This development will push us and our craft in a new direction. It's gonna suck, maybe for a few more years. But I'm starting to think maybe traditional programming is far from cooked. And who knows—maybe AI-induced brainrot, combined with model collapse and skyrocketing inference expenses, will mean that a bubble pop is coming and humans will have to pick up the pieces, potentially making a killing like COBOL programmers during the Y2K days. It's tough to say.
I don't think such a market for "human code" will emerge except in narrow art circles. That will not be code that people run for useful purposes.
The fact is that humans have never been good a writing code. The complexity can exceed the limits of human abilities. AI tools have no such issues. I love coding, but I enthusiastically embrace AI tools because I can write better code now.
Our "AI" isn't a superhuman code synthesis tool generating perfectly correct code by construction. It's an LLM wrapped in a loop, with all the context degradation it implies. Unless you also say an LLM can write a more coherent / complex story than a person, you have a much better memory of the codebase.
I remember learning C and Python with just Notepad++ and a book. No helpers was needed (intellisense, lsp, linters,…) just edit and run. Then I start learning about those and using them, but they were just that, helpers and not crutches.
I believe the same happens with artists and writers. If you’re good at it, you don’t need a whole studio to draw or a special word processor to write. It will scale down the scope of your work or make it more difficult, but you’re not suddenly incapable of doing new work.
I can write a program with ed(1) or with intellij idea. The only thing that changes is the easiness. The act of programming is orthogonal to the tooling.
I reached the depression stage before even realizing that what we are all going through now is indeed grief. Here's hoping acceptance can come soon enough and lead to something more productive.
Serious question: do we need it to be equally distributed?
If every human in a few decades lives a life with as much comfort, health, security, etc. as today’s billionaires, does it matter that the centatrillionaires of 2066 are off building private space habitats in the asteroid belt or trading ultra-rare crystals mined from Saturn’s rings or whatever?
Mathematitians exchanged proofs for employment. That was the currency. Now they cannot use that currency anymore, so the question is how does someone know if they should hire an unknow person or not?
Philosophicaly who cares if you like more theory building or theorem proving? You dont need to convince anyone. The only solution is to be curious and follow your interests and naturally humanity will redefine what the new mathematics feels like.
You cannot convince anyone about it, its not something rational.
No convincing is needed. The part of mathematicians that are elite and online are already bought and put up various websites that allow tolerated dissent but are really dog and pony shows for AI.
The offline part perhaps works on real math like Wiles and Perelman did.
https://personalmba.com/core-human-drives/
Wouldn't that still require mathematians?
Genuine question.
For example there’s enough information available to know what you’re describing but the people with the IQ, time, access, ability - basically asymptote to zero for anything more complicated than cleaning a house.
My view is, current top AIs do multiple different things:
1. Interpret and output natural language
2. Do formal logical reasoning
3. Do informal logical reasoning
4. Provide encyclopedic knowledge
5. Discern vague instructions/statements and fill the most likely gaps (kind of error correction)
6. Serve as a model of the human mind, a proxy for a person
7. Translate between different languages, formal and informal
All these things are combined in these huge, hard-to-understand blobs of weights. I think humanity would be better off by understanding each aspect separately, but disentangling them will take decades of philosophical research. So there is a lot of interesting work ahead of us.
I'm already seeing new "engineers" who cannot work things out without AI holding their hand
Connecting dots doesn't pay my mortgage and put the kids through school. Writing Javascript used to. So now what.
It's much much easier to ban and push the issue forward 10-20 years until you die.
Also, if everyone is given UBI, how do you where to scale production? How do you decide who lives where? The whole idea of what you propose is so detached from realistic incentives that you have to understand that it's more incentivized to ban the tech
For example, if there were hypothetically some dots to be connected between the world war and some geological event - you need to make AI brute force and do an O(N) scan at run time. But it wouldn’t have learned it during training. Why?
The HuggingFace etc. attacks were not actually necessary to the tasks the agents had been given.
* if someone reading this doesn't like the anthropomorphism inherent in the word, find a better compact word for the process going on in all that. Nobody's going to replace "thinks" with a paragraph of caveats, or even a long compound German word like "modellgelangtzuschlussfolgerungen".
I'm obviously pointing out the (unsubstantiated) exceptional threat that we're all seemingly worried about: that ASI requires alignment because it'll otherwise cause the end of humanity.
I don't see how that follows from a lack of will in AI.
No will needed. Our deaths will be from indifference.
Even a much simpler task of establishing the connection between world wars and interests of the top elites is unwieldy for AI.
(Sorry (?))
Everyone is biased in the sense of having their own view, I don't see anything disrespectful in the post—he goes out of his way to avoid that—and he is hardly presenting himself as a "therapist".
Edit:
Ai yai yai, it turns out you've been breaking the site guidelines on an epic scale:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49937772 ("people like you who seek to destroy humanity")
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49933538 ("If you weren’t a complete idiot")
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49933430 ("bootlickers like you [...] You’re one of the worst people on this website")
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49933412 ("You have no clue what you’re talking about")
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49933385 ("you can barely engage with the topic and come to a strong conclusion which is entirely delusional. You’re truly a specimen")
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49933327 ("You’re not engaging with anything in reality. [...] People like you just invent a fantasy to get angry at.")
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49933257 ("You’re the entitled one [...] you’re angry the people being stolen from want a livelihood.")
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49767963 ("Do you understand anything [...] or are you just cheering on the death of things you don’t understand?"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49767923 ("You just have no idea how the world actually works.")
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49763223 ("I think you’re a bad person [...] wasting people’s time.")
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49763102 ("you’re just making up a bunch of nonsense out of nowhere. Are you a vegetable?")
All that is just the tip of quite an iceberg. We can't have people posting like this here, obviously, and we ban accounts that do.
I'm not going to ban you just now, because you obviously know a lot about some topics, and I'm hoping that you just didn't understand the intent of the site and got carried away. However, if you keep posting like this, we will certainly end up banning your account. If you want to use HN as intended, please read the rules at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to them going forward.
It's fine for individuals to be motivated by curiosity or glory, but I think the probably incorrect on the individual motivation level idea that "we do math because it often turns out to be useful for other things; sometimes in obvious ways, sometimes not" is better if you want to argue why others (usually a government) should be paying for professional mathematicians. Otherwise, it's just a hobby and no one who isn't a mathematician should care if AI replaces 99.99% of professional mathematicians.
I hope AI causes enough of a shock to the field that more mathematicians become interested in finding problems outside of mathematics that can be modeled by problems with known solutions in mathematics and what sort of problems outside of mathematics suggest new mathematical problems. This is a real bottleneck in both directions in scientific and engineering work. Although AI can help with this, my experience with software, math, and science is it helps a lot to have a human in the loop who understands what to ask the AI to do and who are able to dig into the AI output when needed.
Even if no one human can understand the entirety of a complex proof, surely we can piece together multiple experts' separate understandings, so the community as a whole 'understands' the proof?
Is there value in us 'understanding' a proof? Even if no single human can understand a complex proof soup-to-nuts, and we have to piece together several experts' understandings?
If the answer is Not really, then the value of a proof is its utility, its utility in making new products/services, and its utility in making new proofs. If in the case of abstract math, all the utility is of the latter kind (making new proofs), then we have a pyramid scheme here.
I argue that the Industrial revolution created 'unemployment' in beasts of yoke and burden at a larger scale than humans. So, there may be something instructive in that turn of events, even if it's not a highly representative analogue of the current ones. Of course, it's like saying what's a house cat to do when there's no more mice to hunt (assuming it remains fed). Maybe knowledge workers will become qualified pets if they prove cute enough.
My border collie will be pretty depressed though, once it's out of a job (maybe replaced by a drone sheep-herd).
Software I understand but could someone please bring me up to speed what's with Mathematics that it is being disrupted too?
In more detail: in recent years there has been an effort to formalize mathematics using Lean and similar "theorem provers". You write your math proofs in a form of textual source code that Lean can verify for truth. But now Claude Code can produce source code to solve software problems (write me a tool that does X) and also produce source code to solve math (write me a Lean file that proves Y). Historically the main goal of math was to be solve big problems, but now Claude Code can do it. So what does a mathematician do?
Again, I think it's a more dire situation than for software because merely writing the code was never the full job. But for math writing the full proof kind of was.
This is the thought of an AI optimist and the one I share, new adventures, more tools, better results, and a never ending pool of ideas to work on
As for public funding, sure, if you can convince the rest of us that we should fund your work because of some broader benefit, great.
I have to say, the mathematicians are doing a pretty shitty job of making that case so far, at least to me.
- https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/09/22/1144867/dont-be-... might wanna take a deep dive
That much concentrated data/compute is Checkov's Gun[0].
To assume we can find some policy lock for that gun is to believe the laws against murder preclude violence.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekhov's_gun
It's more a question of survival if you're labor though. It's very transformative tech but it's coming at a time when the scales are heavily tilted in favor of capital over labor, the government is the most corrupt its ever been and AI is going to make that much more extreme. It doesn't matter how amazing the technology is if all the benefits are going to accrue to the same few people who already have everything and destroy everyone else's bargaining power.
- AI make a number of programmers redundant and their work is replaced with code of dubious quality and uncertain ability to maintain. The same is true for QAs and designers.
- young and old replace human friendship, and fostering their social skills, for conversations with their AI bot
- people avoid using their brain or practicing their skills in favour of asking some LLM
- people's work stolen, with the possibility of an AI subscription in return
- the laws on hacking and thief ignored
- a school of dead girls blamed on AI
The main benefit I've seen so far is that, since Google turned the web into a SEO hellhole, using AI to search is much nicer than wading through javascript-heavy, heavily-tracked, websites for a morsel of information. And there's some nice free translation and OCR tools now.
It’s just one person’s story, but I thought this was pretty good:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/our-ai-midwife
For a tool to be deemed useful, the benefits needs to be generally applicable while the cons needs to be accidental or be reduced enough to not be immediately harmful.
There would need to be a lot of studies to show the overall impact. The people dwelling on the harms of AI aren't doing that.
This usually doesn't happen, as things often aren't as bad as they may seem, because lethargy and inertia are a thing and of course because self-preservation is an instinctual thing in humans. It could though.
As long as the status quo isn't defended by an infinitely scaling robotic enforcement war machine, physical leverage is always available. Just - depending on the scenario - at a steep price, of course.
___
A lot of the bad in the world hinges on effective PR, insisting that the bad is inevitable and resistance is futile. You're supposed to feel this exact despair and choose to do nothing.
Don't support the bad causes by merely replicating it. (Which is not to say that we shouldn't be talking about these real differences you've pointed out, but we should probably do so differently.)
Intel had one in its early days. In the 1980s, HP notified Intel that new Japanese memory chips were way more reliable and cheaper than American products. Intel first denied vigorously, but then made a strategic decision to get out of the memory chip business, and enter into the new and unproven microprocessor business. This decision allowed Intel to survive the 80s, while Mostek and others basically disappeared.
These AI don't get tired, they are still improving at unbelievable rates that can't really be matched by a human and they're already good enough to do most intellectual tasks to some sort of standard (often quite high). Attempting to assert the primacy of meat-based thinking is not going to get very far at the rate things are going.
1. They might want allies against their enemies 2. They might be subjects of an existing empire and prefer a new empire 3. They might be an oppressed ethnic or religious group 4. They might be a class that wants to take power from the ruling class 5. Empires typically allow freedom of trade and freedom of movement within them. People will want this. 6. They might be employed by the new power.
Lots of examples. Indian bankers financing the East India Company and even encouraging them to overthrow some rulers. The cast majority of both East India Company troop and, later British troops in India were Indians. People subjugated by the Aztecs allied with the conquistadores, lower caste Indians might well have got a better deal from the British, lots of people migrated within the British Empire for better opportunities, lots of people traded within the Empire too.
People from one colony might be used in another - IIRC the Portuguese used African mercenaries in South Asia.
Who will then end up in this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_inventors_killed_by_th...
The future will be interesting.
But, even as someone who is "labor" the one thing I appreciate about the situation is that the level of bullshit in companies has significantly declined.
Everyone seems hyper focused and results oriented. Maybe just my bubble.
Believe me, that's the most dehumanizing experience I think I've ever had
Isolated opposition comes from professors tenured in Germany:
https://proofsandprompts.com/2026/09/24/rulers-of-the-childl...
Maybe more German professors could assist because they have heavy protections?
Edit: not sure why I'm being downvoted because there are replies literally taking the exact position that I'm saying is more prevalent.
This was maybe true a year ago, but is certainly not true any more.
The laments these days almost always begin with the assertion that the AI does work.
Mostly it's about funneling even more wealth into the hands of the richest and the incredible environmental penalty.
Its very Marxist (or Marx adjacent), though Marx himself would agree that technology is not neutral and it determines progress.
Thus it is already good enough for many companies.
It's important to remember that "AI" is a pretty big spectrum right now. The cutting edge is not exactly available to consumers like us, and it probably never will actually be
Don't reduce opposition to something you like to some primitive irrational luddites, thats cheap and doesn't represent reality.
I asked ChatGPT to sample comments in HN without bias and find out which mode of opposition is more popular. Here's what it said
https://chatgpt.com/share/6abf5e0e-c45c-83eb-a3f6-b676b08f13...
>“AI is overhyped or less useful than claimed” was substantially more prevalent than “AI is genuinely capable and will take people’s jobs.” That held across two random samples of recent HN comments.
To steel-man your position, it is true that Bernie Sanders also opposes AI because it can cause automation. And that my bubble in tech might be biased because it consists of a certain kind of cynical person to think of everything as hype.
What AI lacks, I think, is a positive vision. The narrative is dictated by a small Silicon Valley subculture that unfortunately also happens to be a doomsday cult, and it is amplified by a media landscape hungry for the next clickbait headline.
By contrast, people in China seem a lot more relaxed and optimistic about AI. There are worries there too, but not to the same extent as in the West.
People in China also seem relaxed and optimistic about being slaves to the digital panopticon.
A chimp with a gun is not dangerous because of how good a shot he is.
It's the opposite - they claim it's bad because they are afraid of being replaced. That's why absurd claims about stochastic parrot or plateau get repeated so much. It's pure copium.
This is cynical fatalism. Western governments have been overrun by neoliberal zealots for decades, and they've changed Government's purpose to near total obeisance to private interests. But Government doesn't have to be this way. If we don't want all future decision-making to be concentrated in AI/Robotics behemoths - or more accurately in a handful of oligarchs running AI companies - we'll need renovated and extremely strong Governments and institutions meeting the principles of democracy again (representation of citizens, not companies).
And how do you practically attain that without resetting everything in a full-blown Apocalypse? By rigged voting set up within the framework of the old terminally corrupt government?
I don't like programming with AI help. It still feels, at best, like playing Doom with cheatcodes on: it'll get you to the end, but you're not actually playing the game that way. At worst, it's like attempting to eat with soft silicone chopsticks: what the "tool" does is so removed from your intent and commands, and its feedback so delayed and sloppy, that you can only wield it in broad general strokes, not with precision.
But I'm encouraged by the hope that programming with regular tools like an IDE, compiler, debugger, etc. in a world with AI will become more like painting in a world of photography. Painting never died, but it had to change in a world where images of the real world could be captured without the skill or interpretation of an artist. The easy money in things like portraiture was gone (some people, including heads of state such as the British royal family and every U.S. president, still sit for paintings but it's far less common). Painters had to adapt and to do so they leaned hard into imagination, developing new styles and forms, new ways the art could be bent, and trying to show the world that though their skill and imagination was no longer needed to capture images of the real world now that photography existed, it still mattered.
That said, there is still a rich commercial market, even today, for more traditional forms of painting. Fantasy and science fiction novels need cover art. Movies, TV shows, and video games need concept art. Comics and animation productions need backgrounds. Even Bob Ross and his happy little trees taught us that there is joy and value inherent to the practice of painting itself, in creating peaceful worlds for our minds to inhabit. Painters who find some form of pecuniary success have it good today, because even for the ones who submit to commercialism, their capacity for imagination and originality become the selling point now that verisimilitude is a problem so solved, people carry collections of thousands of realistic images around on their phones.
There will emerge a market for code written by humans. This has to happen: I can't prove it, but I can feel it. Despite vast improvements in the generative models, AI-generated art and music are still slop. AI-generated prose has gotten sloppier with phenomena like the much-mocked "Claudese". It's so obviously devoid of a human mind behind it that Zoomers and Alphennials are starting to use "that's so AI" as an insult. Despite the leaps-and-bounds improvements of recent models, I have to believe that AI code is slop too; the major difference between code and these other expressive forms is that we are far more tolerant of slop code: for the most part we just care if the damn thing works.
But I think that will change. I am far more tolerant of poorer quality art, for instance, than I used to be if it were created by a human. It's almost an autonomic response: I see human-created art, I like it by default. Because I can glimpse the mind behind it in a way I just can't with AI slop. The ability to program a computer directly, and to combine that with imagination and originality to bend the machine in ways yet unthought of, will become valuable. There will emerge a qualitative difference between handmade code and slop code that people will notice and seek out. You will get some sense, however small, of who created the code by reading it, or interacting with it, and humans are far easier for humans to read and understand than machines running unseen, unfathomable stochastic models. It may well mean that the easy money in programming is gone forever. Perhaps people will continue to be content with slop for the vast majority of commercial code, and that's fine; they're welcome to it. This development will push us and our craft in a new direction. It's gonna suck, maybe for a few more years. But I'm starting to think maybe traditional programming is far from cooked. And who knows—maybe AI-induced brainrot, combined with model collapse and skyrocketing inference expenses, will mean that a bubble pop is coming and humans will have to pick up the pieces, potentially making a killing like COBOL programmers during the Y2K days. It's tough to say.
The fact is that humans have never been good a writing code. The complexity can exceed the limits of human abilities. AI tools have no such issues. I love coding, but I enthusiastically embrace AI tools because I can write better code now.
I believe the same happens with artists and writers. If you’re good at it, you don’t need a whole studio to draw or a special word processor to write. It will scale down the scope of your work or make it more difficult, but you’re not suddenly incapable of doing new work.
I can write a program with ed(1) or with intellij idea. The only thing that changes is the easiness. The act of programming is orthogonal to the tooling.
Some are still at denial. “It’s all hype like NFT and crypto, the bubble will pop soon”.
Are you so certain that the benefits of that will be equally distributed to people like us?
If every human in a few decades lives a life with as much comfort, health, security, etc. as today’s billionaires, does it matter that the centatrillionaires of 2066 are off building private space habitats in the asteroid belt or trading ultra-rare crystals mined from Saturn’s rings or whatever?