[ted_dunning]

In Erdös idiosyncratic nomenclature, all the best proofs are "in the book" and it was always a joyful thing to not only find a proof, but to find the proof that is in the book.

Who cares if it is God's book or the machine's Xeroxed copy?

[xamuel]

Long before Erdös, we had Plato and Socrates develop the theory of anamnesis, that there is no such thing as learning, but rather, whatever we supposedly learn, we actually remember (we knew it already and had forgotten it). Presumably this should be understood only of universal facts (like mathematics), not contingent facts (like who was the president of the U.S. in 1950).

[teiferer]

Remember from ...when?

[xamuel]

Before birth. ...Hey, don't point that pitchfork at me, point it at Socrates. In his defense, that kind of does describe when LLMs acquired their knowledge (if we consider "birth" to be the moment when the already-trained weights are sent to the GPU) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anamnesis_(philosophy)

[teiferer]

> Before birth

Any scientific basis for this claim?

Pre-conception is unlikely to be really possible outside some esoteric circles. While in the womb there could be some limited experiences that get ingrained in the mind as memories, but I don't think that's the topic here.

[isotypic]

I mean, my reaction to God coming down and saying they were bored of being God and instead they would just sit around and answer all of the mathematician's questions would largely be the same, so yes, who cares if its God's book or the machines Xeroxed copy?

"The Book" is more interesting to me if I am the one coming up with the ideas to fill it in. Maybe this is a bit egotistical, but I'd like to think it is allowed to have a desire that you, personally, are contributing to something in a meaningful way. Like, if you are on a sports team, it'd be more fun to win a game if you were on the field than if you were benched, and I think that's okay. And ultimately I don't find dredging for proofs from an LLM particularly meaningful, nor do I see it as a particularly personal contribution, as anybody else could have done the exact same thing with the same prompt.

This isn't to say I wouldn't love to read the proofs in "The Book" for problems I care about, I just think I'd eventually get bored of only reading. And so its hard to be enthusiastic when this book is being built through an LLM.

[energy123]

If ASI does create an abundant future I think many are going to have that familiar listless feeling of enabling cheats on a computer game and all the mystery and fun is gone.

Technology in general (smartphones, social media, search) even without AI is creating this feeling, as it shrinks the world and makes it less mysterious.

It's worse than boredom it's more like nihilism.

Then when you strip purpose and meaning from a human you get something very bad, despondency being the best case outcome.

[Windchaser]

Aye, but it’s also possible for people to find their own purpose and meaning. Some find it in religion, some in art, some in love or nature.

It will be a transition, for sure - there would no longer be meaning in “winning the game” in a capitalistic or scientific sense. Anything you want to produce or learn, the AI could already produce or has already learned. Now you have to do it just for the love of the process.

I have a musician friend who likes to say that good artists overwhelmingly make art for their own benefit. Not to advance the world or blow people’s minds, but because something inside of them needs to come out, and art is how they express it. And that part of us isn’t going to go away.

[energy123]

Basically that's Viktor Frankl's insight and it's more important than ever. Combined with the Buddhist precept of non-attachment.

[qnleigh]

> it'd be more fun to win a game if you were on the field than if you were benched

This is a good analogy for AI work displacement. Probably would resonate with some of the college students who boo'ed Eric Schmidt.