[doctorpangloss]

> Every day, it grows harder and harder to contain a mental map of recent relevant progress by simple virtue of the amount being produced. I cannot help but be very optimistic about the ambition mathematicians of this era will be able to scale to. There still remain lots of problems in current era tools and their usage though.

Always, always always, the problem with research and development is leadership, not insufficient supportive technology. It is a political problem, there is absolutely, positively no shortage of technologies to support research. Your optimism is totally misplaced. The NSF funding cuts have negatively impacted math more than AI has benefitted it. And guess who supports the administration that cut NSF funding? The people who ousted the PhDs from OpenAI.

[virgildotcodes]

I think we’re looking at a new class of wonderful machines that can potentially make meaningful contributions to the sciences and maybe even humanity as a whole, in addition to far more insidious and destructive capabilities.

You are right to point out that the ones who fully own and pilot the machines all belong to the “fuck science and humanity as a whole” group. So the likely outcomes don’t look good.

Echoes the early promise of the internet vs the eventual state and consequences of it, although seemingly primed for far more dire and deeply penetrating consequences.

[diordiderot]

Not in academia, but the amount of crying over rapid technological and intellectual progress because you're not getting credit validates everything critics say about you.

No interest in human advancement, just attribution.

[virgildotcodes]

I’m not in academia myself, and I think AI solving all our problems ASAP is ideal, even if it means no humans get attribution.

What I’m saying is that the ultimate goal of those in power are not these sorts of altruistic or even scientific pursuits, and that the massive labor disruption and hyper concentration of power in the hands of those who are proving time and again that advancement of science and benefiting the whole of humanity are actually antithetical to their goals is likely a bad thing.

[diordiderot]

Oh good. But I think you're over estimating the 'concentration of power', and under estimating 'benefiting the whole of humanity'

Most homeless people have smartphones, and consistent access to food and clean water.

Your average 'poor person' in America has HVAC. An unimaginable luxury in the EU

[wartywhoa23]

Does your average poor person in America have happiness after 100s of years of relentless technological progress for the benefit of human advancement, and especially today, in the age of becoming spaghettied into the AI event horizon?

[mmnfrdmcx]

Unimaginable luxury, what are you in about. Have you ever even been outside of US?

[Windchaser]

Much of Europe is close to the ocean, high in latitude, or mountainous, and climates there are more temperate. You don’t need AC there; AC is a luxury.

Southeast or central US has considerably higher wet bulb temperatures than Europe does in summer. Without HVAC, there’s a good chunk of the year where it’s too hot to get much done.

[inglor_cz]

"An unimaginable luxury in the EU"

Eh, don't be silly. In the places where the summer is hot enough (or, more precise, where it used to be hot enough), I have seen plenty of AC units on shabby buildings, even on old Commie apartment blocs in Romania.

AC is not that expensive.

[virgildotcodes]

> Your average 'poor person' in America has HVAC. An unimaginable luxury in the EU

Lmao, did HN just glitch out and start showing me Pieter Levels' tweets?

[doctorpangloss]

> I think we’re looking at a wonderful machine that can potentially make meaningful contributions to the sciences and maybe even humanity as a whole.

That's true. But. Maybe you've seen the Oppenheimer movie, there is a moment where Oppenheimer shakes Teller's hand, basically after the guy ruins Oppenheimer's life in a completely immature betrayal. That's what people are angry about, the academy community is Oppenheimer's wife asking, why the fuck did you shake his hand?

At least regarding leadership and funding, I don't know if it's a matter of likely or unlikely outcomes. It's just facts: these guys are collaborators. The commenter might very well have zero graduate students starting next year. What pisses me off is the utter obliviousness that STEM people have about how deeply political their work is.

And perhaps this is the real reckoning for the mathematics community. Not the possibility that AI is going to replace their jobs, it's not going to do that. But that having these intensely myopic and disagreeable personalities mean that basically zero leadership skills have been nurtured in the mathematics community. You cannot name a single politician who is a mathematician. You have to be elected to have power in this country, it's that simple, there are way more billionaires than there are presidents! Leadership is far more scarce. So that's why these disputes matter, and while it's great that people engage on Hacker News about it, it's intensely disappointing that "reduced science funding is really bad" gets downvoted.

That is a result of Hacker News's emphasis on this very 2010s view that it wants to be a place where the math nerds gather (in @dang's words) - he doesn't get that the quality of the discourse was caused by great leadership at many political and academic levels. Nobody credits how much better leaders were during Y Combinator's biggest success stories, or how much we overvalue the intellectual powers of math because it makes money as opposed to enlightening our view of the world.

[farialima]

> You cannot name a single politician who is a mathematician.

I can: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%A9dric_Villani

( and of course Wikipedia has a list :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mathematician-politici... )

[doctorpangloss]

it's a pretty short list. guess how long it would be for "Lawyers"