Discussion
RE: https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/117207849921390904
its very funny to me that it's taken Tao this long to realize the implications of heavy use of AI for mathematics, especially after the degree of promoting it that he's done
you made your bed, now you're gonna have to sleep in it
people have been cautioning against these very obvious, very easily foreseeable consequences for a while now. like, since before these AI advances even started
the dangers of becoming intellectually dependent on machines you don't understand or control, which don't embody your goals or patterns of thought or whatever, are very old topics of discussion
the fact that so many formally smart people have gotten mesmerized by the jingling keys of AI, to the point of being incapable of seeing the glaringly obvious implications of that dependence which they OUGHT to have known about, is very very funny to me
for instance, consider this point Tao makes
now, if you had asked me 20 years ago if a magic box that would prove or refute any conjecture you have it was a good idea, i would've said this:
"no. david deutsch makes a very good point in The Fabric of Reality where he observes that the point of a theory is not to tell you the outcomes of experiments -- after all, reality can do that already -- but rather to motivate specific lines of inquiry that guide the development of the theory by suggesting what NEW questions are worth asking, what NEW connections might be worth seeking out, etc."
or if you had asked me what the core message of Asimov's Robot novels were about, i would've said that the core message is that dependence on machines to the point where you cease to be able to do things yourself, as a society not as an individual, inevitably leads to complete stagnation because a vital component of human motivation, desire, and inspiration is a tangible felt understanding of the space of possibilities and without that you can't even tell that it's worth striving for something because you have no intuitions for that
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@beka_valentine it's almost as if the journey is as important as the destination, if not more so.