> I feel like the point is still being missed, and it's very similar to the way software engineers are trying to cope. The argument you are making "Well yes now this part of math we will not need to do again, but now we can do this instead" however the issue with most people just don't want to do that....
> Like who are we kidding, the type of nerds who were attracted to math and software were into it because we saw it as an art-form, it was a craft, it was being the only one in your city to be able to solve a complicated math problem, it was immortalizing yourself because you discovered a proof and added to the ever expanding human knowledge.
> Imagine a leather workman who's life passion is making insanely high quality handbags, who takes joy in knowing everything he touches will last someone a lifetime and give them joy everytime they use it. And then not gradually, but almost overnight someone comes to his door and tells him we can make bags 50 times better than you at 1/tenth the price. But don't you worry, you can make more money overseeing the factory, or selling people on how good this bag is, and explaining that to them.
> I mean, ok, that just is not what I wanted to do with my life. I never wanted to be a manager, I never wanted to be a salesman, I never wanted to be a writer. A craft I enjoy doing has been taken away from me, I should be allowed to mourn, I don't care that I can do something else since I never liked doing it in the first place. I enjoyed solving problems and writing code, I don't care if people say "well thats never what programming was about it was actually about becoming a manager all along" I never wanted to be a manager, I never wanted to manage, I never wanted to be a proof reader.
> > Like who are we kidding, the type of nerds who were attracted to math and software were into it because we saw it as an art-form, it was a craft, it was being the only one in your city to be able to solve a complicated math problem, it was immortalizing yourself because you discovered a proof and added to the ever expanding human knowledge.
This is definitely projection. It might be why that particular person was attracted to those disciplines. I definitely don't recall thinking I should go into software so I can make better programs than anyone else in my city. Actually, it was kind of an accident - it was a hobby that turned into a career through serendipity. If one wanted to go into math or software to demonstrate superiority they probably should mourn. They were out-competed by the guys at the frontier labs in the end.
Interesting problems are not the ones which are useful, but the ones which are difficult, which allow you to show what you can do.
Soon enough instead of Millennium Prize Problems we will have a list of problem AI has not been able to solve, with even bigger reputational reward for humans
Why should any mathematician invest decades of their life working on one of them, knowing that all their efforts could be vanified by the release of the N+1-th version of a LLM, or by the usage of 10x compute resources by companies with infinite dollars? It was VERY different when the only competition came from other biological brains that had to invest the same amount of time and effort.
According to "3blue1brwn" (I'm aliasing here, no disrespect intended by not recalling his legal name), it is because of the sensation of aesthesis in understand, having your mind form the abstract structure etc. In the end I did not pursue some form of mathemathesis, but I did tip my toe in and think I know what he's talking about and his description resonates with me personal. And the way understanding changes reality is still quite informative in a lot of other engagements with the world. (Also the virtuality of me being someone who has pursued a deeper mathematical faculty is still sometimes intriguing, more on the side of applicability though.) What is curious to me with pure math is how the aesthesis could potentially happen at all, when one is dealing with stuff that isn't representable in the usual mental faculties of spatial reasoning and time. I got some impression of dealing with infinities, but wonder if anyone could try to lay out an account how something like an intuituon for something really abstract (say dealing with quantum mechanical mathematical formalisms like the schroedinger stuff) presents itself as a qualia/phenomenological) or high dimensional non euclidean spaces or what have you. (My understanding here of what potentially exist is already limited I have to admit for the sake og being humble).
Is there some visual/spatial sensation with it? Some abstract anticipation of continuity in thought? I have to think of accounts of aphantasia (not as a correlation on the register of the individual capable of something as a form of naturalism, but as an analogy to the pursuit of engaging with a form of experience that is not ones own and (presumably) can't be ones own.
Mathematics is humanity's current best approximation to a universal language, capable of expressing conscious thought precisely.
It's a "programming language for the human brain" that lets you describe reality exactly and thereby make predictions about it.
Without people (humans) knowing and understanding it, society is incapable of grasping reality in any meaningful way, unable to shape it in order to achieve a better tomorrow.
Most never realize that, because society is compartmentalized to the point of people never witnessing how it actually works under the hood. "Experts" do things for you that you never heard of, but that your very life depends upon.
While the majority of people thus lives a kind of "simulated" reality, the mechanisms underpinning that cushioned fantasy land aren't infallible. You cannot uphold an economy nor even a social structure without understanding and modeling it to a sufficient degree.
What the vast majority employs as "rational thought" isn't sufficient.
Careers in the real world are always about winning competitions, no matter what the field of mathematics is supposed to be. If not about competing for tenure, then it's a competition to publish.
And if AI can also make use of the math, then the AI is all you need in order to grasp a better tomorrow. If AI poops out a warp drive, you don't need to understand it to use it. The argument about humans needing to understand anything only holds true as long as humans have something unique to contribute, which might not be the case even a year or two from now.
Competitions are a way to motivate people. What do you believe, why they get set up in the first place? Because rich people have fun seeing you run in circles?
Competition for tenure and publishing metrics has been detrimental to science in general.
Your idea of life being about grabbing whatever comes your way and consuming it first says a lot about you, but not about life.
What do you suppose happens in a society where the constituents of that society "have nothing to contribute"? Your habit of over-simplification will come to bite you.
Well, I agree with publishing metrics being detrimental! On your other points, you're arguing against a strawman. I didn't say anything about life just being a snatch and grab, nor do I hold this belief. But university admissions, job interviews, buying non-plentiful resources...all of these are competitions. Competition permeates the very foundation of our education and financial systems. Many of our greatest virtues as a species are not competition based, but it is a large part of the reality we live in, for better or worse.
And about what happens in a society where constituents have nothing to contribute... I have no idea. But we might find out within a decade or so. The fact that what happens might not all be great is unlikely to stop any of the AI labs.
Those competitions get set up because some people understand the importance of mathematical knowledge and want their names attached to advances in it, even if they can't do the work themselves.
Clearly, it would be far better to make the public understand how the world, and society in particular, actually works. Only, those with the money profit from that not happening.
Regardless of credentials you certainly appear to have entirely missed his point. Imagine if someone suggested that cars existed for the sake of competition. But they don't, right? They exist because in our society we've organized the bulk of transportation around them. The fact that formula 1 exists, or that delivery drivers can be rated on performance relative to one another, those are not (at least in and of themselves) arguments against this basic fact.
> Imagine if someone suggested that cars existed for the sake of competition
are the mathematicians the cars here? what are you even saying? the question is whether elite mathematicians do the work they do primarily for competition and compensation or for the love of the field. now ask yourself: do F1 drivers do it primarily for the love of the sport or for the money?
> delivery drivers
people getting scooped by OAI are not the "delivery drivers" of the math world.
> we will have a list of problem AI has not been able to solve, with even bigger reputational reward for humans
we will have a list of problems that AI has not been able to solve _yet_
anyone who attempts to solve it will do so knowing that there will be thousands of agents working on the same problem, so they may not be motivated to try if they think the AI swarm will get there first and have their time wasted
Soon enough instead of Millennium Prize Problems we will have a list of problems AI has not been able to solve, with even bigger reputational reward for humans
True, but will those be problems for mathematicians to solve, or for AI developers?
It's possible that the best thing a mathematician can do for their field is to drop what they're doing and work on AI instead.
They weren't out-competed by the guys at the frontier labs, they were out-competed by massive piles of cash and compute that were only available to unscrupulous businesses.
In some amount of time (centuries? decades? years?) it will be trivial for any shmuck to train their own automated theorem prover. If people think they are competing against monolithic data centers they are wrong. The brain consumes ~20W and it carries out theorem proving mostly as a side effect. We should not be surprised if the core algorithm requires much less than this.
The algorithm is cheap and simple. A human brain requires decades of experience and information to train it to be generally useful. An AI model requires a similar equivalent scale of information and time to train it to be generally useful, and that isn't cheap to gather or implement.
Sure, once trained, every usage technically lowers the cost per usage. Once trained...
AI methods are improving all the time. People think that modern chess engines are more powerful due to hardware advances but search refinements are enough - SF on a Pentium II would destroy even Kasparov and Deep Blue. In a like manner the guys at the frontier labs discovered an indirect method for attacking many problems and we can expect it to receive considerable refinement. It will not permanently require expensive training.
There was a rather interesting article (sadly LLM-written and not very well either, because the underlying content would be actually good) about this era being "AI's 2 FPS moment".
The comparison was made with the graphics engine team at Microsoft who were writing the first version of DirectX at the time when then-current hardware could just about do 2 frames per second. The sentiment apparently was along the line "why would you bother?" By the time the release grade stack shipped, hardware had caught up and 30 FPS was commonly doable.
We should expect to see similar step-change improvements over time, as the algorithms are refined and hardware further adapted to the new bleeding-edge constraints. In a way we already are, because apart from the frontier models ballooning like crazy, the "regular" class models are becoming more capable in smaller sizes.
Training a human takes much less money and data than training an LLM. Even if I spent my entire life doing it, I would not be able to read the entire corpus of any LLM, even counting just the English subset. LLMs need so much more because they start out as blank slates, while we don't.
yes, but LLMs can hold all this data and once they are trained they blow any human out of the water. It takes a few years for an LLM to ingest the entire internet. No human will ever be able to do that.
Yes math was my best subject in school, most of my software engineering touches on optimization for automated design. I program various math-flavored things in my spare time.
Well, this person was discussing their own feelings. You're accusing them of... projecting their own feelings on themselves? This is a very strange comment.
Yeah, I just don't have any sympathy for these sorts of people. In this society, mastery (hyper-specialization) means that someone is picking up the slack for you in other areas of your life. This can be material need, psychological support, social connection, education access, and more. If you're deemed unworthy of that, you have to handle it yourself; the door to mastery gets closed, because you're occupied with keeping yourself fed, or covering for mental health needs, or dealing with loneliness, or trying to learn everything on your own.
And when you fail, or are slow to progress, and particularly when you can't acquire the requisite skill required for, and deal with external factors related to, monetizing your craft, people say, "Oh, you just didn't try hard enough. You weren't smart enough. You weren't passionate enough."
If the primary thing you got out of your craft was that sense of being better because you could do what others couldn't, that's just pride, and it's one built in a misunderstanding of the circumstances that led to you being capable and others not being so. And now that those people are finally meeting their bigger fish, I just don't feel anything but schadenfreude.
Well, and maybe a little hope that, when all ambition is rendered objectively meaningless, we can turn away from hubris and back towards some common sense of accomplishment and progress. But mostly the schadenfreude.
Do what you want to. Help others. Don't manufacture hierarchies.
> And when you fail, or are slow to progress, and particularly when you can't acquire the requisite skill required for, and deal with external factors related to, monetizing your craft, people say, "Oh, you just didn't try hard enough. You weren't smart enough. You weren't passionate enough."
Underneath a lot of this is just an identity crisis, as a large portion of white-collar workers are facing the harsh reality that who they are was ultimately defined by what they do between 9-6pm.
No you're right - I guess I meant moreso that you seemed to be expressing incredulity that people live this way. It's natural to identify with something you spend the majority of your day doing (especially if you like it or perhaps have stockholm'd yourself into liking it)
White-collar work was sold as the primary vehicle for personal meaning and legitimacy for decades. Now all of these institutions around us have collapsed and it seems like our utility to the market is the sole measure of human dignity.
I think that by reducing this to an identity crisis we will, to our own detriment, ignore the economic system that engineered this dependence in the first place, and is currently trying very hard to brand obsolescence as an individual moral failure.
the people who develop mastery also deal with all the things you've mentioned as well ... PhD students are famously some of the loneliest, worst paid, stressed, and mentally ill people on the planet (in the developed world). Imagine pulling 80 hour weeks while being paid 35k a year.
Many did, and I'm sure some still do. And many get paid very little. I don't really know what point you're trying to make other than showing off your ignorance.
A conscientious read of my post would have revealed that the contention was with the characterization of, I presume, 80 hours a week in an office as 80 hours working the way most people who make $35k/yr work.
Would be curious to read about an actual PhD student who was actually on their feet for 80 hours a week, average, across a whole year, though.
Ok, most PhD students don't consistently work 80 hours a week (although a good number occasionally do, say before a paper deadline) - I'll retract that. But they still work very hard, while many are capable of working much higher paid jobs if they wished to.
I'm sure many do. Working hard is a privilege. Society has to put a lot of trust in you for you to get the opportunity to work quite hard. Society has to expect something out of you. And for you to be willing to put up with that, it's probably something you feel a deep connection to. So while I do believe that everyone should be working reasonable hours for a living wage, I'm not going to pretend that PhD candidates aren't still in a privileged position. There are people wasting away on disability or their parents' dime or flipping burgers who would love to get the support necessary to work very hard at an interesting problem.
> In this society, mastery (hyper-specialization) means that someone is picking up the slack for you in other areas of your life. This can be material need, psychological support, social connection, education access, and more
Citation needed...
Sounds like you are bitter you failed to achieve said mastery, and now are glad that those who did might be also getting pushed aside. If you think that success only depends on initial external factors and personal effort is something to be frowned upon and by striving for mastery you strain the society or drag others down with your lifestyle... man I don't know what to say to you...
If you think AI as currently lead by it's owners will equalize the field for the unfortunate ones... Well you might be right in some sense, but it might not be the way you envision it.
Do you farm your own food, generate your own electricity, or process your own sewage? There are others in society who are picking your slack in these areas. That's was the commenter meant.
So we should each do that then? You know, a few people dedicated their lives to invent and advance farming, electricity and perfect your sewage system... Maybe they should've sticked to foraging, hunting, and burying their crap in holes, so that others don't feel left behind... Or maybe I don't see the point the commenter was making.
Do you think mastering something is not a form of work, which usually results in advancing a field for the betterment of society? Just because one might enjoy that process more compared to maybe someone maintaing sewages, I don't see this as entitlement, but as merit and role fitness. No shade to sewage workers, I hope we all appreciate the work they do, and I hope they can have pride in what they do. Saying you don't have sympathy for anybody really losing their role in society/life is such a soulless take...
> and tells him we can make bags 50 times better than you at 1/tenth the price
I don't know where people get this idea that technological advancements always bring quality improvements alongside the price cuts. The reality is almost always a trade off. Before nails, there were rich traditions of nail-less architecture in Europe, Japan, and elsewhere. These buildings are more resilient to disasters, significantly less liable to rot, are usually built so that modular pieces can be taken out and replaced without taking the whole building down, and have a whole host of other benefits.
We switched to nails not because of a quality increase but because a massive unignorable price decrease and ability to scale.
Today, if you have the money for it, you are probably looking for that leather workman to make you your handbag. It is of much higher quality than anything you can get from any currently existing factory.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding your point but all of those seem like examples of my own point. They all have major downsides/tradeoffs. Cars being the most obvious on the list of downsides. The massive environmental cost, the fact that 2% of the land area of the US is paved so that cars could work, the smog and pollution, etc.
If it were true that cars were a complete improvement and cheaper then we wouldn't have bikes anymore. All technologies have tradeoffs
People have commented on this and said that the gist of the issue is mathematicians egos are bruised. That's true but I think it's defensible. Like we don't typically enjoy watching humans race against motorcycles in a 100m dash. But there's something interesting about watching humans do this in the Olympics when they race each other. Likewise, in math, people are solving problems considered hard by other humans and we acknowledged the art form.
But I think there's a practical side of it too. Finding what the limits of humans are is worthwhile too. Maybe the best analogy is like a group of people trying to find their way through a cave in the dark. One of them found a new passage and has a technique for doing it. So maybe we expanded what we thought humans were capable of. Could there be passages that humans can't get through? That might be useful to know. If we find proofs that humans just can't comprehend or have knowledge requirements that humans can't reasonably obtain that might be useful for us to know. A lot of math is not really applied to anything useful, it is just knowledge that is accumulated that other people thought was worthwhile perhaps because it was considered difficult for humans. So basically the journey to the proof is the value add and not the proof itself perhaps and AI might be erasing the journey. I have previously described it as a helicopter ride to the top of Everest but the point of climbing Everest is the difficult part. That's why people do it, the challenge.
That was quite the stereotype. I grew up loving programming, assembly, hardware hacking and spend a portion of my career doing those things. I was also a top Math student at the state level in school.
I then became a manager because I like mentoring people and using interpersonal skills to achieve things. And I really like using AI for coding.
Please stop this argument that every (or even most) software engineers is an introvert who loves the code typing part of the job.
I am in a similar bucket like you. I like reverse engineering but the tedious and boring stuff between an idea and implementation made me drop so many projects.
Like I see a hole in a firmware and I want to dump the firmware, but then I start hitting the bland stuff like what is the ABI for this hole, how should you compose payload without watchdog kicking me out. Oh this datasheet is garbage. This reference manual makes no sense. Ok that's because it is for a same processor, different lockstep. Why am I fighting with stack on this processor? When you should use star and ampersand for manipulation of pointers in C? Oh writing a linker script a little frustrating horror. No ld we don't have RO data, only code, stop inserting it. Now let's strip it and I have payload.
This would take me days to get through while with AI I can make dozens of iterations in matter of one day.
You've misunderstood. It has nothing to do with typing or being an introvert. At least for me. It describes me. I don't think I'm an introvert and I don't particularly like typing. But the post you're responding to describes me.
Managers are the barrier to personal development and career advancement but labelled as the opposite. So yeah, if you enjoy "power" and gatekeeping this is the best door to be.
I agree. The part I enjoyed was designing interesting solutions to problems, the coding itself was often tedious. Now I can just focus on the fun and creative part.
Or no job. I feel like so many people are stuck in the current capabilities of the models they use - what happens if AI ends up surpassing humans in all domains? Not saying that's guaranteed but it's certainly possible, and I feel like so many folks telling optimistic stories about how "AI focuses on the tedious stuff" have not really grasped with the implications of much more advanced AI.
I think I'm pretty aware of the implications. It's just not something I have control over. But right now, I'm enjoying getting stuff done. If they eventually take my job or upend civilization, it's going to happen whether I use them or not.
Coding since 12, pretty introverted as a teenager and went the usual compsci route. Spent a lot of my free time hacking on OSS projects.
Then got into engineering management, similar to you I’d o enjoy mentoring and the more strategic aspects of the role.
But I dislike using AI for coding, it really ruined the fun for me. That fun being entirely eroded made it easier to commit to the management path (I did the IC-Management pendulum for some years).
What one wants to do and what is economically valuable are different. Be glad we live(d) in an era where those coincided because for most of human history people had to do the work they got, not that which they wanted.
Shouldn't a more efficient society give us more time to do what we enjoy, not less? If not, what's really the value of these things? Economical value for shareholders?
Exactly. Remember, economic value is wealth weighted, a fact that sets it starkly apart from nearly every other notion of value. Feeding the proverbial starving orphan? Zero economic value because the orphan can't pay you back. Merging all the banks to hike fees and offload risk onto the public? Enormous economic value, because a large number of wealthy shareholders can be made much wealthier.
As wealth inequality increases, the purpose of the economy as seen through its objective function increasingly revolves around the desire of rich people to get paid for being rich. The exponential growth of asset values in excess of economic growth (including yours, but dominated by those of the wealthy) ensures that not only does the growing economic surplus fail to trickle down, but that the median person sees a grinding deprivation as their ability to command a wage is slowly eroded while their costs rise.
Why would the starving orphan not have economic value? They can grow up and participate in the economy because you fed them. It's the same as how countries focus on food supply, education etc first. In fact, human history and civilization is predicated on having surplus food production to then have people be able to specialize into other economic roles thus has enormous economic impact.
If the economic value of a good or service is what someone will pay you for it, then unpaid charity has no economic value. We are applying the definition handed to us by (certain schools of) economics and finding that it leads us to some ridiculous places, which should cast doubt on the definition. A better definition of economic value could capture the value of charity, but then it would not support the laissez-faire policies that the usual one is often dragged out to support.
The "what someone will pay for it" definition is a trojan horse. It looks like a mathematical practicality, but it actually smuggles the self-interest of the wealthy into a value system that would not otherwise enshrine such as a guiding principle.
Who decides what is valuable? A market is useful enough as a decentralized system that efficiently coordinates billions of preferences, even if it does carry some contradictions. Other value systems do too, like the labor theory of value for which I can contradict by asking the value of digging meaningless holes all day. It's all about which contradictions are minimized in negative impact.
Moreover, there is a difference between economic and social value, which the field of economics already recognizes in the form of positive externalities.
Rich people who mostly want others to pay them for being rich? That's a weird and extreme answer and I'm tired of pretending it isn't. This is not an externality problem, it's a priority problem. These priorities are dogshit.
We don't need gini=0 to fix this. Gini=0.9 is nuts, famous billionaires having millions of times the weight as the median American is nuts, and we need to back off a bit. Maybe start by asking them to pay taxes. For once.
So you want rich people to decide what is valuable? Because that's basically what you're saying. Maybe you mean the opposite but every time you buy something you as a consumer are deciding, not some cabal of rich people.
So we should expect our governments to implement 4 day work weeks? Or 9-3 onstead of 9-5? Or UBI? Or what exactly? How will we have more time to do what we like?
You don’t expect these companies or employers to just give you something or let you work less, right? Right?
Please, elaborate how do you see this? Give me a few examples…
Why not? Why can't efficiency be realized into less work? Why do you believe it so preposterous that someone else than the already wealthy should reap the rewards?
Oh, I definitely think we should all get something out of technological progress and efficiency.
But it has (almost) never happened before. It is very unlikely it will happen now. More likely outcome is companies pocketing profits. Unless the unemployment is so high that the government needs to step.
I honestly think it’s a bit naive to think this time it will be different
I'm optimistic in the limit but I can be pretty cynical about the path. The self-serving narratives of the rich are embedded deep in our national psyche. We might need 30% unemployment, a precipitous demand collapse from the liquidated masses, a second Great Depression, and years of trying the wrong solutions before people begrudgingly move on to the right ones.
But we might not. The billionaires moved early; we have over two years until the next presidential election and a speeding AI train that seems on-track to deliver exactly the right amount of economic displacement by then: enough to convince people to act boldly, but not nearly so much as to achieve a worst case. That's no guarantee of success but the good path has substantial probability weight.
Yes. The New Deal brought the 40 hour workweek + overtime structure to America, the business leaders all talked about how it would collapse the economy (they even tried to coup FDR!), and then it helped usher in the greatest era of prosperity the American Middle Class had even seen. So much so that people with the opposite politics keep pointing at this period while promising that economically opposite actions will lead to the same outcome. Just one more concession to Big Business, one more tax cut for billionaires, one more erosion of workers rights will usher in prosperity that will surely trickle down. This keeps not working over and over again (from the perspective of the gullible voter), so it's long past time to bring back the politics of the three-letter Democrats and demand a larger share of our own productivity.
Thomas Piketty in Capital in the 21st Century shows that the period of economic flourishing in the 1950s onward was due to WW2, not the 1930s era New Deal, and the fact that every other major economy on earth was decimated and that it's an aberration that is now reverting to the mean of human history. The New Deal helped, for sure, in improving people's lives and leisure time but it was not the cause.
No, the Great Depression had a huge role to play in unwinding inequality. I'm pretty sure Piketty talks about this in Capital but it's been a while since I've read it so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. In any case, it mechanically works the same way as war: a catastrophe incinerates capital, poor people suffer more in real terms but rich people suffer more in nominal terms and it's the nominal terms that drive the burden of furnishing runaway capital with runaway returns so the nominal wipeout has the very real effect of resetting the inequality spiral. The New Deal was downstream of this reset and represented real concessions to the middle class that persist to this very day.
> every other major economy on earth was decimated
That would be a more convincing argument if the decimated economies didn't experience the upswing in middle class living standards as well. Gary Stevenson has been covering this from the UK angle and his story (and the UK's story) is the same: middle class flourishing in the wake of WWII and a steady erosion back to the mean. This suggests that the capital reset, increase in worker bargaining power, and the concessions won through it were causal while being on the fortunate side of the Atlantic was not.
They only experienced an upswing because they were decimated; the only way to go was up. Regardless, I'd rather not have a Great Depression level event to need to see prosperity.
Both my grandparents raised 3 kids on a single salary and owned their own homes by thirty. One of them did this in a communist country!
They never had laptops so the work finished at 5 and that was it. Ditto for weekends. I work longer hours and could never dream of doing what they did with two salaries.
The book Capital in the 21st Century shows that the phenomenon you're talking about with your grandparents is a historical aberration caused by World War 2 and is unlikely to be repeated again unless there's another destructive war.
Once you hit rock bottom the only way to go is up, hence creation of wealth for many Americans and destruction of it for many Europeans. Policy choices don't exist in a vacuum and are instead beholden to the conditions of the world, one of which being, it's very easy to build up when everything around you is flattened.
And before that? As I said, your grandparents are an anomaly. You are regressing to the historical mean. Policy can control some of it but black swan events like world wars do occur.
Yeah but also despite being the richest we've ever been on avg., somehow we're working more hours than ever. Especially in well paid disciplines.
But more to the point, it seems that 2 or maybe 3, > $1 trillion dollar companies are poised to capture all the economic value from all knowledge work ever, despite doing it off the backs of artists, programmers, writers etc.
(Assuming they don't collapse the financial system , internet or power grids first).
> somehow we're working more hours than ever. Especially in well paid disciplines.
Working more is a choice. The field is well paid because there the industry is supply constrained. Workers have a choice to work more because they're the supply.
> 2 or maybe 3, > $1 trillion dollar companies are poised to capture all the economic value
The AI companies running models will capture a portion of the value they're creating. Their vendors and their customers capture similar portions, and the end user/society at large captures the lions share of the value as real work done.
>and the end user/society at large captures the lions share of the value as real work done.
This is a fallacy where you extrapolate the large change in a single dimension and imagine everything else staying mostly the same, ignoring the disruption of the system from non-linear effects of that single dimension being saturated. When a few companies capture a large proportion of the economic value of the system, the economy simply doesn't exist as it is currently conceived.
The current economy is driven by the need for broad participation to maintain the collective standard of living. We all get to skim a bit of that value for ourselves, and so distribution is inherent to the system. When broad labor participation is no longer needed to create collective wealth, the leverage of the average person to demand a share of the value produced evaporates. The economy in this scenario is something very different. There's no reason to imagine wealth being distributed in an egalitarian way; it certainly won't be automatic.
This guy was talking about airstriking data centers. People of his kind are the reason humanity will never reach the stars. Ludditism is a civilizational threat that must be countered by any means possible.
Yes, to your first question. But that future isn't here yet, as we can only get there once everything has been automated away. Until then there will be a period of struggle. It's actually quite similar to the communist version of a vanguard party where it really will get worse before it gets better. I'm speaking about what would realistically happen not what one would want to happen, by the way.
I don't think anyone tried to prescribe to you what emotions to have.
For the vast majority of history people did whatever work their circumstances led them to do. Such as taking over their father's farm, their father's craft, or whatever apprentice job there was a vacancy for nearby and hopefully learned to like it though exposure.
It has also been argued that the first farmers were also miserable, but still won due to more calories. But they would have preferred the hunter gatherer lifestyle over working one field all the time and taking care of a bunch or domesticated animals.
Yes there is something sad about a master craftsman having to become a manager in a factory, and the apprentice a conveyor belt worker, but the industrial transition also allowed immense improve ts in efficiency and production. Many people who descend from those early factory workers and farmers, like myself, enjoy a casual level of abundance with a desk job, car, stocked supermarkets, online orders etc. and while poverty still exists it's nothing like it was 100-150 years ago.
> it was being the only one in your city to be able to solve a complicated math problem, it was immortalizing yourself because you discovered a proof and added to the ever expanding human knowledge
I think if that is what one builds an ego on, being better in a discipline than most others, that is a good way to go into isolation and depression. With or without AI.
As Grant lays out in parts of his video, teaching, helping others, socializing etc. will always be valuable skills and much more likely to lead towards happiness.
And while I don't know how the specialized problem solving roles in a future with an actual capable AI will look like, I am sure it will continue to be a useful and needed skill as well. Without everyone having to take on a manager role.
> I think if that is what one builds an ego on, being better in a discipline than most others, that is a good way to go into isolation and depression.
What do you think why guilds were created?
Most of the professions are about doing something not everybody can do.
That’s not the way to depression that’s human nature.
Find something where you are good at and get paid for it.
There is a difference between taking joy in doing what you are good at and taking pride in being better than others.
Just as a guild can be helpful to find like minded people who enjoy doing what you do and elevate the profession as a whole, but also as an institution to keep outsiders out.
I am not saying I don't understand the fears. Imagining this machine that can do everything faster and cheaper than me, making me completely obsolete is of course scary. But really to me that is all that is, imagination. At least for now.
Also, even if my job gets completely automated away, I could see myself enjoying trying to understand how that magical thinking machine works and teaching that to others. Even if it is just at the frontier of my limited understanding and not the frontier of human/machine knowledge.
> teaching, helping others, socializing etc. will always be valuable skills and much more likely to lead towards happiness.
I think you misinterpreted the writer's intention. Adding to the ever expanding human knowledge is teaching the whole humanity including people that aren't born yet.
I learned to program because I wanted to make video games as a kid. I studied math because I got bored of programming. I worked as a programmer because I needed a job and it was the thing that paid the most among the things I was qualified to do (I actually thought I wanted to be a chef...). I went back to grad school because I thought programming apps was tedious and a dead end and wanted to get a job in research. I got a postdoc because I was pretty decent at it and liked what I was doing. I left academia to go do industrial R&D because academia was a dumpster fire and I needed more money and predictability for my family. I'm now writing niche numerical libraries for a small company because it's what I ended up intensely specializing in and I still like what I'm doing. I'm mixed on LLMs, but they're unavoidable. They've made some parts of my job easier, and they've made some parts harder. I still have to write a lot of code by hand because the LLM's code is often wrong.
Code is a great serialization, but writing code is a poor substitution for dreaming.
I want to dream and build, not write code. And certainly not hole punch punch cards or whatever our ancestors had to do.
Code is/was fun sometimes, but not always. Plumbing and glue code sucks, for instance. Even in the best times, programming by hand was largely a means to an end. There are far more entertaining things than any of this.
Thanks for clarifying. It's interesting because most programmers I know who dream a lot about making stuff and are the "get things done" kind, they liked plumbing and glueing code together, and are now of course AI enjoyers...
If I understand correctly you'd much prefer your ideas to materialize, and be spared of the implementation effort.
I'd like to live forever and explore the universe and live a billion trillion lives and build galactic empires. But we're a bit absent of that.
It's not about effort. It's about scope and scale and wonder.
Software programming can't live up to that. It's just manipulating symbols in a buffer that do some things. Nudging symbols around is cool, but there are so many even more amazing things left to unlock and do in the universe that are still out of reach.
"Born too soon", as they say. AI at least feels as though it's trending in the right direction.
I really took the "craft" aspect of software to heart when I joined the industry (~2004). I was in R&D, had great mentors, and worked for years that way, very happily.
When I moved to SV and joined Amazon, and later, a startup, the feedback I consistently got was "never spend that much time on <task> again" -- the business itself was putting hard downward pressure on the quality I wanted to produce, and I was never a super-fast programmer, so it was a tough lesson for me. I remember taking it hard at the time, telling my boss "I joined so I could learn how to write mediocre software". It was a crappy thing to say, but it was how I felt in that moment; it seemed like I was being held back from doing my "craft" thing because of the business. I guess you could say I mourned, but more accurately, I recalibrated what the heck I was doing. This was around the time DEI was taking off and I was doing trainings about all the different sorts of privilege I was enjoying, and I realized that me whining about not being able to practice my special "craft" was the privilege talking. There was never a rule that I got to do what I wanted for money, and I needed to respond to what my employers were telling me: the most beautiful code in the world doesn't pay the bills.
It's been about 15 years since then, and I mostly practice "craft" programming in my hobby projects, and focus on "industrial" programming for work. I view the sentiment in that YT comment about AI in sort of the same way: everyone wants AI to automate away they things they don't enjoy, and they are distressed at the prospect that AI will automate away the thing they love doing. In the time of AI, my craft hobby coding projects have fallen to the wayside a bit as I use AI for more coding -- I'm finding that for certain types of projects, I enjoy being architect/product manager/QA tester. I spent this past weekend building a city simulator in WebGL, and it was a ton of fun.
Of course nothing has been taken away. In much the same way that a wood worker can still make handmade bowls despite them being made better and faster by a machine. The same is true for the Mathematician.
It's not really missed though. He does spend a good amount of time saying that it'll be a problem for many. Whether it's most of professional mathematicians is an open question I think.
> > But don't you worry, you can make more money overseeing the factory, or selling people on how good this bag is, and explaining that to them.
...Or you can keep working on your handbags & refine your styles & qualities, using your expertise & experience as value adds.
The existence of the factory did not wipe out the boutique craftsman.
> > A craft I enjoy doing has been taken away from me, I should be allowed to mourn, I don't care that I can do something else since I never liked doing it in the first place.
A craft wasn't ripped away from you: The process still exists as-is in its prior form, like the woodcarvers of yesteryear. Nothing that you desire (the process/journey) has been lost. It still exists.
The only step required to restore it is to ignore the contributions of others that use it. And your desire to do so will be valid & consistent.
But similarly as to how you want to be validated on your feelings of 'the craft being ripped from you', you don't get to impose that belief onto others to rip their use of LLMs away from them if they want to do so, lest you want to invalidate their feelings as a consequence.
> The existence of the factory did not wipe out the boutique craftsman.
But... it did? It's not like there are lot of horse carriages out there or, for a more recent example, plenty of Cobol developers. Or for a closer example, there used to be plenty of shoemakers when I was young and yet now I know of exactly one.
> The process still exists as-is in its prior form, like the woodcarvers of yesteryear. Nothing that you desire (the process/journey) has been lost. It still exists.
At the risk of stating the obvious: just because I can be a woodcarver as a hobby it doesn't mean it's the same as making a living out of woodcarving because doing something I consider enjoyable for a living is not the same as doing it exclusively as a hobby. If I fire a Cobol programmer knowing full well they'll have to work at their local supermarket until retirement, telling them "you can still program in your free time" will not bring them comfort.
Horse carriages were replaced by a superior technology, that has literally zero bearing on the discussion and actively weakens your argument. Also they are still made to demand, but that demand shrunk dramatically when people stopped needing horses.
The entire analogy is flawed though, and this is why: a market still exists for handmade objects. Factories make cheap clothing/objects, but handmade bags/woodworking are still deeply valued and there are people who still make their living in woodworking and other fields. Factories did bring some professions to near-extinction, but that doesn’t mean there is nothing left of them. In fact, many utilize factory techniques and tools in their work to ease costs, like lathes.
As for COBOL, it was mostly phased out because it’s Hell to program for and other languages like Python allow for faster dev time (for both good and bad). COBOL programmers still exist, and you’re honestly unlikely to fire that COBOL programmer because you need them to maintain mission-critical infrastructure. However, because you’re not actively building new COBOL programs, you also don’t need any more than that one. For compliance reasons it also needs to be a human, because a lot of surviving COBOL code is medical or financial in nature.
A craft wasn't ripped away from you: The process still exists as-is in its prior form, like the woodcarvers of yesteryear. Nothing that you desire (the process/journey) has been lost. It still exists.
Agree, I don't buy the notion that mathematics is a craft, it's a pursuit of knowledge. A better analogy might be cartography where people spent a lot of effort mapping unknown regions and now we can take pictures from space. This is both faster and probably more accurate and there are basically no unknown regions left so there's less motivation to do it anymore.
That said, there's nothing stopping anybody from mapping out an area today if they get a kick out of it. The gripe with mathematics is less about the loss of a craft and more about a superior solution replacing the old approach as the best option; the old approach very much still exists though.
You are willfully misinterpreting the comment. You know exactly what they mean, which is that the meaning behind the craft is gone. The value of performing the craft is not in itself, but in the feeling of creating something of value, something useful to other people.
I don't get this attitude that there's no point in doing something because a computer can do it better. That just tells me that you don't enjoy the "craft" and only enjoy the part where you get credit for doing something.
It's like playing chess because you want to win and don't care about the part where you play the game. Computers are better at chess too but people still play it because they enjoy it. Does nobody practice mathematics just because they enjoy it?
there is value in the craft itself, and in creating value. now one half of the bargain is gone. you feel like you're just playing games now and not contributing anything (which tbf, math was before to some degree anyway).
> the issue is that there are no value adds from humans anymore if the LLM is smarter than everyone
The value adds (from the view of humans wanting it) come from:
1) a human understanding concept X & thus can communicate about X; or
2) finding alternate routes to X that make it easier for humans to get there.
(1) is human-centric & thus non-replaceable, since the requirement of a human is what gives it the value add.
(2) is similar to how there can be many paths to deriving the Pythagorean theorem. None of the existing paths devalue the others, but they each allow those with different perspectives to reach the same destination.
right, so mathematicians will be communicating someone else's discoveries instead of making their own. notwithstanding whether that's an interesting job or not (I know, it's not part of the discussion), why wouldn't LLMs be able to do that with enough RLHF?
And why would a human be able to come up with a proof an LLM can't? I get your point but the new paths and perspectives could probably all be derived by prompting "prove xyz statement" a few times in fresh chats.
> I don't know about you, but I got a lot of satisfaction from finding proofs for my math problem sets despite the fact that they were "solved problems"
Good for you, but that's not a job, and no one is going to award you a PhD for doing that.
99.99% of valuable work is a version of something that's been done before, including in math. Lots of people get phds for successfully applying known stuff to new contexts, at least in my fields. It still takes pretty deep understanding to be able to grasp something well enough to apply it in a useful way, whether you derived it for the first time ever, found it in a textbook, or asked chadbbt
"Applying known stuff to new contexts" is creative, original work, and is quite different from "working out the answers to a problem set", as mentioned in the comment that I am replying to. Don't move the goalposts.
Moreover, that's precisely the kind of work that AIs can do. So why would anyone pay you to do that, whether or not you find it satisfying?
Me too - as a depressed PhD student, the only math I've been doing lately is problem sets for courses, because they're fun and help me pass the class.
But the fact of the matter is that the purpose of my program and of research isn't to work on solved problems but to solve new ones. And the machine seems to be better than me in basically every way in this regard.
Statistically correct more of the time doesn’t equal smarter though. It doesn’t equate to more creative either. Honestly if independent thought was to become extinct due to LLM’s what would be the point of society anyways? We’re not talking about shoes or handbags, we’re talking about the thing that makes us human. So weird that we in the tech industry are so willing to ruin humanity for the sake of a sick IPO.
> We’re not talking about shoes or handbags, we’re talking about the thing that makes us human.
Exactly. That's why people are upset, and why more people are going to be upset as AI subsumes more parts of society. The handbags are just an analogy.
I wouldn't say that independent human thought will become "extinct," but rather that it will be severely devalued. And I don't see any technical reason why AIs can't replace every aspect of human thought, including creativity.
> So weird that we in the tech industry are so willing to ruin humanity for the sake of a sick IPO.
Not all of us. But the people who are making the decisions about AI have their own set of values.
There's an analogy here in woodworking -- rich people still go to craftspeople when they want e.g. a table that doesn't look like everyone else's. Same way people need to work with software engineers / web designers now, if they want to have a website that doesn't look like everyone else's.
> Translation: my fragile ego is totally dependent on being overpaid for typing instructions I found on stackoverflow
I'm confused. Your comment's shitty tone implies you're overwhelmingly in favor of LLMs. That's copy-pasting not just on steroids, but on crack cocaine. So what point are you trying to make?
If you read carefully I don’t suggest you to base your personality on producing code at all. Whether it comes from SO or Claude, there is no proud in any of these. Let’s be adults and be proud of solved problems and users using our products.
If your job was previously mainly following instructions from SO, and this has now been replaced by Claude - your employment prospects are not looking good right now. You're just a middle-man between your PM and the codebase that possibly doesn't need to exist for long.
I think you are mistaking 'happiness' with 'employment' here. The leather worker may adapt to the new environment to become a factory site manager. But there's no guarantee that this leads to happiness.
Also you should bear in mind, adaptation is a young man's game. Retraining is possible, but companies typically don't hire trainees in their 40s/50s, so your willingness may not be the deciding factor. My dad ended up as a postal worker when he left his career as a humanities academic at 55, no highly skilled jobs would take him (he did prefer it though haha).
If I try to think of my grandparents and older generations, it just feels extremely out of touch to even associate work and happiness conceptually. They worked what they could to sustain their families. They were happy from seeing their children well fed, not from how the job felt.
A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon an interview of Bernard Arnault who said "I work, but in the same time I have fun, this allow to work a lot without too much suffering". I was raise in the environment you describe and could never understand as a kid why people working in fancy job would not retire when given the choice, politicians are a fine example of those, well past retirement age but staying when everyone in my family would go on retirement the second they were given the chance since work was associated with pain, and the only thing that can explain that gap is the happiness factor
well, this is what happens as people move up the needs later (as ted kaczynski said) - they turn to other activities outside of basic survival for fulfillment.
And of course in a society based on protestant capitalism, it's clear why work and happiness and work are so strongly coupled. I'm sure things are different in most of europe.
But again, academia and math are things people only do because they really love doing them and can't imagine doing anything else all day.
I didn't want to look it up because it is more interesting in engaging with other people. If I looked it up I would immediately know if I was right or wrong and wouldn't have even bothered looking at your reply.
I probably could have beared with it if it was only limited to programming, but it showing up in creative fields has made me feel all sorts of negative emotions. I hate that I can't even enjoy any fanart without trying to check if it might be AI generated, I hate that I always have to check for an AI GENERATED DISCLOSURE on any new game on steam. And some aren't even honest about it, and look down at artists.
Some context - I'm a frontend dev and I've lost all interest in work, I just see it as a way to pay my bills now. I'm trying to practice drawing because I want to draw fanart of my favourite characters, and I want it to be meaningful. I've already dabbled with stable diffusion back in the day and I got bored of it because it was just way too easy and didn't require any effort, and thus it didn't feel any rewarding either.
> however I don't think that means people should want them hidden :-(
Sorry but no, even if the music is great I don't want to hear it if the cover was AI generated, at this point I'd happily accept even a crudely drawn cover because it is human :)
What's the difference between me pasting a face over a body in GIMP manually and me prompting an LLM to make the same edit, faster, and better than I would by hand? They aren't particularly high-effort. The artwork isn't really the point, but I can't just upload a black video...
AI-generated anything sends a message of 'I do not care about quality'. You might feel that that's unfair, but it's the impression you're making on a large segment of your potential audience.
So if I uploaded a black screen, or a black screen with text (the title of the song), that would be sending a message...that I do care about quality...? Since there was no AI?
As opposed to thinking of a play on words between the game/the original song and having an AI make the joke cover per my directions, instead of me just doing it (worse) by hand, which is "I don't care about quality?"
The whole point of the video is not the visual component, it's really just about sharing the non-AI music.
Pretty much, yes. People read no visuals or poor visuals as 'hobbyist who really cares about [other aspect]'; years of experience make it a familiar schema.
They read AI as 'grifter who probably doesn't care about any aspect'.
I find it hard to see AI in a positive light when it is the root cause behind my friends not being able to afford gaming pcs and consoles, every thing is getting more expensive. I use it at work (because it is mandatory) and objectively speaking it has helped me, but the negative effects are hard to ignore.
But really, blaming AI (software) for this is a similar situation to "old man yells at cloud".
The software didn't want more RAM. AI companies did. Not to mention that RAM companies may have purposely raised prices and blamed it on AI, I've heard about a class-action lawsuit against the big three RAM companies for coordinating a price increase.
If you don't want to use AI at work, you should really file a complaint. Again, the software didn't do anything, someone else did something to force it on you.
I'm not saying this as something to anger people, but because hating AI has no effect on whether you make AI optional at work or stop big tech companies and RAM manufacturers from price increases. Software has no mind or consciousness, it has no sense of being evil and purposely doing these things. People do, and people do it on purpose. People made AI, after all. It didn't spawn into existence.
The root cause of not being able to afford PCs might just be RAM companies themselves, along with some real demand from AI companies.
> Not to mention that RAM companies may have purposely raised prices and blamed it on AI... The root cause of not being able to afford PCs might just be RAM companies themselves, along with some real demand from AI companies.
I mean, it sounds to me like responding to market forces. It's not as if the RAM companies can charge the AI companies a higher unit price than everyone else. The bigger question is why the AI companies have so much capital (including borrowing) at their disposal.
I'm so conflicted about it. My main worry is that I go all in and when I'm used to it the prices increase drastically and I can't work without it.
I'm also learning art and I'll never use AI here, so I thought I have less time for hobby programming and I could just use AI for that but then I come back to the concern I mentioned above.Plus I can't proudly share anything I made with it either because I wouldn't have done much of the work at all.
I'm also feeling burnt out about web dev in general and doing the same thing during my free time just feels like more work to my brain. I wish I could find something interesting to do, and if I don't I'll quit programming in free time for good.
yeah the models are great and all but will they continue to be great? anthropic has some real miserable looking finances, and as a counter example, googles gemini is starting to get stingy with its tokens or whatever (I get this from complaints in reddits antigravity threads). I suspect that googles the one who's homing in on the actual costs as anthropic and others are still in startup launch mode with all the big investments.
Same author behind https://git.dec05eba.com/gpu-screen-recorder/about/ , the best screen recorder for wayland imo (I had tried other alternatives but none of them helped in recording at 4k 60fps, this worked out of the box).
From the article you posted, blocking still stops people from communicating with you.
The only difference with how it is now is they can still view your posts. I don't have a dog in this fight (don't have Twitter) but this seems like a good feature.
On reddit I've been blocked and then called a Nazi/reprehensible person/nonhuman scum. When blocked, you can't see what people say about you. I would like to report the comments for harassment, but I can't.
Blocking should stop someone from being able to communicate with you - but it shouldn't be a shield against reporting harassment.
Back when I still had an account, after never seeing his content in the previous ~15 years I had been using Twitter, he was suddenly all over my feed. I had to mute him, and then, when that didn't work, block him, within months of his takeover.
I made and follow my own "lists" and that blocks just about anything (including most ads). Also, having just under 10,000 block and mute words helps a bit.
Perhaps I'm not the right person to reply to this, because I am just a beginner pixel artist, but I feel so much better when I finish my art projects when compared to the time I spent fiddling with stable diffusion. Maybe because I struggled so much to make it because of my mediocre skills?
I got the same feeling as when you defeat a boss in some soulslike game, it's frustrating but you feel so good when you're done with it.
AI art didn't feel special to me because you can generate as many as you want, I got bored very fast. I guess this is because I'm a process oriented person.
> I feel like the point is still being missed, and it's very similar to the way software engineers are trying to cope. The argument you are making "Well yes now this part of math we will not need to do again, but now we can do this instead" however the issue with most people just don't want to do that....
> Like who are we kidding, the type of nerds who were attracted to math and software were into it because we saw it as an art-form, it was a craft, it was being the only one in your city to be able to solve a complicated math problem, it was immortalizing yourself because you discovered a proof and added to the ever expanding human knowledge.
> Imagine a leather workman who's life passion is making insanely high quality handbags, who takes joy in knowing everything he touches will last someone a lifetime and give them joy everytime they use it. And then not gradually, but almost overnight someone comes to his door and tells him we can make bags 50 times better than you at 1/tenth the price. But don't you worry, you can make more money overseeing the factory, or selling people on how good this bag is, and explaining that to them.
> I mean, ok, that just is not what I wanted to do with my life. I never wanted to be a manager, I never wanted to be a salesman, I never wanted to be a writer. A craft I enjoy doing has been taken away from me, I should be allowed to mourn, I don't care that I can do something else since I never liked doing it in the first place. I enjoyed solving problems and writing code, I don't care if people say "well thats never what programming was about it was actually about becoming a manager all along" I never wanted to be a manager, I never wanted to manage, I never wanted to be a proof reader.