| ▲ | bbor 6 hours ago | |
Just a ~~few~~ ton of things (sorry!), with the upfront caveat that Tao is a hero who's trying his damndest: 1. The use of semi-ugly slides to communicate this is just perfect and quite heartwarming, but it does highlight my main criticism of the mathstadon version of this thesis: he's myopically focused on mathematics as he has practiced it, rather than mathematics as a ~2400y old academy. Like, "stable for almost a century" sounds impressive, but should be a pretty obvious red flag in hindsight! 2. Glossing over "objective verifiability" feels like another place where he's ignoring a ton of relevant philosophy for no clear reason -- yes, mathematics is the only academy based in pre-conscious cognitive facts about our processing of time and space, but that's not the end of the story on "objectively verifiable". To say the least! He hedges with "broad consensus" which doesn't need to be absolute, but that seems to be not only dismissing a highly relevant question, but even implying that he might be unaware of it. I doubt he is, but still: not great. 3. Who is this for...? Why is an explanation of Lean needed in a talk given at CalTech? I suppose he's welcoming his role as a bit of an influencer, there? 4. Re:the focus-on/centrality-of 'highly digitizable' as a unique class of task that applies to mathematics in particular, I must sadly trot out the increasingly-common trop: Yudkowsky called it... https://intelligence.org/files/IEM.pdf 5. "the space of mathematical problems remains infinite" is, again, ignoring really important philosophy around academies as social structures, built for human means. Mathematics is only infinite if we decide that all knowledge is useful (the quintessential example being 'counting the grains of sand on a beach'). Not really important in the first place, but another worrying case of the above. 6. Problem solving is the goal of mathematics; he has a completely valid point here (that we shouldn't throw AIs at unsolved problems in bulk and thus lose human expertise), but it's obscured by the use of "[open] problem" being a too-technical one. IMHO. Slide 16 fails to disabuse me of this notion. 7. Slide 18 is describing the differences between functions and systems, and is arguably even talking about assemblages. 8. If we're gonna explain lean up-front, it feels like a baffling choice to throw the "maybe AI will solve cancer but use it to secretly plot to kill us all" slide in there. It's also already lead to misunderstandings and backlash on Reddit, where 'yes we want to not die of cancer!' is a pretty convincing counterpoint (if a ultimately a subtle strawman, ofc). It's also quite distinct from the rest of the talk. As always, the best part of any Tao publication is his ability to inspire and rally and organize. I think Math 5.0 will indeed be a matter for creativity! Hopefully the IE levels off before we cease to be helpful in that capacity... | ||
| ▲ | math_dandy 6 hours ago | parent [-] | |
Regarding 6., that we shouldn't throw AIs at unsolved problems in bulk and thus lose human expertise. I think that ship has well and truly sailed. AI will continue to be thown at all manner of unsolved problems, and at an increasing rate - by commercial labs, by individual researchers, and by academic research teams. The mathematical community needs to establish paths to meaning, progress, and growth of human expertise in a world where AIs will by default be thrown at every unsolved problem. | ||