The presentation may be public grieving, but before the day is pass, we'll all be grieving too. Because, sadly, one thing Tao's Math 2.0 is in denial of (or purposefully refuses to confront), is:

> Simply put, if we don't understand the answers we won't know what the next question should be.

It won't matter, because it won't be us who will be asking the next questions anymore. Whether in math or anything else.

And no, domains that require real-world validation against physical ground truth won't save us, because AI gets to have the same inputs as we do (or better, if using specialized hardware), while beating us at reasoning.

We struggle, and will for some time, to understand how transformed our lives will be.

The questions we asked were originally not about math. They were about a thing that we invented maths for to do or explain, a question that existed, because it touched us in some way that was already real to us. There is nothing that would not allow this to happen in the future. All this requires is attention and connection to the world around us. The maths required to answer our questions can be done and developed by something else.

To me, all you need to believe for this to be true is to agree that understanding maths is also not a stated requirement of reality to get a thing, if something else understands the maths (or something that does the same job). This is demonstrated by billions of people who do not understand maths and get things that, currently, require other people to understand the maths.

But the last part is entirely optional as it pertains to reality. That's just the best we can currently do (and in some important sense it is holding us back as a species, and in some other sense doing the opposite).

If that goal is understanding math, you certainly will be able to understand maths, more than ever before.

If that goal is something that required you to understand maths first in the past, you won't have to do that anymore.

Having not yet read the post,

> Bottom line, Tao is pushing for human understanding as the primary goal

100%. This applies to SWEs/math folks/etc. I do infra and I see many SWEs take their hands off the wheel. When they encounter perf issues they ask their agent and agent says GC and they say GC. It's rarely GC.

Now we might be well past the point where we need to remember the kubectl flags for rollouts etc. But basic human understanding of what their bots are doing as a goal has never changed. Humans are still liable for when bad things happen, and that hasn't changed over the roller coaster the last 5-odd years have been. LLMs, as astonishing they are at Navier Stokes, are still eminently capable of nuking your filesystem and saying "I can now see that that was wrong" with zero regrets. If you can't understand you can't sign off.

> math is the most pure expression of human understanding

This I don't know about. I think math acquires meaning when it contacts reality: like an iota is pointless until there's some circuit that it explains. Abstract math can diverge from that and can become an exercise in playing with symbols for their own sake.

A whole book was written about this and very, very few people got the point it was making.

This is an empirical question, right? We could have three teams of researchers, team A focusing purely on understanding, team B focusing purely on solving problems, and team C focusing on a combination of the two. See which one makes the most breakthroughs on problems we actually care about.

I respect Tao and I belive he's trying to think deeply about the issues, but a lot of his thinking seems to revolve around preserving the current roles and prestige of mathematicians, and also makes a lot of assumptions about the capabilities of AI years or decades into the future.

It seems somewhat narcissistic to assume that humans are capable of understanding every frontier in perpetuity, or that a human mind has a meaninful role to play in mapping out the frontier beyond a certain threshold.

It might be that P=NP and the algorithms are handed down to us. We can apply them without understanding why P=NP, and we may never be capable of understanding why.

[dead]

Reducing all human endeavors into “toil” is reductionist as fuck.

What it nothing is meant to be anything, but just happen to be?

Listening to tech-bros talk about the AGI utopia, it always seems like they are completely detached from reality. When talking about the potential downsides, they've got both confident predictions for days, as well as expected timelines. But when asked about the positives, then it gets real vague - where we're going? Why is that something people should want? What is the line from our current society and that one? I know predicting the future is hard, but when faced with this kind of imbalanced uncertainty between good and bad, how do you expect people not to feel afraid of it?

> Nobody in any position of power is even hinting this is driving toward post-scarcity

Who are you counting as being in "any position of power"? All the AI lab people are saying that the most likely and best outcome is we all live in a world of abundance where money doesn't matter anymore. Dario, Sam, Demis, and Elon have all said this loudly and repeatedly to anyone who asks.

None of them have articulated a coherent way to get there from here. But they all believe that the technology will make it possible, so the only unresolved question is how to transition us there.

I think the process will not be clean and the upturning of apple carts will happen. But I don’t think it’s possible to sustain the decline in value of toil in a stable society. People simply won’t die for the convenience of the consolidated power.

There are a lot of discussions of socialization of health care and basic income approaches and sovereign wealth based on automation dividends similar to the Alaska trust.

I think the current spate of mean cruelty ala MAGA and a glorification of a mean and cruel past that was never a golden age is a death spasm of a deeply unpopular belief system. As the actual realities of the policies sink in 70% of the populace is revolted, which is a super majority. That’s more than enough to put a pin in the philosophy permanently. It is also greatly accelerating electrification, realization of the value of expertise in technocratic systems in current generations, etc. I think humans are socially adaptable animals at a cultural level, but for the individual the adaptation process can be awful. I hope it’s not, because it doesn’t have to be. We will see.

> It just looks like the same old vile maxim, all for ourselves, and nothing for other people.

  We have no choice, we must tax the common people.

  The Uprising (2026)

Because UBI studies found it makes people perform significantly worse than without it. They didn't get better. Humans require toil, we require pain to function.

Matrix was a good point to this. They made the world a utopia and people couldn't handle it. Our monkey brains require pain give us a utopia and we'll just walle ourselves to death.

Most of the boosterism around AI is also starting like religious mysticism, the kind of arguments religious people made (and make), trust in God/AI, abundance is here, no one will have to work. I wonder what that tells us?

It also doesn't help that people are generally not optimistic about the future.

The economics in the West feel very strained right now, and this incredible tool has come along just in time to threaten one of the last bastions of middle-class safety: white collar jobs.

AI is just another technology, and all technologies should be employed in service to humans.

I think it’s reasonable for people to say “I like the way things were, I don’t like this new future you’re proposing, and I want to limit the technology that’s doing the thing I don’t like.”

There is nothing inevitable about AI. As a society we may decide it is fundamentally unhealthy or anti-human. We have banned or curtailed access and research for other technologies before.

The irony of what you said and how you said it is glaring.