I think Terry Tao is a great litmus test for AI zealotry (both pro- and anti-). Just in this thread, we have people twisting themselves into knots about how he "sold out" or "not doing math the right way" or whatever. To him, AI is a tool, like any other.
From the interviews I've seen with Tao, he's not some AGI maniac, he says things like here's where we can use this tool, here's where it's less likely to be useful. There's a lot of hallucinations, so we need to double check stuff. Most of the stuff the AI produces is nonsense, but there's occasionally a diamond in the rough.
A very tempered attitude, and likely what most sane people are experiencing when using AI.
I enjoyed the article. I'm not a mathematician, but I did notice one aspect: even with his enthusiasm for AI, Tao effectively showed that for the uses he describes, AI can currently only handle small chunks of a mathematical problem at a time. Humans, or non-LLM approaches are still needed to stitch these together.
It perhaps isn't too different from LLMs being able to coherently output short, a few hundred words, pieces of prose, or code, but not being able to assemble them into functional output with constant "nudging".
A smart phone was just a tool at first, but over time society has become overly depedent on them. Most of us are now addicted to our smart phones in one way or another, and that has consequences that play out across society as a whole.
AI not only provides potential to cause society to become overly dependent on it, but it's being developed by/pushed for by the same fucking people who caused our societies smartphone addiction.
Once you recognize what we've lost already, it's hard to turn off your brain and just compartmentalize this away as a "just a tool". Nothing that is adopted so widely is "just a tool," and thinking of it in those terms eliminates the ability to analyze the potential downstream effects it will cause.
> pushed for by the same fucking people who caused our societies smartphone addiction
Not sure where you live, but I would guess the West (where we have the luxury to be worried about "smartphone addiction"). I assure you that the net positive of smartphones, especially cheap Androids, have had a significantly more positive effect on society than negative, particularly in the developing world.
As a person from the developing world I feel obligated to say that I find your assurance quite unconvincing: the negative effects of smartphone at this point in time is invariant globally, and whether they are a net positive or negative is at least debatable.
And in relation to your first comment, most sane people would agree that "tools" don't exist in isolation - neither come into existence out of nowhere.
This reductionist position of treating extremely complex machines with deep social interactions as a tool like any other is objectively wrong, and I believe the reasons are highly obvious but I can expand on this if you disagree.
>But I assure you that the net positive of smartphones, especially cheap Androids, have had a significantly more positive effect on society than negative, particularly in the developing world.
My point is that the tool which was meant to augment one particular aspect of life, has metastasized into being a cancer on many other aspects of our lives, and that has downstream consequences on society as a whole.
Keeping this in mind, being a bullish on AI seems foolish.
edit: Perhaps a better thesis for my reservations with rapid technological progress: smart phones were supposed to help us adjust to society, but society instead adjusted to them. AI is positioned to do the same, and we need to ask ourselves what those changes could look like, and if they're for the better, or for the worse.
>where we have the luxury to be worried about "smartphone addiction"
I reject this, and any similar framing that amounts to "because there are other, greater problems at play, worrying about this relatively lesser problem is worthless."
A problem that impacts people is a problem that deserves attention, especially if an absolute terms the number of people impacted are in the tens/hundreds of millions.
Social constructivism is tougher and tougher than “just tools.” Could the so-called “addictiveness” consist partly of the many other devices smartphones replaced? Sure, some attention economy but also just turn off the data?
> My point is that the tool which was meant to augment one particular aspect of life, has metastasized into being a cancer on many other aspects of our lives, and that has downstream consequences on society as a whole.
This is true of all important tools in history. From computers, to electricity, cars, steam, even agriculture. They reshape society and its practices. This has been documented multiple times. One I can remember on top of my head, but is not limited to, is historical materialism.
From an misesian perspective, this seems fairly obvious:
1. smartphones are extremely useful (being miniature computers and all);
2. people tend to optimize their actions with the best tools available (i.e. smartphones in this case);
3. people will see others using smartphone increasing and will try to leverage that for their own goals, thus further adopting smartphones (even if indirectly);
4. the economy is the sum of human action, so this progressive adoption changes the economy and the culture.
> A problem that impacts people is a problem that deserves attention, especially if an absolute terms the number of people impacted are in the tens/hundreds of millions.
The real issue with your post is that you seem to be trying to fix smartphones addiction by getting rid of phones, ignoring the benefits they brought and the previous problems they fixed.
> 1. smartphones are extremely useful (being miniature computers and all);
Whether they are extremely useful or just some tool that has its uses depends a lot on your lifestyle.
> 2. people tend to optimize their actions with the best tools available (i.e. smartphones in this case);
What "best (tools)" means for you, depends a lot on your values. For example, if you value privacy, mobile phones and in particular smartphones are incredibly bad tool choices.
> Whether they are extremely useful or just some tool that has its uses depends a lot on your lifestyle.
The "useful" then didn't refer to the individual value judgments of all individuals, but the presence of material affordances that a sufficiently big mass of people would find useful. I admit this was not the best wording, but I forgot (and can't find it right now) the formal term that encapsulates the material qualities that others may see usefulness.
> What "best (tools)" means for you, depends a lot on your values. For example, if you value privacy, mobile phones and in particular smartphones are incredibly bad tool choices.
Agreed, but this misses the point. I didn't mean to imply that the value of things are objective (this is a misesian perspective, SToV is implied), but that some people would find smartphones useful, adopting themselves, and that would further expand the opportunities smartphones are useful to others, creating a positive feedback loop.
>The real issue with your post is that you seem to be trying to fix smartphones addiction by getting rid of phones, ignoring the benefits they brought and the previous problems they fixed.
No, my post is decidedly not that. I'm saying maybe we should stop and think about the consequences and plan accordingly.
My bad, then. If I may suggest something, give a small acknowledgement and avoid words such as "cancer", which is pretty loaded.
Still, people (as in most individuals in the economy) can't simply be stopped, even less so to plan, specially in a free system such as enjoyed by most of the west. That requires a high degree of coordination and coersion that I think only Cuba and NK are currently capable of, slightly. Otherwise, people will just do their own thing, leading to a technological revolution again, given the material means.
A more practical approach is to continuously nudge the direction of change towards a better direction, constantly reevaluating approach, but avoiding having to stop everyone else.
I'm not the person you were responding to, but I could've written the same as they did, so here's my reply:
I don't dispute that in aggregate the effect was positive. But I spend more time thinking about things which impact me directly, and I assure you that in my personal life it used to be a problem, and fixing it was an improvement.
That's an extremely broad statement to make "assuredly". I'd wager you haven't figured environmental consequences into your calculation. All the toxic waste from production is being routed to the developing world.
Calling my position stoic is kind of goofy imo (and fwiw, I personally find AI to be a pretty useful tool), but I'm not going to reply to some drive-by account literally made just to troll me.
Both the Leiden Declaration[1] as well as Commelin et al.'s announcement (Shaping the Future of Mathematics in the Age of AI)[2] are completely common-sense pieces, neither overstating the power of AI nor understating the capability of these tools to be misused (most acutely when it comes to attribution).
I do think that ethically, OpenAI and Anthropic, by training their models on the entire corpus of human knowledge, have certainly broken some rules, but these rules were already broken decades ago by Google—unless we really want to start splitting hairs about if indexing + processing is different than training, which is imo a distinction without a difference—, so it's hard to see who to exactly blame. In any case, that cat is out of the bag. (And for the record, I'm technically a stakeholder: I'm part of like two class actions because of a few books I wrote.) But that's neither here nor there.
I see Ochigame in both and they do talk about supply chain security..
Which Tao is more equivocal about as 2 issues higher on his mind are
1. Funding, short and long term (so he is evangelising "at the bequest of" SAIR)
2. Indigestion from generative abundance (this has always been an issue but now even researchers with permanent positions are affected, over and aside of administrative responsibilities )
here he tries to redirect attention from the "harder" problem of attribution to the "softer" problem of digestion
> I think Terry Tao is a great litmus test for AI zealotry (both pro- and anti-). Just in this thread, we have people twisting themselves into knots about how he "sold out" or "not doing math the right way" or whatever. To him, AI is a tool, like any other.
We've been flooded with "AGI is 6 months away!" for a few years now, mostly by Anthropic/OAI/XAI, which is clearly nonsensical hype. Also, almost everyone has been walking back their previous claims that "AI will replace ~80% of white-collar jobs."
> Also, almost everyone has been walking back their previous claims that "AI will replace ~80% of white-collar jobs."
They started walking those claims back right around the time someone tried to set Sam Altman's house on fire.
Not making those claims anymore doesn't necessarily mean they don't still believe those claims, it is very possible they just realized saying the quiet part out loud was a bad look for them even if it was/is what they believed to be true.
In the last decade or so I have never seen so much layoffs across the industry. This may be suggesting that evidence supporting the latter hypothesis is not maybe too far fetched.
In the last decade, the software engineering industry has turned into a grift that has pushed out hundreds of thousand of low-quality "engineers" through coding bootcamps or online courses. Many of these people have no passion for the craft or interest in building products.
Then, when money was cheap during COVID, companies over-hired unscrupulously. Now, given that markets are cooling off and there's some political, geopolitical, and economic uncertainty, companies are hedging their bets, and laying off is usually the right move, especially as interest rates are going back up.
There are perfectly viable explanations for the situation the industry finds itself in without invoking the AI boogeyman, especially considering that just about every study out there shows that AI use correlates with a fairly modest increase in productivity, and that it won't turn anyone into a "10x engineer" overnight.
Over-hiring could be one way of explaining the effect we are seeing, however, where are those "coding bootcamp" or "online courses" engineers? I honestly ask because I have never worked with one in almost 2 decades of being in the industry, and I worked across many different domains. What I see is on the contrary - the people who are getting laid off are people with legit engineering degrees from legit engineering Universities.
Also, over-hiring by the very definition implies a sudden surplus of engineers on the market. I can't quite understand where did these engineers all of the sudden come from? The number of engineers outputted by the Universities YoY is pretty much close to O(1) so I am not convinced to this theory at all and I see it only as a good excuse that companies are making in order to make them look better.
I spoke with my friends few days ago, and one of them runs the company so he asked me on the opinion of the AI frenzy. I gave him my view and by the end of it he told me that he feels uneasy but that he has to let go part of his employees because he simply does not need them anymore - they are literally replaced by the AI model and one or two or N-M engineers operating the model. Yesterday he needed 10 people for the job, today it is 2 or 3 people.
So, I think that the AI has already changed the landscape dramatically, and what we are seeing are not the post-COVID effects.
Where I'm from and peripheral countries, the industry is riddled with bootcampers and button pushers. My company even has a big bootcamp for reconversions
What are you trying to suggest? That people without the University degree who have been trained for monkey coding do exist? Sure but that's not what I was saying nor does it skew the picture in any significant way.
What I'm trying to convey and you fail to understand is the picture you have in your mind is very much affected by your reality. The fact that you don't see these bootcampers doesn't mean they don't exist.
As I said, your communication style is coming across as arrogant and disrespectful. Instead of asking for more clarification and giving a benefit of a doubt you chose to counterpoint with a trivial example, in which tbh I am hesitant to believe. I say this as someone who has worked across continents and across many different domains. None of the layoffs taking place do not involve laying off "bootcamp" people.
> Instead of asking for more clarification and giving a benefit of a doubt you chose to counterpoint with a trivial example
I didn't counterpoint with a trivial example I just pointed out that where I'm from there are some bootcamp people being layed off. If you don't like someone counter pointing you, sorry that's your problem not mine. I was neither disrespectful or arrogant.
> None of the layoffs taking place do not involve laying off "bootcamp" people.
And how am I the arrogant one here? You're full of absolutes and certainties and get pisssy when someone argues against your point.
Arrogant? I believe what I am saying is factual and pretty easy to check, if not already widely known if you read at least a tiny bit of tech news - so how about layoffs in Oracle, Intel, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, PayPal, Cisco, Dell, Atlassian, Epic Games, ASML, Verizon, ..., and this is all without mentioning startups because there's just too many of them and not many people know a lot about them etc. Which of these layoffs are the bootcamp people?
The problem I have with your "argument" is that it is unsubstantiated. And I already answered you earlier - it does not matter if such people exist because such people are not majority, unless you would like to support that hypothesis with some fact?
I know this might be shocking but... You know there are other contries besides USA? There are layoffs in other countries as well? What? Yes I know wow such a suprise. Go look at a map once in a while. Now you can call me arrogant
I'm not doxxing myself by sending you news from my country.
> if such people exist because such people are not majority
Which is different from your absolute "there are none" argument.
I live in Europe btw, and I am surrounded by people being layed off and none of them are the "bootcamp" developers. So, in order to support your view you'd really have to be more concrete, otherwise your response reads as short-viewed or even manipulative.
If "the latter hypothesis" of parent commenter was that "AI will replace ~80% of white-collar jobs", then that hypothesis clearly not supported by the current layoffs. AI isn't replacing workers, AI just happens to be an easy excuse for it. Could as well have been "COVID" or "tariffs" or "the economy" or "the end of Zero interest-rate policy"
Why not? I have literally got several first hand examples where people are fired because of how good the AI models became. Why do you find that questionable?
Objective reality is that many people have lost and are still loosing their jobs. If you don't have anything useful to add to your response please refrain from polluting the discussion.
No, it is not the same at all. I intentionally frame my words by saying that after all there may be an indication that such an event or correlation exists but I am explicitly not stating anything, therefore it is rather an invitation for discussion and not one-sided talk.
From the interviews I've seen with Tao, he's not some AGI maniac, he says things like here's where we can use this tool, here's where it's less likely to be useful. There's a lot of hallucinations, so we need to double check stuff. Most of the stuff the AI produces is nonsense, but there's occasionally a diamond in the rough.
A very tempered attitude, and likely what most sane people are experiencing when using AI.