- He's embedded in a social and professional world that has every incentive to believe the current state of AI progress is real and important and should be hyped to the stars. I am unsurprised to read such frothing soothsaying as a result.
- Luckily, humans will always remain relevant to humans.
- It remains to be seen if LLMs would do any good in the "theory-building" heavy fields of math. They have certainly proven themselves in branches of math where the progress is verifiable, but fields like AG commonly have papers that do not concretely solve a problem but provide a new perspective/framework. This is iterated upon if other mathematicians find the construction rich and interesting enough, which eventually leads to breakthroughs.
LLMs have yet to show that they can meaningfully make such helpful abstractions. Not saying that it can't be done, but I wouldn't write such doomer posts just as yet.
- Reports of our demise are greatly exaggerated.
- Someone close to me is about to embark on a maths PhD. I'm curious about what advice people here would have for people in that position.
- I think they'll do okay considering there's another story in the front page about a university in California just now realizing after six years (without the requirement) that standardized math testing should be pre-requisite for...wait for it...STEM candidates.
Short-term: you better love it. Long-term: just focus on being one of the ones that ensures humans retain their ability to understand math. Do a YouTube channel on the side where you make math legible to the masses in a fun, engaging way. Use the cash from that to fund your research/genuine passions.
Whatever you do: please don't submit to the machine or throw away your genuine curiosity as a sacrifice on the Altar of Commerce.
- Honestly? This is my own opinion, but I think math was never about getting results per se. Counting citations and always talking about advancement and progress distort why people do math at a high level. It's sort of like why climb Mount Everest? You could just take a helicopter if all it was about was getting to the top. People like to challenge themselves and see how far they can go. Universities might get outsourced to AI if all that matters is publishing and results. There might be even fewer prestigious professorships. But even in that case I believe some people, maybe many fewer people than now, will continue to work on math for their own sake. So if your motivation was to find things out for yourself, I suspect that won't go away.
- I think it depends what they’re hoping to get out of it.
- The academic market in the US is very bad and in the EU only marginally better. China seems to prefer domestic talent now.
Outside of academia there are only a few niche industries still hiring. Mag7 is drying up. The semi-private research institutes want seniors with grants or customers in pocket, not fresh phds with no connections.
Probably only getting worse in the near term.
There are a few specific applications that are still good. Medical imaging seems okay for now. Advanced signal processing is still a viable route. Consumer robotics, possibly.
- Learn a trade that involves using your hands.
- Most academic math is still done with pencil and paper, so there is that.
- So don't bother with higher education at all?
- At least until robotic dexterity catches up.
- > I feel like at this point, both the prophets of AI utopia like Ray Kurzweil, and of AI doom like Eliezer Yudkowsky, could be forgiven for asking: dude, will you listen to us YET?
What did Kurzweil or Yudkowsky predict that actually came to pass?
I assign this Scott no points for bringing up Penrose as a straw man. That’s a very old canard.
- Soon we will all just be human cattle owner by billionaires who own all the technology used to keep us poor and indoors.
Oh, no - that's actually now.
- I think that's temporarily. The trend is to reduce the population, see Europe and China.
- the billionaires currently see the problem as how to properly read the ownership tag.
- bwaaaaaa! ha ha ha bwaaaaa! wheeeeeeuew! is the title what happens from too much ketamine? or is the hype machine being tasked with streeeetching things out for one more quarter? bills, elections, push back,lack of relevance, that sort of stuff.
23 points by gone35 9 hours ago | 18 comments