Twenty-five Fields Medalists Say AI Is Misaligned with Math. They're Half Right.
Align AI and Mathematics–To Something Else
Twenty-five Fields medalists signed a letter warning that AI companies' goals are severely misaligned with mathematics. Lior Pachter agrees, but argues the mathematics community itself fails to nurture its students and ideas. He cites the persecution of Juliusz Schauder, the overlooked Olga Ladyzhenskaya, and the exclusion of women like Karen Uhlenbeck and Cathleen Morawetz. The real question, he says, is not aligning AI with mathematicians, but aligning both to understanding, attribution, and generosity.
The history of mathematics gives us little reason to treat the profession's existing incentives, hierarchies, and institutions as a model.
- xanderlewis
I have a strong sense that almost none of the commenters and blog post authors ranting here about mathematics have any clue about mathematics or its culture. I do not recognise any of these descriptions of mathematicians at all, and can only imagine they’re based entirely on experiences of other, almost entirely unrelated, parts of academia. This is not the first time I’ve seen it online, but recent events seem to have exacerbated it.
Not sure quite what animates the absurd hatred of one of the least greedy groups of people on the planet, but it certainly isn’t experience. To anyone with any, it just looks like absurd derangement.
- andai
I've heard this idea before, that civilization itself is already a misaligned intelligence, and that AI will merely amplify the existing tendencies.
- mag7269
"People inside a moat, want to keep the moat from being breached because it fucks with their status quo."
EVERY.SINGLE.TIME. No shit, why would they want something disruptive to fuck with the way elite academia operates? And obviously I am talking about the "Master of the Universe" types atop the Ivory Tower. They have been A-OK, with privately-funded professorships, partnering with book publishers to milk students with single-access codes and never-ending "new" editions to their books, summer salary grants, partnering with all sorts of private companies as contractors, and/or milking on the tenure tit while the average adjunct lecturer at a local college/university struggles to make ends-meet and has 150 students in a lecture.
The author talks about his UC Berkeley years. That UC Berkeley that opened and operated for nearly a century as a public institution educating California's true middle class up until the 1960 Donahoe Master Plan, but slowly progressed to gate-keep "normies" out and pivoted to a model of elitism that is absolutely and catastrophically broken.
Fuck off.