AI Is Creating More Jobs Than We Can Fill, and That Will Force It to Slow Down
Why Do We Need Human Mathematicians Anymore?
Po-Shen Loh argues that as AI advances, it will generate an overwhelming number of control points requiring human oversight, creating more skilled jobs than there are people to fill them. This imbalance will force AI development to slow down. He proposes an axiom—humans should help humanity flourish—as a core value for all industries, including mathematics, to preserve human-led communities of expertise.
So, either the labs will reduce the pace of AI development themselves, or they will be forced to by disasters that arise when an overly fast pace exhausts human control.
- xanderlewis
Friendly warning to those who might not be aware: the vast majority of comments below posts like the above will be left by (otherwise intelligent) programmers who think mathematics is a closed system where one attempts to solve endless Olympiad-type problems. I wouldn’t take any of it seriously at all. Better to listen to what those who actually know what the subject is about have to say.
Unfortunately, mathematics (especially pure mathematics) is by its very nature very, very poorly understood by those who haven’t worked as a mathematician. Even worse, those who don’t understand are seemingly not at all aware of their misunderstanding and are entirely confident in their (very wrong) characterisation of the subject.
- Planktonne
Everyone involved in AI should have read The Library of Babel [1].
It's about many things, but perhaps the most relevant idea here is that no information matters without understanding. We could generate all possible knowledge, but unless someone--a human--can verify and understand it, it doesn't count. The cure for mortality could be written on the moon, but if no one reads it, it hasn't really been discovered.
[1] https://maskofreason.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/0...
- auggierose
> We (humans) should help humanity flourish.
I think this axiom is of course true. But the mistake the article makes, in my opinion, is to try to apply this axiom separately to each domain. If we have this as the over-arching axiom, it is not clear at all that humans should be steering the development of mathematics. Maybe it would be better for humanity if the department of world math is run by AI.
- bananaflag
> Similar logic applies to every industry and every job. And it comes to the conclusion that we won’t have enough people for all the jobs that need to be done.
In the (extremely) short run, yes. In the long run, those jobs will also be done by AI.
It's like chimpanzees seeing human society and saying "look how complex it is, imagine how many chimpanzees it needs to maintain it".
- VCFundedGenYer
What's up with these insanely off base articles on HN this morning? Every single one of these is an unhinged pro-AI anti-human schlock piece.