Oxford Student Learns Four Physics Courses in Six Weeks with ChatGPT

I'm glad I finished my Ph.D. before any of this stuff hit the market. It sounds like it would have been a substantially different experience, and I suspect I might not have finished it with as solid a grasp on my thesis subject as I have.

Her comment about the Mathematica notebook really hits home. As a scientist, not a software engineer, who uses code as a tool to speed up more critical parts of my work, I was thrilled to have the chance to learn programming skills on the job. I could justify it because the time saved by the fruits of it outran the time I spent learning it. I can't do that anymore. I'm not building software, just scripting, so even the cheapest models today can give me suitable code quicker than I could write it myself. So I can no longer justify learning new programming skills, at least on work time. I'm glad I had a few years to pick up the basics before these tools became available.

Society benefits when in person collaboration builds understanding and creates new ideas and approaches /in both parties/.

Since now the former potential collaborators are feeding on more or less the same generated content, it's hard to see how AI will replace that.

And that's not the mention the further alienation it causes, as heavily alluded to in the article.

I somewhat agree with the article on the narrative level.

Lately, my thoughts on our LLM future darkened a tad, too.

I find the parallel between LLMs and Sophons from the 3-Body Problem novels increasingly accurate. That is, specifically, in terms of their effect of stalling human progress. Sure, anybody can opt out of using LLMs (unlike with Sophons), so the restriction on progress seems kind of "soft" in this sense, but the chances of someone choosing to do so aren't too high, IMO. It is so much easier to avoid forcing yourself to learn or explore hard stuff and just ask the model instead.

While I tend to support this in a field such as SW Engineering (if only the Standards and Quality Control aspects advanced as fast as raw code generation...), I share the same fears as Tao and others regarding Mathematics (and not just Mathematics; Computer Science, which ultimately underlies SWE, is on the spotlight as well).

> In particular, it would be pretty sad to destroy one of the few things that makes our life meaningful, not the fancy prize or the fancy position, but simply having a community to share and discuss and learn.

Exactly. The problem is a weird one though, because there are at least independent forces that are working together here:

(1) The people that are inventing AI or those that are pro-AI are typically those that have been conditioned to enjoy the "information rush" and place personal superificial enjoyment over human interaction. Lots of nerds/geeks simply love the idea of having a playground devoid of the necessity to actual interact outside their microcosm and so they think AI is the best thing since sliced bread. They're often people who were taunted in school or at least partially ostracized early in life because of their intelligence and take emotional comfort in tech.

(2) The perverted incentives of academia reward publishing and in general the incentives of capitalism create an arms race to be as efficient as possible at the cost of goods like "community" that only accrue vague benefits often outside the capitalistic system. So people tend to use AI.

(3) Very advanced technology itself weakens and even destroys smaller communities whose members then seek out technology as a superificial salve to ease what they consciously or subconsciously feel as something missing.

AI was never great. Knowledge as an end in itself is not a good thing and we should seek knowledge t […]