Mathematics Was Beautiful Before We Were Born, and AI Can't Diminish It
Egoless Mathematics in the AI Era
Karthik C. S., Amit Sahai, and Jie Xue argue that mathematicians should rethink why their work matters as AI advances. If worth is tied to producing results and proving individual ability, machines expose a conception of intellectual life that was already machine-shaped. Taking a Platonic view—mathematical truth exists independently of its discoverers—they propose "egoless mathematics": pursuing truth with humility, letting discovery reshape our purposes rather than demanding it preserve our importance.
We had already come to understand ourselves in terms suited to machines. AI merely exposes the consequences of this view.
- kzz102
Human pursuits cannot be separated from the humans who pursuit it. In the pursuit of knowledge, what ultimately drives people is what they themselves can understand, and the meaning these understanding provides, both based on their own experience and people whose opinions they value. Humans do not pursuit Platonic knowledge for their own sake, and those who claim to do it, often are satisfying their egos in a different way.
- bhouston
Following Terry Tao's blog he seems to be engaging in forced self-directed cognitive behaviorial therapy, he is trying to come to terms with loss while developing a new framework for himself and other as to where the value is. It is cool to see. It is better to engage than to be in denial and just fall into reactionary behavior.
- j2kun
This essay seems to say, "people don't matter; all that matters is truth." And that all the policy decisions should follow from that assumed value.
Yikes. I fear for what mathematics will become if that becomes the majority viewpoint.
- GMoromisato
The lens to use is the Venn diagram of:
1. What you like doing
2. What you are good at doing
3. What people will pay you to do
For math, if your goal is to prove something that no one else has proven, then all three are under attack.
I think the "egoless" path is taking a 50,000-foot view of mathematics that ignores the above lens. Sure, mathematics will survive and even prosper with AI, but what about the mathematicians?
In time, the profession of mathematics will evolve so a new task is at the center of the diagram--maybe it will be explaining math results to humans or teaching math to future mathematicians. I don't know. But it's easy to see that not everyone is going to be happy with the transition, and many will be left behind.
For software engineering, it depends on what your center is. If you like "writing code", then #3 is under attack. But for those whose goal is, "make something work", all three are still viable and even better than before (or at least faster).
That's why we see so much disagreement on HN about whether AI is good or bad for software engineering.
I'm sure lots of other people have made this observation before.
- abstractbill
This is one of the best posts I've seen on this topic in a while.
I finished a math PhD before I decided to get out of academia and into startups. Since then, the older I get the more of a Platonist I become, especially now that I've taught my daughters a bunch of math (I'm their homeschool math+science teacher). And the more of a Platonist I become, the less I care about who made a particular discovery. Who cares?! It seems obvious (and quite beautiful) to me now that the same discoveries must be getting repeated again and again across the universe by alien mathematicians, and eventually by their AIs.