>And now that AI has solved all our problems, we can devote ourselves to more important work: going into quantitative finance, vibecoding sports-betting apps, consuming AI-generated TikTok shorts, and arguing with political bots on Twitter.
Grim but this is exactly where society is heading.
Not a huge fan of the sentiment in this article, and the very cynical way it was communicated, but the references to the library of babel reminded me of this fun site.
> From what I know about the academic community (mostly from Twitter and LinkedIn, which I assume are representative), there seems to be near-unanimous agreement that the purpose of math and science research is to gather a large quantity of potentially true factoids in a repository that nobody will actually ever read, in a ritual called “advancing humanity’s[3] knowledge”. That these results are well-written, understandable, pleasant to read or look at, or even completely correct is a secondary concern — in fact, in the pursuit of advancing humanity’s knowledge as quickly as possible, many academics will recoil in anger at the suggestion that it is worth spending any time making results understandable to humans.
Am I the only who thinks this is rhetorical? Modern mathematics is so far removed from the base average knowledge (lets just assume high school instead of going to axioms) that the only people who understand most (if not all new) mathematical achievement are the mathematicians themselves, heck not even all mathematicians, it needs to be spread and developed from "hot spots"?
Your math results are not "well-written, understandable, pleasant to read or look at" unless you literally operate with two or three levels within the proof paper compared to the average person who probably starts at an order of magnitude levels higher.
To the average person, asking a mathematician to explain something is the same as asking the AI/LLM. Both are asking an oracle to dumb it down to their level of abstraction.
To the person who are not career mathematicians, both LLMs and mathematicians do the same thing, pump out garbled output that they themselves understand, and to mathematicians, the difference is one probably explains using axioms rather than theorems.
Just hit "random." It's always gibberish. The odds of getting something that isn't gibberish are astronomically low, like winning the lottery.
The actual library Borges describes has 25^1312000 books, the very vast majority of which are utter nonsense. (As the simulator makes clear.)
Yet with AI, we're getting an abundance of very credible -- and, as Tao himself notes, frequently correct -- mathematical proofs. In these new AI math results, the ratio of signal to noise is high, which makes our current situation the exact opposite of the library, which is pure noise where signal emerges only by random necessity.
Dear friends: you may not like to hear this but the profit motive is what ruins everything.
I have a degree in Economics. I have read Adam Smith (and not just the Wealth of Nations, by the way!). I spent years on this stuff. I understand markets and for some things they are indeed the best solution. No argument there.
It is a FACT that some things in life should not be done for profit.
If we as humanity cannot protect fields like art, science, even healthcare and housing, from the ever-growing pressure to make a profit off of them, then we are truly doomed. AI is not the sole cause, it just expedites the process of destroying everything that is not maximally cost-effective.
It's a nice rant that I think will become more common until everyone burns out and one important realization dawns upon them: the corporations doing these things don't really care about your plight, suffering, etc. You can write thousands of books using this kind of tongue-in-cheek-but-really-angry language, and they'll just laugh it off. Felix Reisenberg will make a new post about something he's doing with Claude, Boris will make a tweet and everyone will rush to turn it into LLM-generated images so they can post on their LinkedIn for their bosses to measure their engagement KPIs, and we'll forget about the rants.
So if you are suggesting that life is now meaningless at status quo, it suggests that life will find new meaning....perhaps it will come in the form of a realisation that if corporations are in no ones interest, perhaps the better life is the one fighting against meaninglessness through our own redefinitions of noble pursuits...perhaps the most noble pursuit will become war against companies and executives in a post-modern religious crusade to reclaim some purpose in ones life. Perhaps murder is not a problem when you murder companies
It's the same process that has been running - creation of complexity as a dissipative structure - but now with even less friction. Some say we'll transcend, I think we're spiraling into the language-navel of cartesian dualist logical positivist insanity.
> That's the point - why are we doing this?
> Of all the things we could be doing, why are we doing this?
Money. Capitalism. It's all a fucking grift. Always has been.
If you thought AI was going to usher in a post scarcity golden age of infinite wealth where all disease, hunger, want and inequality are solved and everyone gets to live their lives purely for pleasure and intellectual pursuit, where the Eschaton is in their Heaven and all is right in the world, and humanity spreads out amongst the stars as being of transcendent machine intellect or some shit you read in a sci-fi book then congratulations, you're the mark.
>And now that AI has solved all our problems, we can devote ourselves to more important work: going into quantitative finance, vibecoding sports-betting apps, consuming AI-generated TikTok shorts, and arguing with political bots on Twitter.
Grim but this is exactly where society is heading.
Not a huge fan of the sentiment in this article, and the very cynical way it was communicated, but the references to the library of babel reminded me of this fun site.
https://libraryofbabel.info
Great satire, it is nice to see people with a human spirit left. The NYT should ask to republish this.
> AI has solved all our problems
What about the Collatz conjecture? AFAIK, it requires some novel approaches to mathematics, which would be a real testament to AI creative skills.
I don't doubt it will be solved some day, but as of now it's too early to say that all our problems are solved.
> From what I know about the academic community (mostly from Twitter and LinkedIn, which I assume are representative), there seems to be near-unanimous agreement that the purpose of math and science research is to gather a large quantity of potentially true factoids in a repository that nobody will actually ever read, in a ritual called “advancing humanity’s[3] knowledge”. That these results are well-written, understandable, pleasant to read or look at, or even completely correct is a secondary concern — in fact, in the pursuit of advancing humanity’s knowledge as quickly as possible, many academics will recoil in anger at the suggestion that it is worth spending any time making results understandable to humans.
Am I the only who thinks this is rhetorical? Modern mathematics is so far removed from the base average knowledge (lets just assume high school instead of going to axioms) that the only people who understand most (if not all new) mathematical achievement are the mathematicians themselves, heck not even all mathematicians, it needs to be spread and developed from "hot spots"?
Your math results are not "well-written, understandable, pleasant to read or look at" unless you literally operate with two or three levels within the proof paper compared to the average person who probably starts at an order of magnitude levels higher.
To the average person, asking a mathematician to explain something is the same as asking the AI/LLM. Both are asking an oracle to dumb it down to their level of abstraction.
To the person who are not career mathematicians, both LLMs and mathematicians do the same thing, pump out garbled output that they themselves understand, and to mathematicians, the difference is one probably explains using axioms rather than theorems.
This is not a very upbeat post. It does not say much about the AI Library of Babel but I have been wondering about the same thing.
Such a weird take.
There's a library of babel simulator here: https://libraryofbabel.info/
Just hit "random." It's always gibberish. The odds of getting something that isn't gibberish are astronomically low, like winning the lottery.
The actual library Borges describes has 25^1312000 books, the very vast majority of which are utter nonsense. (As the simulator makes clear.)
Yet with AI, we're getting an abundance of very credible -- and, as Tao himself notes, frequently correct -- mathematical proofs. In these new AI math results, the ratio of signal to noise is high, which makes our current situation the exact opposite of the library, which is pure noise where signal emerges only by random necessity.
Whoosh.
I’m not doing it. Why are you?
Dear friends: you may not like to hear this but the profit motive is what ruins everything.
I have a degree in Economics. I have read Adam Smith (and not just the Wealth of Nations, by the way!). I spent years on this stuff. I understand markets and for some things they are indeed the best solution. No argument there.
It is a FACT that some things in life should not be done for profit.
If we as humanity cannot protect fields like art, science, even healthcare and housing, from the ever-growing pressure to make a profit off of them, then we are truly doomed. AI is not the sole cause, it just expedites the process of destroying everything that is not maximally cost-effective.
It's a nice rant that I think will become more common until everyone burns out and one important realization dawns upon them: the corporations doing these things don't really care about your plight, suffering, etc. You can write thousands of books using this kind of tongue-in-cheek-but-really-angry language, and they'll just laugh it off. Felix Reisenberg will make a new post about something he's doing with Claude, Boris will make a tweet and everyone will rush to turn it into LLM-generated images so they can post on their LinkedIn for their bosses to measure their engagement KPIs, and we'll forget about the rants.
So if you are suggesting that life is now meaningless at status quo, it suggests that life will find new meaning....perhaps it will come in the form of a realisation that if corporations are in no ones interest, perhaps the better life is the one fighting against meaninglessness through our own redefinitions of noble pursuits...perhaps the most noble pursuit will become war against companies and executives in a post-modern religious crusade to reclaim some purpose in ones life. Perhaps murder is not a problem when you murder companies
That's the point - why are we doing this?
Of all the things we could be doing, why are we doing this?
Is it collective mental illness? Economic hysteria? A cult of virtual personality?
It's simultaneously irrational, obsessive, ecologically and politically catastrophic, and all-consuming - none of which are good things.
It's the same process that has been running - creation of complexity as a dissipative structure - but now with even less friction. Some say we'll transcend, I think we're spiraling into the language-navel of cartesian dualist logical positivist insanity.
> That's the point - why are we doing this? > Of all the things we could be doing, why are we doing this?
Money. Capitalism. It's all a fucking grift. Always has been.
If you thought AI was going to usher in a post scarcity golden age of infinite wealth where all disease, hunger, want and inequality are solved and everyone gets to live their lives purely for pleasure and intellectual pursuit, where the Eschaton is in their Heaven and all is right in the world, and humanity spreads out amongst the stars as being of transcendent machine intellect or some shit you read in a sci-fi book then congratulations, you're the mark.
What if the rants slowly transition into violence?
When, not if...