In recent months, Open AI has stunned the mathematical community by publishing hundreds of math findings. Many of these proofs, spanning number theory, theoretical computer science, and logic, had stumped the world's best mathematicians for decades, or even centuries. The reaction has been a mix of indignation, astonishment, and sorrow.
"Tuesday night, I cried and it woke up my daughter," said Hugo Duminil-Copin, recipient of the 2022 Fields Medal, after Open AI's October release. "They have annihilated my field of research." Steven Strogatz, a mathematician and author at Cornell University, said he cried when he spoke to Wired. "People are using language like 'they're strip-mining our subject' or 'they're nuking the landscape,'" he said. "The feeling is disorientation. There is enormous grief."
The author set out to understand this grief, asking whether it was a familiar case of bruised ego or something more profound. Today the mathematicians are weeping because the machine smashed their tower first, but tomorrow it may be physicists, economists, illustrators, or writers who weep over their fallen blocks. The author argues that a rapidly improving technology whose output is intelligence is destined to collide with a modern sensibility that equates human intellect with purpose, dignity, and self-worth.
To explore that future, the author turns to a broader question: what makes humans special? Intelligence and sociality are part of the answer, but other species share both. What sets humans apart is how these capacities multiply each other. Humans imitate, iterate, and tinker, and their social networks spread that process across generations, so each discovery becomes the floor for the next.
Science is both a craft and a conversation, a collaborative and adversarial game in which each generation stands on the shoulders of giants. That cumulative tradition is precisely what the new machine intelligence now challenges.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing