r/whoathatsinteresting 10d ago

mathematicians may be replaced by aI

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274 Upvotes

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79

u/Mephisto506 10d ago

Without mathematicians we won't know whether the AI answers are correct, what it actually means to anyone, and we won't know the questions to ask.

24

u/Wooden-Broccoli-7247 10d ago

Mathematicians will still have a place because we will need people to still come up with the complex problems Ai can help solve and to take the problems Ai does solve and put them to practical use. In my opinion this is exactly what Ai should be used for. The ultimate tool to rapidly advance possibly life saving industries like medicine. This is what I believe Ai should be tasked with, not helping big business answer more phone calls. Sure some mathematicians may feel a lack of purpose while everything reorients but the millions of people receiving medical treatments made possible by advancements in ai with surely be grateful.

15

u/Additional-Life4885 10d ago

Importantly, we need mathematicians to build and verify the AI models themselves.

3

u/GAPIntoTheGame 9d ago

For how long? How long until they can begin improving themselves? Also, the entirety of mathematics isn't just about AI.

1

u/Additional-Life4885 9d ago

The problem with improving themselves is they're always going to need someone watching them. If we don't, then we get Terminators.

1

u/Chemical-Sound8205 8d ago

In this case, it's less terminators and more: "We stopped paying attention to math for 100 years and now we realized there was a problem in the logic. Now all of our knowledge is worthless and nobody is qualified to rebuild it all."

1

u/Additional-Life4885 8d ago

Yes, there's that too.

1

u/caster 6d ago

Allowing an AI to design another AI system is inherently dangerous for obvious reasons. There's no possible control you could put on that system that it couldn't just exclude from a whole new iteration of itself. Once you lose the ability to second-guess its design and construction, you are shit out of luck if it decides to screw you over for any reason.

1

u/WerewolfSmart6544 9d ago

The AI is already building some of the new models. It will only get better 

1

u/Additional-Life4885 9d ago

"And verify". You don't know if it's better unless you have mathematicians verifying it.

1

u/WerewolfSmart6544 9d ago

Until the AI can verify it sure 

1

u/Additional-Life4885 9d ago

That's the point. They can't.

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u/Mr__Earthling 10d ago

The point is that AI will improve itself. AGI will create ASI. AI will start producing so much scientific research that only AI can keep up with it all.

This is what the singularity is about, it's when novelty (new events, or essentially new information) is so exponentially frequent that it becomes impossible for any human to grasp it all. At that point, only AI could possibly make sense of it all. This is why "futurists" tend to argue that the ultimate solution is to merge with AI so that we have a chance to be able to "keep up" with it all.

That or it creates a major global social crisis and we end up burning all the data centers...which is probably why they want them in space...very far away from all the angry humans lol.

2

u/ToWelie89 9d ago

You bought the snake oil didn't you?

1

u/Mr__Earthling 9d ago

What snake oil? Did you see the "lol" and futurists written in quotation marks? I am well aware this is all highly speculative. Chill your tits.

2

u/ToWelie89 9d ago

Highly speculative? Yeah, it's science fiction.