The hubris in the framing is astonishing, amusing and sad all at the same time. Many say, that's what HN attracts. Anyone who talks about inevitability except of death in these times is just someone who considers they'd be in the "have" rather the "have not" category.
I still can't see what this means for human understanding and how open would this knowledge be. Who'd ultimately get access to this stuff going forward and what kind of power games would ensue hereon.
I'm not sure why you think that someone who believes that this is inevitable is just someone who assumes they'd be in the "have" rather the "have not" category.
It seems like you are doing exactly what you accuse the parent commenter of doing.
The only difference, perhaps, is that the commenter seems to extrapolate past progress to future progress, while your own assumption is a lot more tenuous.
I just find it uncertain what lies ahead. I just don't see the sustainability in this. I have degrees in Mechanical Engineering, Applied Mathematics and Scientific Computing. If the "inevitable" is that I do manual labour till we can augment the robots to do that as well, I don't see how me or millions others similar to me have any agency.
Right now, a bunch of stuff is blurted out every month or quarter and people in notable positions are given a chance to "tidy it up". Let's assume that you have even the open weight models at your disposal, the hardware to run any of this in the kind of scale needed, requires capital of Governmental level funding.
Where I see this heading is that there'd be a divide of who controls the resources to produce and who gets delegated to do the menial work. If that's what you mean by my tenous assumption, please do share what you see differently.
Your assumption was that someone who believes that this is inevitable is just someone who assumes they'd be in the "have" rather the "have not" category.
I agree there may be some correlation, but it is less of a sure thing than thinking AI replacing mathematicians is inevitable, in my opinion.
It just puts us in the same boat as buggy whip manufacturers and saddlemakers. At least now we know how they truly felt. The rest of society needs to care as much as you cared about saddlemakers before AI. See how that works?
It's fascinating how we start bringing in printing press, saddle makers and weavers into these discussions.
But since you bring that up, to recap, the then colonial powers, systemically invalidated the hand weavers of India (where I happen to be from) with the industrial revolution. What followed was famine, mass deaths and cultural collapse. So yes, I truly realize the catastrophe what a group of resource controlling groups can cause on the ones who don't have the chance to have say in how tech moves forward.
Also saddle makers and weavers weren't like a sizable part of world economy. The effects were "far away from home". The "inevitable" is people in tech, all sorts of knowledge workers and possibly even manual labour.
Jobs being invalidated has been happening for a long while. This is not that discussion.
When you mechanise, you take the "meaning" out of the effort and that, in of itself, is death of human pursuit of the venture.
The industrial revolution did that to battles and wars and it inspired Tolkein's lores to a considerable degree. He loathed what mechanisation had done.
I feel something similar is happening to Mathematics. I shudder to think what would come of other human pursuit this mechanisation targets next.
No, you're right. I clearly missed reading the room :D
But I'm glad how Terence Tao sees it. I was relying him to do that for the NS results as well.
I didn't follow through to the PhD, but I spent few years building up to understanding of Fluid Dynamics and Functional Analysis to come close to NS. It's intriguing that it's "solved", but what interests me is then "what do we learn from it" and what lies beyond in non-linearity.
In the 10 years I've spent away from academia, I still cherish what Math taught me best: looking at equivalences and I still feel the kick that I surely wouldn't want an Agent to do on my behalf. NS was never the point. And who can't see that I can only feel that they missed out.
Maybe, actually, it will rehumanize math by formulating its ideas in a manner that allow their comprehension without 10-15 years of mechanized practice. The average human might understand quantum mechanics and Maxwell’s equations with the right conceptual interface.
Maybe they should, you know.
Maybe OpenAI is exactly working towards so that we need to do that :)
It's fascinating how people like to push any statement to its limits, because it circles around to absurdity and they believe they've made a point. Moderation seems to be chasing you, but you clearly are faster!
Taking a statement to its limits is useful for that reason. This is why it's so common to do in physics & math, in fact!
If your mental model breaks at the limits, it maybe means there's some truth in what you say, but there's a nuance that's clearly missing.
And that's the case here: nobody argues when automation comes for many types of other tasks, so why is mathematics special? Or even art? We should either find that line or accept that maybe they aren't as special as we assumed.
I'm really curious how you're dealing with lazy loading. Is the MCP then more like a tool-helper instead of the tools themselves?
I was trying to find out if the MCP has some sort of lazy loading feature/primitive in the works, but there seem to be a lot of disagreements about it.
Intuitively, lazy loading seems to be somewhere between a CLI and vanilla MCP. In the end, it sounds very similar to tiered/ progressive loading similar to images on low bandwidth connections.
I went through the whole article, agreeing to most of it and I was baffled by how skeptical people were in the comments here, with remarks of "follow the money". I didn't read all of it in one shot, but in breaks over the course of 2 days and when I finally got to the last paragraph I understood what people in the comments were on about.
I grew up in a culture where hustle and work was the way out of a terrible life. I've spent several years unlearning that work is not everything while living in Europe. But then, work is not everything and not all that important because some AI agents can do all* of it...
Nice try, but work is still a lot of what I derive meaning from and taking meaning from a person might not have a positive outcome: for the person and for the society.
I still can't see what this means for human understanding and how open would this knowledge be. Who'd ultimately get access to this stuff going forward and what kind of power games would ensue hereon.