Really? Just send whoever a link to literally any of a dozen cross-platform video calling services. They don't even need to install anything. Hell, even Google Meet is just clicking a link.
I don't think that's true. The technologies that have made solar panels efficient enough to be worthwhile were being worked on at a pace that was not effected by not "going all in".
The desperately needed TL;DR is that perhaps the actual mathematics itself (i.e. proofs, calculations, etc.) can be done by AI, but why we do it and deciding which problems to solve can only be done by AI. Therefore mathematician do maths.
I'm not a mathematician, but this seems like a weak and slightly bizarre argument.
I'm wondering how we are going to maintain a critical mass of people who understand frontier mathematics if in another five or ten years the only "mathematicians" truly working at the frontier anymore are AIs. Or maybe "understanding" at depth will become a thing of the past, superseded by broad-strokes grasp of results plus machine verification.
For one thing, every topic can be explained with motion graphics offering another 1 or 2 dimensions (time and for the 3d stuff that is hard to see structure of in static 2d, plus things like vr will allow more direct depth perception and different views) than a typical blackboard lecture.
On Proof and Progress in Mathematics talks about how much gets lost of the geometric understanding when translated to a paper. The kinds of things many mathematicians visualize in their head will be much easier to transmit.
I don't know if that is enough to offset the other affects, but learning and transmitting the understanding should be able to get much easier for a lot of people in principle.
If training data are purely historical, then how does the AI look forward?
And if human mathematicians are drummed out of producing future training data, then can AI end up proving itself so much "eating the seed corn", only at scale?
This is also how it works for humans too.
What portion of human art produced in 2025 or 1925 do you think was fresh and novel, compared to derived and repetitive?
The same is true for science and Engineering.
What matters is if you have a method of sorting through the repetitive trash
If training data are purely historical, then how does the human look forward?
Seems to me not impossible that given current knowledge, AI generate one nugget more of knowledge (eg a proof of Navier Stokes), and given current knowledge + the nugget, generate yet some more new knowledge.
Not sure on whether the pros outweigh the cons for what it was originally intended for, or if older diabetes medication is better. One thing that I am sure of though is that _diet and exercise do not have shortcuts_.
I have to have my machine further crippled in order protect people who don't know what they're doing on a computer.
I don't think there's anything wrong with people not knowing how to use a computer properly. In fact, I wouldn't expect a normal person to, why should they? So what I would love to see is normies be given iPads, and my computer left the hell alone.
It's like if we over-simplified all the controls in a cockpit because someone who likes playing flying games finds it too difficult to fly a real plane.
We've had a solution to this for a long time in various programs - let the user tell the application how much they know. By default, settings are extremely limited, but you can change settings to "advanced" or "expert", and more options/settings become available.
There is no reason this couldn't work for permissions as well; beginners get the system locked down pretty well, whereas advanced users get a more open system they can do more with, at the expense of potential foot-guns)
(As a side note, we could probably make a plane that had this principle applied as well. With autopilot where it is today, we could easily make a commercial plane that grandma could fly under most circumstances - you just need that real pilot and extra controls for when things go wrong.)
The reason this doesn't work for the OS is that applications invariably ask the user to set settings to "expert" and toggle this and that in order to take full advantage of features.
So I still think the solution is something like iOS or Android. I can not think of anything a non-CS person needs to do that can't be done on those platforms.
Install an app. For apple you need to try test flight to find out too many people use the app so you need to be able to install in developer mode.
I can understand the argument that you should have some technical competency to evaluate that these programs are safe to install, but neither accounts for a technically competent friend/family member suggesting/helping you install an app. Apple requires expertise to even keep an app that doesn't pay to be on the app store installed longer than a week.
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