Yet another Hacker News

"I'm on a war footing": Terry Tao and the crisis in math

31 points vinipolicena 2 days ago 23 comments

ViktorRay 34 minutes ago | parent

I find it interesting that, several years ago when discussing AI, folks used to focus on how automation would first come for blue collar work. Things like driving being automated and truck drivers replaced. And then eventually on the horizon we would see things like this.

But we still have no self driving cars. Seems like the automation came by in the opposite direction. Perhaps driving will actually be the final thing automated.

JLO64 30 minutes ago | parent

> But we still have no self driving cars

While I agree with your statement overall, as someone who drives everyday in LA alongside Waymos without anyone inside of them I must disagree with this aspect of it.

SchemaLoad 8 minutes ago | parent

We still have no general self driving cars. What we have is a bunch of geofenced tests. While we are closer than ever, we are still seemingly a long way away from truck drivers being obsolete was foretold over 10 years ago now.

bluefirebrand 28 minutes ago | parent

Driving is actually regulated.

Something I'm noticing a lot is that automation finds easy footholds in unregulated industries because there's no basis to push back on it. And there's a lot more tolerance for poor quality work in unregulated industries too.

mattnewton 26 minutes ago | parent

An LLM automating web developers with 99% success rate saves the company millions of dollars and allows them to launch products and features faster.

A truck or a car that has a 99% success rate would be the top threat to society and quickly rise to the leading cause of death under 30 if widely deployed.

BurningFrog 21 minutes ago | parent

I have a self driving Tesla, as do many others.

HoldOnAMinute 15 minutes ago | parent

(Supervised)

fliglr 17 minutes ago | parent

Driving is heavily regulated, and there are a million interest groups lining up to sue to stop self-driving. Imagine all the people who make their money from car crashes, for example.

za_creature 17 minutes ago | parent

Broadly speaking, this is proof that there will be no jobs coming after AI.

All past inventions have put some of the most miserable humans out of a job. Farming by hand is hard, so is copying books and don't even get me started on the dullness of making clothes by hand.

Driving all day isn't all that far off, though still much better than the above and definitely better than riding horses all day.

Telegraph operators? Hell no. Dude sitting in an elevator all day? No thanks.

It's always been from the other end. This time around, there's gonna be some 10-20 years of robot manufacturing, then a universal lifetime of robots fighting misaligned robots until enough paperclips have been manufactured.

Or you know, we block out the sun and live in caves or whatever you fancy.

layer8 9 minutes ago | parent

The physical world is still more difficult and messy than discrete logic (theorems, software).

dyauspitr 8 minutes ago | parent

> But we still have no self driving cars.

Do you live under a rock?

bagacrap 34 minutes ago | parent

https://archive.li/0LTWn

zer00eyz 32 minutes ago | parent

> They “used math for what they needed, which was to evaluate their models,”

OAI first paper on the prize was a pretty shitty thing to do. But the rest of this looks like they are just mining the corpus and taking a brute force approach to do it.

Im going to say this again, the "pure math" academic types need to get a grip. Plenty of your peers got PHD's and happily made a fortune in finance, while screwing the world (See 2008 housing bubble) and none of you said a peep about that.

typedef_struct 15 minutes ago | parent

TLDR: "I didn't understand this proof and there is no one to explain it to me"

ademup 8 minutes ago | parent

The TLDR seems perhaps tongue-in-cheek, but it's a worthy thought: the situation where our best experts find new science to be inscrutable is close at hand, if not here now.

Humans have been guilty of burying things we don't understand for millenia. Will we continue to do so "because AI"?

throwyawayyyy 6 minutes ago | parent

Has OpenAI shared any new interesting _problems_? I.e. do more than strip-mine mathematics, as said in the article, but said: "Here is a question I cannot answer, it's interesting for this and that reason, I believe it's true for this and that reason, it's beyond me though, have at it." Has that happened yet?