> the best way for all other species to flourish is for humans to eradicate themselves right now

That wouldn't do much for rice, pigs, chickens, or rats.

>> We (humans) should help humanity flourish. I understand that not everyone agrees. I have been called a “speciesist” for being “too human-centric”.

> this is insane. the "speciesist" people aside (the best way for all other species to flourish is for humans to eradicate themselves right now, which is completely mad), i have the opposite problem: the _axiom_ seems to be: we should help ME flourish. "Me" as in people who are raking in trillions for their own very special selves right now, at the cost of everyone else's future, while none of them can be trusted to hold my cell phone for a second.

I don't think there are actually any "speciesist people." I think most, if not all, are the selfish "me people," who have disingenuously created "speciesism" by mad-libbing racism and sexism in a ham-handed attempt deflect criticism/opposition to whatever they want to do. Most of them aren't even "raking in trillions," they just don't like thinking about others or being told "no."

As I understand you referred to Elon Musk. But this is Poh Shen Loh talking. If you don’t know who he is, look up or at least read his articles.

> I no longer have to haul the pyramid blocks up the ramp myself... what I bring to the party is intuition and understanding.

Hauling the pyramid blocks is what gives people intuition and understanding. It is true that school systems usually have way too much computation -- it is easier to test and grade computation. But the only way that you were able to use computer algebra systems fluently is because you had internalized how algebra worked by hand. If we tell students that they no longer need to learn how to solve equations we are seriously depriving them of a mathematical education.

I think the astronomy and telescope comparison is missing some nuance. You don't delegate actual thought to a telescope, the thinking and acting on the observations you make with it is still done by you. With AI that is different; you get the opportunity to delegate a lot of thinking and acting to it (practically all of it if you really wish), at which point it becomes dubious to call yourself the creator or inventor of some idea.

You can use AI like a telescope, and alleviate your inherent organizational problems or other ailments, which in my opinion is a great use case, as it is empowering. But there will also be plenty of people who are not looking to alleviate any mental/physical quirks they have to do more, but simply want to make a "quick buck" for the least possible effort from the work and thinking of others, without adding much value of their own. Lowering the bar makes things easier for both, the ones who bring value and the ones who merely exploit in some context.

After looking at the title for a day, the idea occured that, without mathematicians doing mathematics, those people would end up in banking, so seeing the top post is most amusing. One of my local contacts is a semi retired bankster, who I am going to prank by pretending that theres something stuck in her fangs, looks like the still quivering flesh of a young accounts executive, which seems to be the thing that happens to mathematicians, money that is, triggers some sort of primitive predetory instinct better left dormant.

> unless someone--a human--can verify and understand it, it doesn't count.

One counter-point: Humans have not figured out how general anesthesia works, but we use it every day to great effect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theories_of_general_anaestheti...

While I get the point and it's true.

I'm a little more flexible, if the new knowledge (that human's don't understand) can be put into a mechanism and have an observable effect, I'd be happy enough. e.g. a new type of rocket fuel that burns 1000x more efficiently.

Doubt.

If I vibecode a video game and manage to sell it on Steam, the information definitely mattered even though I didn't understand any of it.

There are drugs that nobody truly understands how they work and they are being used by professionals in actual treatments literally right now. We know purely statistical facts like "if drug X is used for condition Y it will help Z% of patients" and can only speculate as to their mechanism of action. They are used anyway and still benefit a lot of people.

> but unless someone--a human--can verify and understand it

Why though a human? Mathematical proofs are very ivory-towery, but if OpenAI would solve a subkind of Cancer, without mortal humans understanding, cancer is still be healed.

I don't think this necessarily follows. The point of the Library of Babel is more one of permutations/combinatorics than of knowledge accumulation itself. In 'our' Library of Babel, each book would be informative, if not perhaps flawed in some ways. That's quite different from one in which in which the number of books that contain anything coherent whatsoever cleanly rounds to zero.

> Every problem you solve, ten new ones open up. Like a fractal, the more you zoom in, the more detail emerges. No matter how much better AI is at solving problems, it's not going to generate the "final, complete compendium of mathematics" that that seems to hover over this post.

I guess Terence's main point has been all the time that if we let AI solve all these existing problems, we don't notice the new ones and then there is stagnation.

There probably is a finite amount of math to be done

The universe is bounded by rules, as far as we can tell, and not a lot of them

It seems likely that there are an infinite number of math problems but only a finite number of interesting ones.

> In the (extremely) short run, yes. In the long run, those jobs will also be done by AI.

Let's be honest: we don't know. Maybe you're right, but for the moment it's more likely that you're not. And countries cannot bet on that vague intuition at the cost of destroying their research communities and world leadership (which takes decades if not a century to achieve).

Chimanzee vs Human is not an appropriate analogy. First, because they cannot communicate properly.

A better analogy: look at all these highly trained engineers, mathematicians, doctors, writers, philosophers, writers, scientists.

How many dumbass politicians do we need to keep it all running smoothly?

Turns out no matter how dumb politicians were, overall society has been developing positively over the history of mankind.

Math proofs are special because they’re verifiable, safe, and do not require physical experiments. You can perform exhaustive parallel search in simulation with RLVR.

Do you think this applies to say, surgery, as well? There are few useful problems that share these properties.

But we're not building an AI society - to what end?

We're building tools to serve the human society.