This. The value of intelligence and execution is plummeting towards zero for knowledge work. Right now, software and mathematics are the most affected, but the transition to every other industry is going to happen with shocking speed.
We routinely close the feedback loop when training people in pretty much every industry. Otherwise, what would you say that exams and accreditation/chartering are? I don't see anything inherent in other knowledge work that means AI couldn't do it.
Not really. Australia is very lax when it comes to bringing in dependents, who outnumber skilled migrants themselves. We also have an oversupply of technically skilled people, with nothing for them to work on, because we got rid of all of our industry. High energy prices and wages means that you'll struggle to get anything that isn't finance, gambling, or real estate related off the ground. I guess defense is the other option, and it's essentially the only game in town if you want to do something hardware related.
I'm one of the lucky few who ended up in a job that really does exercise my technical training, and a big factor in that was COVID shutting the borders and me getting my foot in the door. That one event meant someone was willing to take a shot on me, and I got put in the hot seat and got time next to very senior software engineers, which changed the trajectory of my career. They got something out of it, too, as it turned out that I really was the right guy for that job.
There are currently 3 million temporary visa holders in the country, roughly 10% of the population. Australia also has a birth rate that is below replacement. All of those people need a place to stay, and if a population twice the size of Adelaide were to disappear tomorrow, we'd immediately go into a housing surplus. In fact, you wouldn't be able to get a loan for a house from the bank, because they're not in the business of investing in falling markets. Which is to say, the housing crisis here is entirely by design. It has been engineered by both sides of government for more than two decades, and is primarily kept afloat by our world beating migration rate. It has to end.
> There are currently 3 million temporary visa holders in the country,
It's pretty important to realise that this includes student visas (600K - and education is a major earner for Australia) and graduate visas (200K) and 700K New Zealanders (who have their own special temporary class).
There are also 250K working holiday visas (ie backpackers).
Yes, the largest chunk is students. In fact, ~6% of all international students in the world attend Australian universities, making it the largest per-capita destination for international students by a significant margin. They still require housing, and they still have working rights. Fake students coming over to work without ever attending a class is a well-known rort.
The single biggest justification for our high migration setting (among the highest in the OECD) is ostensibly for skills we need to keep the economy afloat. I've yet to see a skills shortage closed by migration. And of course, skilled migrants are one of the smaller cohorts in our net intake -- we actually bring in more dependents than we do skilled workers.
Of course skills shortages are closed by migrants! You've never met one of the many ex-UK police officers or nurses? Or the many welders on mine sites?
And of course skilled migrants have dependents - they generally have partners and kids. Why is this surprising?
Most professions on the list don't have a shortage, and professions stay on the list for far longer than necessary. We don't need any more IT workers, for instance; my workplace routinely receives hundreds of applications even for temporary roles.
We get to set the terms of migration, because it's our country. I don't think we should be allowing students to bring dependents across, for instance, because they're students. We're already saturated with them, and could stand to be a bit more exclusive.
It's less clear cut than that, because modern materials can be better at the job they are designed for. An IKEA kitchen, for instance, might not use traditional wood or stone for its benchtops, but the materials used are actually better in terms of cleaning and handling food on them. It's just that these improvements often get bundled with cheap plastic and parts in other parts of the kitchen to keep costs down.
Similarly, cars today are far superior to old cars in terms of safety, and the gains that have been made on the engine side of things are nothing short of incredible. Every modern car is essentially a supercar by the standards of the 90s in terms of oomph per unit of displacement. The problem is that all of the systems have been coupled together, often needlessly, in order to improve telemetry and capture a bigger share of the used market. It's hostile towards the end user.
There's no question that the level of quality today is higher, especially where it matters. It's just that value extraction eventually turns hostile towards consumers in the absence of real competition and the need for endless growth.
There is a general solution to the three body problem due to Sundman, in the form of an infinite series. Unfortunately it converges so slowly that it's useless in practice.
Being unable to state the solution of a problem in closed form doesn't prevent solutions from existing.
I can honestly say that I've never had to compile wifi drivers from source in more than a decade of using Linux as my main OS, even through my distrohopping phase. And I'm not researching my hardware ahead of time, either. I don't even know what you'd need to be running in order to have to do that? Maybe void or something similar? I don't think that my experience is particularly unique.
The sharp edges are usually pointing the package manager at a repo (generally an official expansion) that lets you install the necessary binary.
The problem with the article's line of thought is that mathematicians can't control what others do with models that are capable of generating proofs for hard problems. Sure, maybe there's a career in taking known proofs spat out by the oracle, and translating them for mortal digestion, but I'm not sure that's what most mathematicians signed up for.
Most mathematicians do compete for funding, based essentially on how many articles they can publish and where. Publication strongly favors problem solving. Universities are ranked on the same criteria.
What we see is a panic reaction to the fact that problem solving is "easy", which affects the future of the management of mathematics, not of mathematics itself.
Mathematicians are not luddites afraid of AI, is the academic publishing industry mixed with management interests speaking here.
- that it was stirred by the International Mathematical Union Committee on Publishing
- that is a mixture of the older San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment DORA https://sfdora.org/read/ and recent fear of commercial AI competition
The academic system developed in the last ~50 years will crumble. On the broad scale of human intellectual history, this was a blip and not even the most productive phase. But it provided mass office employment and so this is all much more about the general knowledge work job replacement issue than anything specific to math. All desk/computer/office jobs will face the same fate. Math is just easier to verify. But engineering design, architecture, lower levels of lawyers and accountants where the selling point isn't charm and connections, they will all have this moment soon.
I've been working on something similar as well, but not yet ready to be shared. It's a geometry kernel and then an authoring layer on top. The idea is that the constraints are tests that get run after the geometry is defined, so it's more programmatic. Sol was able to generate STEP files for credible turbo machinery with it, and I have Astra building out the assembly for an inline three engine idea I had. The drawings are looking credible, but that's about all I can really say. I'm just blown away at how far the models have come in the last 12 months.
Hey, are you interested in collaboration? I did implement something similar to your approach of "constraints are static_asserts" inside the code CAD language and it works fairly well to assert volume/tolerance stack-up inline, but that is only half the answer, and the other half is "constraints are compile time types/requirements that are erased at runtime", as in TypeScript, which proved to be more significant. STEP roundtrip was proven months ago, so yesterday I had Codex Astra build a V8 engine assembly simulation in 3.JS last night to prove viability.
Sure, why not. I haven't uploaded anything to github/lab yet, and you'll have to give me a few days, since I'm busy juggling work and being a new dad.
Full disclosure, this is one of my pie-in-sky ideas that I've been letting AI loose on with only top down direction from me. I'm usually fairly hands-on even with the model in the loop, but this is an exception, because a geometry kernel is frankly beyond my ability to write solo (and I say that as someone with a reasonably strong math background). The gamble has always been that if a current model can produce "works, but crap under the hood", future models will be able to clean it up to "works, and is solid under the hood".
I'll push everything up by the weekend and drop you a line.
I switched from Claude to Codex because Claude just doesn't do what you actually tell it to half the time. It dances around the edges and does busy work without actually tackling a tough problem.
I'm not sure what others are doing that they're getting such different results, but I'll take Codex every day of the week.
My newest and most expensive car cost $5k in freedom dollars. It gets the job done. I have an older, more clapped out vehicle that cost $1500, and is in surprisingly decent knick for a 30 year old car, but it does need a paint job and some imminent TLC to keep it from deteriorating. That will cost more than it's worth, but I think it's worth doing in the long run.
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