Almost every "normal" job has regular performance reviews where individual contributions, not collective outcomes, are reviewed and used as a sole input for raises, promotions, and firings. If you can't sufficiently document what you personally did, you might've as well not done anything at all.
Yes, that's true, but it is still generally accepted that a completed project is a result of some collective effort where people of varying degree of seniority and ability contribute. There is also not a singular event of a project being completed with a list of heroes/geniuses making it happen, but rather a whole lifecycle of gradual development, maintenance and going out of relevance with contributors coming and going.
I can imagine mathematics of the future being more like that rather than history of discoveries with dates and names
Looks like mathematicians (like people in many other professions) have to redefine what their work means and how to define success. Hard to agree that a tool that can find a proof is detrimental by itself, rather it voids some assumptions people relied on previously
Yes if you don't think about the matter for more than 6 seconds you would indeed conclude that, and retreat to the comfortable cliché of "it's just a tool". Meanwhile, I'm glad that there are still people who _think_ about issues and ponder the consequences and reflect on things before they become a reality.
I am on this track too. If AI leads to advancements, objectively that's a positive (depending on the advancement I guess) but it's only when mathematicians realise they'll get beaten to every thing now that they're outraged.
Say AI becomes the best at everything. Best at chess/go, best at maths, philosophy, economics, romantic advices ... and so on. Then what's the point of thinking by oneself? Of talking to one another?
What's the point of being human if we dont do human things but entirely rely on AI?
I believe this is more or less these mathematicians' argument.
It has been best at chess for quite a while. Yet everyone knows who is Magnus Carlsen, even though at no point of his career he was stronger than the machine
Magnus Carlsen plays fellow humans at the game because people still care about human competitions. What motivation would a mathematician have for solving already solved problems by hand? Can you imagine someone spending years working on a proof for an already-proved theorem just in case it leads to new insight?
If insights and human understanding are more important than specific results, I don't see why people should stop producing insights and human understanding. "Working on a proof" in today's sense of trying to come up with a proof before others probably stops being useful, other ways of working will be needed
Of course not. I'm so tired of the chess analogy. It was always a game and it was always performative.
Research is fundamentally different. We are seeing the erosion of specific needs for thinking at depth. AI is the automobile for the mind. There will 100% be undesirable consequences and selective atrophy of cognitive abilities once prized. This is a loss. There's no getting the cat back in the bag at this point so long as the objective dimension of work, as in object opposed to subject, is held as the most important.
SWEs felt this same crisis late last year. Now it's the mathematicians. They won't be the last.
actually I think the whole point is we're finding that the chess analogy to math is in fact quite apt. Math is just an extremely complex game. Its rules can be written down and there are win conditions. It's really not far fetched to think that through information theory, a reasonable measure of depth and beauty to a definition or conjecture can be defined. Then the game is simply to maximize the number of such artifacts produced of high depth and beauty along with proofs of the relevant conjectures.
Philosophers I'm sure can debate this back and forth but it seems probable that some things we thought were ineffable are in fact quantifiable to a degree, and now we have the technology and the machines to bring that to the logical conclusion.
> What's the point of being human if we dont do human things but entirely rely on AI?
It's fun.
Well, it's not fun today because most of us have to spend most of our waking hours working some bullshit job for a living. But imagine that there's no bullshit job?
>> Once a robot can do everything an IQ 80 human can do, only better and cheaper, there will be no reason to employ IQ 80 humans. Once a robot can do everything an IQ 120 human can do, only better and cheaper, there will be no reason to employ IQ 120 humans. Once a robot can do everything an IQ 180 human can do, only better and cheaper, there will be no reason to employ humans at all, in the unlikely scenario that there are any left by that point. [1]
The answer may sound harsh, but we will not need human once AI reaches that threshold. Current IQ of AI is currently 130 as per Google.
Depends on who controls the machines and what they do. If the machines just serve a select few and the masses are left to fend for themselves, they can just make a secondary pre-AI-like economy where they do small scale medieval-like economic activity for each other. Because if you're poor and can buy no AI services but still need some shoes, your other underclass neighbor may specialize and make some handmade shoes out of some plants or whatnot, for which you give him some seashells you got from another guy for cooking a pot of peas. However the machines may come in and intervene and stop this kind of shadow economy and force you to... I don't know. To just sit in your pod, or die. Because I guess they won't allow you to plow a field and stuff, because that land is now owned by AI or AI-owners too.
There are too many uncertainties around who will be in control and with what kinds of aims.
This only makes sense if you assume that the value of humans to other humans is solely their economic output.
Which is certainly how our society is structured, but, does it have to be? Can we admit that we basically have a developmental trauma as a species and learn to live the sake of living, instead of for the sake of being "useful"?
I don't think you'd get a 404 if you weren't able to reach the endpoint because of DNS or networking? 404 is an active response from the server (or LB/proxy in front etc) no?
Concept is the same though. If one blurts DNS?, it's usually because the idea is you're not getting to an endpoint associated with the service. A 404 means there shouldn't be "DNS" (or networking) concerns (at the least those associated with the DNS cacher you are using or networking that you or your ISP controls)
What's the point of bundling unemployment, low wages, and part-time employment (potentially with a high wage) together? They've come up with a big scary number, but it has been big and scary over the whole period of observation, so nothing particularly special is happening right now.
Any solution relying on collective sacrifice is unrealistic IMO. I believe in geoingineering because it's better compatible with how economy works. Either that or we discover a magic abundant non-polluting energy source, but I woldn't rely on that
Oh, yes, geoengineering, because nothing can go wrong …
Please read the classic book by Edward Tenner: Why Things Bite Back. Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences, 1996 (oldie but goldie and must read for people who think technical solutions have no unintended (and irrevocable) consequences Mike eucalyptus trees in California, or the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cane_toad in Australia, among others.
A lot can go wrong, but a long is going wrong already. I think putting effort in trying to do it as safely as possible is more productive than trying to convince nations to become poorer voluntary. Alternative energy is important too, but so far it rather complements than replaces fossil fuel.
But this is one of the classic blunders! "Things are going wrong, so we have to do something! This is something, so we have to do it!"
Well, no, we have to do something that will help. Doing something that makes things worse isn't the answer, and the worse things are, the less we can afford to do so.
"This might help, but also might really mess things up" is not the answer - not in politics, not in economics, and not in climate change.
But I agree with one part of your post. Persuading nations to become poorer voluntarily is not a viable strategy.
It is not collective sacrifice. The war on drugs was imposed worldwide by the American élites and it consisted on banning the production, trade and use of many drugs.
Oil is a drug for the world’s economies. If you remove it, the economy plummets with billions of starving people because everything is grown, produced or transported using fossil fuels
> is civil servants developing OSS commodities too much of a heresy
I see two problems here for Germany. First, the salaries of civil servants are regulated, and might be not what most developers, even German ones, expect. In addition civil servant status is bundled with privileges and duties that make it painful to lay it down. Most developers are used to job flexibility though, especially as, as I said, the salaries are not going to be great.
Second, there is a decision by the Constitutional Court that prohibits the state from competing with the market. Temporary grants to independent actors are among other things a way to work around it.
The first part boils down to any civil servant: inflexibility and lower wages aren't for everyone, but it should not be impossible to attract talent intrinsically motivated to contribute to public cause. Especially when it's OSS.
The second part is a bit closer to the heresy angle: new public management forbids competing with "free market". Of course, many EU governments have always found and used all kinds of loopholes to support "independent enterprises" like railways, airlines, power companies and banks once they become too big to fail.
Maybe commodity open source software has reached that level too...
I agree on the second point. I assume we all know that this weird EU free market religion is harmful. The EU would be 1000% better for us, without the economy stuff it was originally build upon.
Free markets are dysfunctional and never fair. How we now? Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, Meta proof it every day. The US and China don’t even care about fairness. Why they should?
Someone mentioned above the limited money STF has. I agree. I did not considered it noteworthy.
Great to see open source projects funded, but the value of Flatpak for tech sovereignty evades me somewhat. It's a pretty niche and questionable piece of technology, and likely won't be there in 10 years. Some grants by STF, like Mastodon, Openstreetmaps, Let's Encrypt, rustls are spot on, but there are many questionable ones.
Flatpak is proving to be a very important piece of underlying infrastructure if government agencies want to switch to Linux computers running distributed graphical applications for their workers.
Yes, it has major problems, and you might be right it won't exist in 10 years, but the point of this grant is to fund their attempt at fixing their problems and getting it to a point where it's better infrastructure that can survive into the future.
Flatpak itself might not survive, but the underlying protocols (portals, security contexts in wayland, pipewire, and d-bus, systemd-appd, …) are relevant for sandboxing on linux as a whole. While I do not personally with every design decision, I still think this is useful and valuable work.
My first reflex would be to ctiticise PG, but after reading the article, I don't think I agree here.
First he doesn't say universities should prepare founders - his advice is to those universities that do want to do that.
Second, his advice is basically to skip BS business education and make students good professionals, well-rounded intellectuals, not afraid of starting a business. Anyone would benefit from such education, not only prospective founders
As a university professor, I've seen that all universities want to do everything.
By which I mean, they employ all sorts of people who are pushing a huge range of agendas. You can't meaningfully speak about "what universities want", because various factions tend to expect free rein to pursue their goals, and there is no mechanism to get everyone pushing in the same direction.
There are founders and there also are the rest of the startup workers.
I felt my most valuable formative experience for being a startup worker was the summer I was back from college and the supermarket I worked at in high school felt they owed me a job even though they weren't really hiring.
I was assigned 50% as a bagger in the front end and 50% a pinch hitter attached to the store manager who did whatever random things we needed whether it was deep clean the floor, paint a metal strip around the building, learn to work the meat slicer to sub for somebody in the deli, sub for people in the bakery, etc.
That made me into somebody who did whatever need to be done, but people who haven't had that kind of experience get really hung up on job titles and think "I'm a data scientist, I don't need to do that."
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