Reading this brings a lot of thoughts to mind.
I come from an engineering background, so maybe this doesn’t apply to mathematicians, but here’s something I saw in university: friends who, simply to graduate, would take a previous student’s research, change some parameter, and see what happened. This had been going on in the same lab for years. It was essentially a ritual of going through the motions of producing something that looked like a research paper and following the required procedures.
And then I think about people like my parents, who have absolutely nothing to do with science or research. When we talk about the value of AI, what are these people to science?
And when I think about the social value of science, I think about researchers themselves. Now, I know this is a terribly unfair generalization, and I know I’m drawing from a very small sample of people I’ve encountered. But many of them aren’t particularly sociable. They’re people who feel more at home reading books or watching insects and fish than playing basketball with friends.
I can’t begin to imagine how important the scientific community is to these people. As the years go by, I increasingly feel how difficult it is for adults to find somewhere they can truly feel comfortable and belong.
So I guess I have two points.
First, nobody, and especially people in the scientific community, should have their place of belonging taken away by something else.
Second, there really are areas of science that are largely procedural, that AI can brute-force. And even before AI, humans had been brute-forcing these things, often without much thought, for decades.
I’m not saying that’s good or bad. But the work itself serves as proof that someone is willing to put in the effort. It’s a ritual, a rite of passage into a community. Having gone through the same experience makes it easier for people to connect, doesn’t it?
In Japan, there are temples and shrines high up in the mountains. When you’ve gone through the trouble of climbing all the way up there, you can laugh together about how hard it was. Now imagine everyone could just take a helicopter. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, of course. But you wouldn’t be able to share a laugh about the struggle anymore.
Does climbing a mountain make you a better human being? You could dismiss it as nothing more than burning calories. But people who have burned those calories together somehow find it easier to become friends.
I find it fascinating to watch people debate what the equivalent of that is in mathematics and science. And when we say that some of those activities contribute no more to human progress than the effort we put into mountain climbing or online games, we can also say, at the same time, that they’re just as valuable.
You find something that fascinates you, something you want to spend an enormous amount of time working on, and through it you connect with other people. Isn’t that enough?
We’ve reached a point where people feel compelled to justify mathematics and science in terms of industrial or commercial value, as if they have to explain and defend something precious to them. And the rest of us, standing around them, are expected to take those justifications seriously.
Haven’t we already created a rather messed-up atmosphere, a messed-up world, just by making that necessary?
If anything, we should be doing more of these things. Pay people to teach us things. Heavy metal, mathematics, whatever. Celebrate people who dedicate themselves to these pursuits. Give them awards. Praise them.
And sure, let AI-generated work exist alongside all that. There’s nothing wrong with it. But it’s not the same thing as a community.
It’s becoming increasingly difficult to demonstrate effort and dedication. The era when you could look at someone’s work and get a sense of who they were, whether you might get along with them, and how much you might have in common, is coming to an end.
And here’s the thing: sociable people are remarkably good at figuring all of that out within the first three minutes of a conversation, aren’t they?
It’s a tragedy that one of the ways less sociable people could do the same has been taken away.
Sorry for the rambling. But hey, AI can summarize it, so I guess that’s fine.