I've heard this idea before, that civilization itself is already a misaligned intelligence, and that AI will merely amplify the existing tendencies.
"People inside a moat, want to keep the moat from being breached because it fucks with their status quo."
EVERY.SINGLE.TIME. No shit, why would they want something disruptive to fuck with the way elite academia operates? And obviously I am talking about the "Master of the Universe" types atop the Ivory Tower. They have been A-OK, with privately-funded professorships, partnering with book publishers to milk students with single-access codes and never-ending "new" editions to their books, summer salary grants, partnering with all sorts of private companies as contractors, and/or milking on the tenure tit while the average adjunct lecturer at a local college/university struggles to make ends-meet and has 150 students in a lecture.
The author talks about his UC Berkeley years. That UC Berkeley that opened and operated for nearly a century as a public institution educating California's true middle class up until the 1960 Donahoe Master Plan, but slowly progressed to gate-keep "normies" out and pivoted to a model of elitism that is absolutely and catastrophically broken.
Fuck off.
> book publishers to milk students with single-access codes and never-ending "new" editions to their books,
The best example of this is James Stewart's Calculus textbooks. It is priced so high and made him so much money that he built a $24 million "Integral House"!
Where the money from your Stewart calculus book goes - https://www.mprnews.org/story/2011/04/18/where-the-money-fro...
The House That Calculus Built - https://www.fastcompany.com/3052267/the-house-that-calculus-...
PS: Just to be clear, the above has got nothing to do with mathematicians and their work. It just goes to show how bad the textbook publishing industry is in shafting students that you can make money off of them by selling centuries old well-known mathematics.
How in god's name—irrespective of how valid this is, and its very valid—is this even remotely germane to the issue of AI in mathematics? Rattling off incidents and making the case that there is discrimination and sexists in mathematics (yeah no shit), how is this related to the issue of AI that was raised in the letter? Are the complaints raised in that letter any less valid because the mathematicians who signed them make part of a community which has reproachable behaviour, both past and present? I really don't get it.
Why does it have to be about that? The author says they agree with the letter in the first paragraph.
It's a clumsily made point, but I think the gist is that the letter asks AI to align to a certain ideal vision of the field of math, that the math community itself is not well aligned to. I don't think the article makes this point well, though, just by listing these incidents. Don't get me wrong - each incident is important and worthy of attention in its own right, but I find the overall argument to be pretty weak and strongly reeking of whataboutism.
The letter claims that AI is destroying the mathematics community as is now. The blog asks whether the mathematics community as is now is worth saving.
You are right.
This just reads like a rancorous rant.
In any human group there will always be issues on how we treat each other dependent on time/context/culture. But while not condoning it, this issue is orthogonal to that of misaligned AI.
The communique from the mathematicians when shorn of polite language is blunt viz.
AI companies are stealing our hard-won lifelong research findings, which we were already sharing freely, without attribution/credit and building upon them without informed consent nor compensation.
The above is true for "misaligned AI" in all the Sciences. It is time the Scientific Community got together and sued the hell out of the AI companies.
I think the letter is misguided. So what if the AI labs are misaligned to math?
- But they announced a result before a paper was peer reviewed! The horror! So what? The mathematics community can read the paper once it is written up.
- But their results they publish may not care about conceptual understanding and insight! So what? If that's the mathematics community's goal, then they should sift through the lean proof and reformat the ideas to make them more insightful and develop their own conceptual understanding.
- But they aren't bothering to do literature review to tell the history about how humans contributed to the final result! So what? If it's so important to the mathematical community, they can do that themselves and throw a party every Tuesday in the honor of Luis Martínez-Zoroa and wear jeans on casual Friday in honor of Buckmaster and Alpöge - the left leg for Buckmaster and the right for Alpöge.
An AI giving a definite result of an open problem doesn't decrease the mathematical community's insight or conceptual understanding. They are still free to continue doing their work and pursuing their goals. If it's really so bad, they can just pretend they don't know NS is solved and keep spending their efforts trying to prove it never blows up (or a hand full of them can try to blow it up from scratch).
Guess what! I spend no part of my life working on unsolved math problems. I read some books for pleasure. I work in a hospitable with sick kids. I help my wife raise our kids. My goals are misaligned with the mathematics community! I've done nothing to increase conceptual understanding and insight! So what?
You might want to read up on "Self-Determination Theory" on how Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Motivations works in Humans - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-determination_theory
For a nice introduction, see Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation by Edward Deci - https://thorprojects.com/2020/05/04/book-review-why-we-do-wh...
I might want to. Would you explain its relevance here and make a pitch for me doing so.
This whole discussion is basically a field demanding that their field be preserved for them alone to discover. No competition allowed besides the monks of mathematics.
Shouldn't the AI companies know by now that all mathematical knowledge belongs to the mathematical community? Hopefully this letter knocks some sense into them.
Spot on. They now feel threatened that there's multiple challengers to their intellectual monopoly. This is their "whaaahhh... whaaahhhh... private company bad, now," but where OK when Halliburton, Boeing, General Dynamics, Monsanto, Open Society Foundation, Tides Foundation and many other shitty and scummy private and so-called "non-profit" entities were funding their shit. Now their entire business model is changing. Is not that it'll completely collapse, it's just changing and they are throwing a bitchy fit.
You can invent whatever fantasy you like. I hope more honest people will read the letter (from the fields medalists and other endorsers) and consider it on its merits.
Here's the thing. I read the letter. I'm considering it on its merits. And it has very little. They made great arguments for why it's a good thing that the mathematical community operates the way they do. They could have made a good argument for why practitioners within the mathematical community shouldn't be seduced by the power of AI and should continue to build mathematics they way they do now. Ignoring AI as a tool, but perhaps not ignoring the results coming out of it, builds understanding and skill and develops humans. I'd be all for a letter that calls on humanity to not give up their humanity to AI tools. To not become lazy and overly dependent on them.
The letter makes no arguments why AI companies proving a bunch of results quickly at all affects the ability of mathematicians to do what they want to do. It's just a giant self-congratulatory list of all the wonderful things the mathematical community does and notes that AI companies aren't doing the same thing.
It's not enough for them that they are still free to pursue all the goals they outline in that letter to their hearts content. They want to make sure everyone else doing mathematics also sets aside their own goals and pursue theirs. I distrust AI as a technology regardless of alignment. And I've learned to just not use them and focus on the things in my life that matter to me. It turns out that I'm still free to pursue the things in my life that are meaningful regardless of the existence of LLMs.