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Why do we need human mathematicians anymore?

293 points · 384 comments · auggierose

  1. bananaflag · · focus · HN ↗
    > Similar logic applies to every industry and every job. And it comes to the conclusion that we won’t have enough people for all the jobs that need to be done.

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

    It's like chimpanzees seeing human society and saying "look how complex it is, imagine how many chimpanzees it needs to maintain it".

    1. sm0rad · · focus · HN ↗
      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.

      1. cma · · focus · HN ↗
        Not all of it would translate, but robotic surgery could be done on anesthetized animals in a mass RLVR way.
        1. jebarker · · focus · HN ↗
          > robotic surgery could be done on anesthetized animals in a mass RLVR way.

          well that's an awful image

        2. sm0rad · · focus · HN ↗
          This is wrong, both morally and technically.

          First off, I can’t imagine anything more torment nexus-y than throwing billions to automate and scale the torture of animals. If each token is a “cut”, how much suffering does 10 trillion training tokens (lower bound) corresponds to?

          Second, this still doesn’t cover all the properties that make math proofs doable. It requires working in the physical world. You must physically capture or grow 10T cuts worth of animals. You cannot verify success so easily, either. Cancer cells, for example, could regrow over months. You would need to keep the animal alive and regularly test the animal, which would be difficult to scale. And most people wouldn’t trust the world’s greatest vet to operate on them, anyways.

          1. cma · · focus · HN ↗
            I'm not advocating for it, I don't know enough. But we already slaughter lots of animals and raise them in horrible conditions, and all robot assisted surgery already goes through animal trials.

            > Second, this still doesn’t cover all the properties that make math proofs doable. It requires working in the physical world. You must physically capture or grow 10T cuts worth of animals.

            It would likely be sim2real with that as the post training, reducing that requirement a lot.

            > Cancer cells, for example, could regrow over months.

            In that specific scenario you would likely train on receiving no unrelated injuries during the surgery, and have induced conditions with stuff tagged molecularly that you can then verify efficacy from without waiting months.

            Depending on how much more data efficient sim2real makes it, you could end up seeing companies pushing it only for actual procedures the animals need but economically would never get; botched surgery and the animal gets euthanized before waking up, which they could argue was already going to happen.

            > And most people wouldn’t trust the world’s greatest vet to operate on them, anyways.

            Robotic surgery systems, already go through animal trials before being used on humans. So do many purely human surgery techniques.

      2. password54321 · · focus · HN ↗
        Do you think surgeons start performing surgery for the first time on people?
        1. airstrike · · focus · HN ↗
          Sounds like you're saying that so long as the LLM with robot arms starts by operating on mice, cows and pigs you're fine with it
          1. password54321 · · focus · HN ↗
            wtf are you on. Surgeons practice on much more than animals.
            1. [deleted] · · focus · HN ↗

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