Much is being written these days about the dismay of mathematicians, several years into solving the great mathematical questions, who find that AI has solved 700 of them overnight, somehow. leaving them in the dust of their own great hopes.
Some of them had actually been using AI to solve them; others questioned how these proofs and solutions could possibly be anything but tainted or imperfect. Some said, "we're doomed," or finished, since the world obviously won't need high-level mathematicians anymore, if it can get AI to figure everything out.
At this point we always point out the dismay of people who thought the advent of the printing press would mean that people would no longer be able to memorize entire long stories, like The Odyssey; the advent of the calculator would mean that people would forget how to multiply, divide, add and subtract large sums. They're right; people have forgotten such things. And now they've forgotten how to find their way home or to the nearest McDonald's without a GPS.
The counterargument is that with people's minds freer to do what they want, they can learn new things or push new horizons. Maybe that's true, but this time I think we're over our heads.
We were in effect trusting these very smart people to tackle these huge mathematical questions that were, for the most part, over our heads to begin with (definitely over mine), but the fact that the machine is better than we are at even these now means, to some people, that the machine can outsmart us in just about anything. And it probably can, and that's scary. Some in the younger generations are finally saying, that's enough, we need limits here, we need to be able to control these machines. But if you loook around at a world that's almost half MAGA, do you really want these people controlling machines? We are a divided society now. WE can't decide what we would do with all that information.
For example, we now have the technology to ensure that every gun is being held by a permit holder, legally, and if not, is setting off alarms somewhere so that no school shooter can march right into his old school and shoot up all the unarmed children. But do we use that technology? No subject is more divisive than whether random people ought to be able to just buy and use any guns they want, so good luck trying to get humanity to agree on how to use AI fairly and equitably, peacefully and for the good of the masses.
Our next leaders are going to have to figure it out. That, and how to deal with genetic modification.
