I wrote a blog post making some very similar arguments earlier this week in response to some mathematicians’ takes—just before the OpenAI paper drop a few days ago (https://creating.software/essays/ai-and-math/).
I feel we’re all realizing, at the same time, that (1) intellectual activity is communal, and yet (2) those communities are sustained by recognition of individual achievement. What a way to find this out.
I claim (here and in my post) that humanity actually can’t advance without these human communities. It’s critical that people not give up learning things that AI knows better than they do, because they play an important role in these communities, and the community is critical.
My (maybe naive) hope is still that people find ways to keep doing this stuff for fun, like chess (competitions, awards, coaches, I don’t know). We still have chess competitions and the like, even though computers are far better at chess and have been for a while. The community and the recognition of individual achievement are both there. And human chess and chess engines have gotten vastly better, so computer dominance failed to kill progress in chess (today’s stockfish would’ve beaten Kasparov in 1997 running on a desktop from 1994: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4MLBK7iCW3vYd93Mn/a-closer-l...)
Maybe math olympiads and programming contests live on well past the end of their practical utility—I always liked them.
I feel we’re all realizing, at the same time, that (1) intellectual activity is communal, and yet (2) those communities are sustained by recognition of individual achievement. What a way to find this out.
I claim (here and in my post) that humanity actually can’t advance without these human communities. It’s critical that people not give up learning things that AI knows better than they do, because they play an important role in these communities, and the community is critical.
My (maybe naive) hope is still that people find ways to keep doing this stuff for fun, like chess (competitions, awards, coaches, I don’t know). We still have chess competitions and the like, even though computers are far better at chess and have been for a while. The community and the recognition of individual achievement are both there. And human chess and chess engines have gotten vastly better, so computer dominance failed to kill progress in chess (today’s stockfish would’ve beaten Kasparov in 1997 running on a desktop from 1994: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4MLBK7iCW3vYd93Mn/a-closer-l...)
Maybe math olympiads and programming contests live on well past the end of their practical utility—I always liked them.