On: AI unlocks Gödel's notebooks, said to contain hundreds of proved theorems

This might be an actual concrete example of someone making themselves obsolete with AI.

> Von Plato said he had started his Gödel project in 2017 because he was facing mandatory retirement from Helsinki University. “What should I do to make myself indispensable? Oh yes, I’ll start reading Gödel’s enigmatic shorthand pages!” He received a €2.5m (£2.1m) grant from the European Research Council, taught himself Gabelsberger shorthand – “I am one of only six people who can read it in the world” – and assembled a small team.

And via earthshaking victory, at that, wow.

Okay let me know when AI gets itself a 2.1M Euro grant from ERC as the PI.

I think you're missing my point. It's that once the workbooks are completely interpreted, which is happening at an accelerated pace thanks to AI, von Plato's value as an interpreter of the short hand becomes severely reduced, presumably as does his ability to get future grants.

I'd think there would be more competition to lead studies and receive grants now that the workbooks are accessible to a wider audience of logicians

If he was facing mandatory retirement nearly ten years ago it’s likely he might be ready for voluntary retirement, particularly after achieving this fantastic result.

Indeed, he is 75 years old.

But that is happenstance. It might happen to someone early in their career next time.

I would his not be in verifying the AI is output?

It's literally an example of someone keeping themselves from becoming obsolete with AI.

The professor's value was/is in being one of a few people with the capability of interpreting the shorthand. By translating it with AI, his value as an interpreter begins evaporating as the translated workbooks become accessible to more logicians.

He might see his value in his role of carrying the knowledge itself rather than being its gatekeeper.

I actually got a very different impression. He could publish this interesting result, exactly because he had been working on this project i.e., had an interesting dataset to feed into Claude and had the expertise to interpret its output.

Compare him to those who are burning tokens to generate cringeworthy AI slop on social media. The value of a tool depends on the skill of the user.

First, he gained that skill just for this task specifically.

It's not some unique, hard-to-acquire skill. It's rare because nobody needs it anymore.

The value of that professor is, and was, his mathematical ability.

Second, he fed transcription into Claude. The work that Claude did wasn't deciphering the shorthand.

The works aren't accessible not because of the shorthand. It's because the mathematics of Godel's work is hard.

The ability of the LLM to hold a large context, connect the pieces, and synthesize output is not a human ability, as the professor himself said.

And he didn't want to milk that for the rest of his life because he's a smart guy that has other skills and interests

That's what he thinks, surely.

It's clear though. Even if an AI had connected all the dots on the obsolete shorthand, it would never have recognized the human value. I doubt that any AI process would choose to spend the energy on interpreting this particular obsolete handwriting and then understand that it was from the hand of a genius.

But is he needed once he finished writing the prompt?

Using AI to do your job does not mean that AI suddenly walks in the door and escorts you out and starts collecting your paycheck.

Someone is still driving these studies, and probably will be for a while. Or maybe not. But still we can reward this guy for opening up this can of theorems that had before.

Silliest case: Imagine a dusty basement terminal screen open to claude code with "There we go! Cancer is cured as you requested, let me know and I'll send off the results" and nobody is around to approve it.