Well, thank you for the context of (2) and (3), but you’re dead wrong about (1), because Kaczynski was uniquely qualified to accurately predict LLMs, and here is the proof, complete with an analogy of headstone carving.
So this is our battle-cry: “Ted Kaczynski wasn’t wrong!”
What does "amenable to computerisation" even mean? Typist used to be a job, but it's become computerised. Stuff like data entry is surely not for away.
It absolutely is. I once read a tiny part one of his manifesto, and it was full of weird leftist boogeymen without any justification. It made sense that he went ahead with terrorism rather than trying to argue his point peacefully.
Well, ask any person medical dependent advanced tech on whether they want to go back to a primitive life - and most obviously say no, as they would literally die. And also most other people like hot showers and refrigerators.
So you cannot get far with peaceful discourse - so what do you do, if the self righteous anger is still boiling? Literally blow something up apparently.
I mean I get the anger on careless destruction of wild nature. I feel it too. But bombs don't change that. They make it only worse.
In Finland we had this guy Pentti Linkola, who was a very vocal advocate of abandoning technology and living simply. He didn't resort to terrorism, although he celebrated any event where a large number of people died.
His impact was probably comparable to the unabomber, I.e., not much.
cartographery and translation are vastly smaller professions than they were, that have been altered as to where and how they are practiced and going forward are vulnerable to bieng abused and manipulated if they fall under central controll with closed source software.
As my mathematical statistics professor told us on the first day, “statistics is not mathematics.” It’s a good idea to remember: if a branch of the subject x is called “mathematical x,” then x in general is not totally mathematical and can be studied to some extent without mathematics.
In the same sense as pharmacology is a branch of physics. Technically, yes. Realistically the overlap is small and you don't need one for the other most of the time.
Well I have often times see an architect creating a wild fantasy like structure and statistician with project manager saying, nope it is going to be another box due to actual physics and budget constraints.
I saw a cryptographer interviewed. She was maybe 20yo and was working onboard a US aircraft carrier. Installing and managing cryptographic systems does not make one a cryptographer. Doing math via computer programing also does not make one a mathematician.
The Unabomber had semi-correct problem identification, but completely worthless prescription like else anyone unable to separate reality from fiction basing their ideas on a Hollywood revenge movie or becoming a crazy terrorist with a cause that maybe valid seeing themselves as "good guy freedom-fighters" but alienates and harms many. People might've been interested in helping to counteract the effects or sources of a problem if a change advocate approached them in a manner that was constructive, achievable, rational, and considerate. Instead, evil, lazy actions make the cause a pariah and its supporters enemies to most.
He had infinite options he failed to exercise, like getting involved in the humanities (sociology, philosophy, law) and/or community building to do the groundwork necessary to contribute positive change rather than illusionary shortcuts to fruitless impact, needless suffering, and self-destruction.
AGI is a canard. Too much money in electricity, servers, land, and technological advances would be needed to build and operate sufficiently capable digital reasoning. Domain-specific pseudo-intelligence task automation will continue here and there with LLMs, deep learning, and such, but no one is building just one "brain" for less than $5T and it probably wouldn't be very performant.
Current AI is totally incapable of replacing expert human judgment for almost everything because they lack constraints, predictability, and reliability. Also, most models hallucinate worthless, incorrect answers so often that they should be relegated to glorified creative, entertainment, and task-acceleration work for the foreseeable future and not be given wildly-inappropriate power like giving a toddler a nuke. Furthermore, the appeal to LLM authority fallacy is a dangerous trend of unthinking, laziness of people failing to think skeptically and find sources for themselves. Finally, too many laypeople and wild-eyed techbros are projecting and imagining AI capabilities that aren't really there and may never exist, but then making much bigger mistakes of irrational, risky bets on their preconceived conclusions, and telling us we should worship the billionaires, accept layoffs, accept panopticon surveillance, accept their loud, polluting data centers in our literal backyards.. for what good?
> People might've been interested in helping to counteract the effects or sources of a problem if a change advocate approached them in a manner that was constructive, achievable, rational, and considerate.
I mean this is just obviously and flagrantly untrue, eg. Greta Thunberg became a culture war boogeyman for half of the political spectrum over significantly more moderate views expressed in exactly the way you describe. If anything, acting like a bitch just emboldens the type who cause problems to cause more problems when they see these signs of weakness and zero will to resist them, as we see happening with acts of complete irrationality like Trump making a war against fucking wind turbines a top priority of the US government's agenda.
When you tell people they're protesting the wrong way, you're really just saying "I don't want to hear your complaints. Make them in a way that doesn't bother me so I can ignore them".
Its already replacing human experts. Watch the bond market self off currently happening in US. Driven by hordes of AI agents doing thousands of things faster than experts can blink. The experts at the Treasury tried to react at traditional human speed. Within a day the agentic horde detected the moves and counter reacted. Its like watching chimps throwing stones at a hurricane. The chimp troupe is quite unconcious about the randomness and surprises ahead.
Replacing people willy-nilly with AI is a stupid fad that won't work the way they think it will in most instances. AI doesn't impart judgment, constraints, reasoning, or correctness so far the way a human can and likely never will because AGI is a fantasy. Owners and managers will only learn this lesson after they suffer failure from their own stupidity and recklessness.
Another angle is excuses for mass layoffs are continuation of the Powell memo neoliberalism agenda of suppressing wages by keep workers desperate and partly a consequence of rising interest rates since there's no more free money.
Workers need to stop depending on megacorps for stability and form worker-owned co-ops that compete with and supplant unstable, mercurial megacorps.
His impact has not been fruitless, to the contrary and case in point, we're now discussing about him in here and in other similar places. Had he chosen the lame road of becoming a humanities thingie nothing of his legacy would have remained.
Does anyone have to understand AI output when it comes to math? Then that someone has to be trained in math. Yeah, for all intents and purposes that person is a mathematician. Maybe not the one who gets money for that in which case they are not a professional mathematician. Maybe these paid guys will disappear. However if AI keeps churning new stuff nobody understands humanity will have to create a new category of employment for those who do to make sense of all that. Mathematicians, then, are back in the game again.
Human Mathematics is what lives in the head of all of humanity, not a serialized proof of a theorem or conjecture. Yes the other kinds maybe useful, may even pay the bills, but as long as humans enjoy mathematics the human side will survive.
People still go on runs although that's not what wins wars today.
Personally, I found that people are impressed with AI for subjects they simply don't understand, and when an expert works with AI, they're often underwhelmed. So while we're seeing some mathematics being automated and proved, I think there's a long way to go before we automate proofs with meaningful human value.
In your letter of December 14, you ask me whether mathematics is a worthwhile endeavor. Mathematics absolutely is not a worthwhile endeavor! I can imagine only three possible reasons for studying mathematics:
(1) Entertainment.
(2) To promote technological progress.
(3) To promote one’s own career.
Reason (1) is harmless; but one doesn’t refer to entertainment as a “worthwhile endeavor”; it’s just a pastime.
As for reason (2), modern technology is the worst thing that ever happened to the world, and to promote its progress is nothing short of criminal. Read Our Final Century, by Martin Rees; or read “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” an article by Bill Joy that appeared in Wired magazine, April, 2000.
As for reason (3), to choose mathematics as one’s career would be very risky. Not long ago I received a letter from a gravestone sculptor whose craft had been rendered obsolete by a laser-guided machine that carved gravestones automatically. He was in his forties, unable to find work, and depressed. Maybe you think that can’t happen to you if you become a mathematician. But you’re wrong. Martin Rees, Bill Joy, and many other distinguished experts believe that within a few decades machines will be developed that will be more intelligent than even the smartest human beings. When that happens, people will be obsolete; they will be phased out and will be replaced by computers and robots. This will happen to everyone eventually, but mathematicians probably will become obsolete before anyone else does, because mathematics is more amenable to computerization than any other field. Hence, computers probably will surpass humans in mathematics before they do so in other areas.
> He skips over understanding our world which is probably the reason most pure maths is done.
I'm not sure I agree with this. I suppose it could be that we have different defintions of what "our world" means.
You might like the quote below. I suspect you're arguing that most pure math is performed for option #2 below (utilitarian purposes). Like I said, I'm not so sure.
In the temple of science are many mansions, and various indeed are they that dwell therein and the motives that have led them thither. Many take to science out of a joyful sense of superior intellectual power; science is their own special sport to which they look for vivid experience and the satisfaction of ambition; many others are to be found in the temple who have offered the products of their brains on this altar for purely utilitarian purposes. Were [someone to] drive all the people belonging to these two categories out of the temple, the assemblage would be seriously depleted, but there would still be some men, of both present and past times, left inside. Our Planck is one of them, and that is why we love him.
I guess I was including maths and imagine mathematicians investigate stuff of the general type like the riemann hypothesis, whether all non-trivial zeros of the Riemann zeta function lie on the critical line where the real part equals 1/2, which are interesting but of little practical value.
I think humans will always value human labor in some professions like athletics and some entertainment and service. Consider how chess has not been diminished as a human competition despite computers being much better. We prefer human drama.
High end service will likely be human to distinguish itself from all the cheaper automation. Listening to humans play live music won't go away. Having a human touch when being cared for won't either.
Good point. At least 20+ years until you could see a start of what he describes in the letter. Wondering why this is really the case what he describes...
51 comments
[ 0.27 ms ] story [ 20.2 ms ] threadSo this is our battle-cry: “Ted Kaczynski wasn’t wrong!”
So you cannot get far with peaceful discourse - so what do you do, if the self righteous anger is still boiling? Literally blow something up apparently.
I mean I get the anger on careless destruction of wild nature. I feel it too. But bombs don't change that. They make it only worse.
His impact was probably comparable to the unabomber, I.e., not much.
programming is more like communicating to a computer to convince them to do some task. has always been like this, and this will not change
I saw a cryptographer interviewed. She was maybe 20yo and was working onboard a US aircraft carrier. Installing and managing cryptographic systems does not make one a cryptographer. Doing math via computer programing also does not make one a mathematician.
He had infinite options he failed to exercise, like getting involved in the humanities (sociology, philosophy, law) and/or community building to do the groundwork necessary to contribute positive change rather than illusionary shortcuts to fruitless impact, needless suffering, and self-destruction.
AGI is a canard. Too much money in electricity, servers, land, and technological advances would be needed to build and operate sufficiently capable digital reasoning. Domain-specific pseudo-intelligence task automation will continue here and there with LLMs, deep learning, and such, but no one is building just one "brain" for less than $5T and it probably wouldn't be very performant.
Current AI is totally incapable of replacing expert human judgment for almost everything because they lack constraints, predictability, and reliability. Also, most models hallucinate worthless, incorrect answers so often that they should be relegated to glorified creative, entertainment, and task-acceleration work for the foreseeable future and not be given wildly-inappropriate power like giving a toddler a nuke. Furthermore, the appeal to LLM authority fallacy is a dangerous trend of unthinking, laziness of people failing to think skeptically and find sources for themselves. Finally, too many laypeople and wild-eyed techbros are projecting and imagining AI capabilities that aren't really there and may never exist, but then making much bigger mistakes of irrational, risky bets on their preconceived conclusions, and telling us we should worship the billionaires, accept layoffs, accept panopticon surveillance, accept their loud, polluting data centers in our literal backyards.. for what good?
I mean this is just obviously and flagrantly untrue, eg. Greta Thunberg became a culture war boogeyman for half of the political spectrum over significantly more moderate views expressed in exactly the way you describe. If anything, acting like a bitch just emboldens the type who cause problems to cause more problems when they see these signs of weakness and zero will to resist them, as we see happening with acts of complete irrationality like Trump making a war against fucking wind turbines a top priority of the US government's agenda.
When you tell people they're protesting the wrong way, you're really just saying "I don't want to hear your complaints. Make them in a way that doesn't bother me so I can ignore them".
Another angle is excuses for mass layoffs are continuation of the Powell memo neoliberalism agenda of suppressing wages by keep workers desperate and partly a consequence of rising interest rates since there's no more free money.
Workers need to stop depending on megacorps for stability and form worker-owned co-ops that compete with and supplant unstable, mercurial megacorps.
His impact has not been fruitless, to the contrary and case in point, we're now discussing about him in here and in other similar places. Had he chosen the lame road of becoming a humanities thingie nothing of his legacy would have remained.
People still go on runs although that's not what wins wars today.
Dear Mr.,
In your letter of December 14, you ask me whether mathematics is a worthwhile endeavor. Mathematics absolutely is not a worthwhile endeavor! I can imagine only three possible reasons for studying mathematics:
(1) Entertainment. (2) To promote technological progress. (3) To promote one’s own career.
Reason (1) is harmless; but one doesn’t refer to entertainment as a “worthwhile endeavor”; it’s just a pastime.
As for reason (2), modern technology is the worst thing that ever happened to the world, and to promote its progress is nothing short of criminal. Read Our Final Century, by Martin Rees; or read “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” an article by Bill Joy that appeared in Wired magazine, April, 2000.
As for reason (3), to choose mathematics as one’s career would be very risky. Not long ago I received a letter from a gravestone sculptor whose craft had been rendered obsolete by a laser-guided machine that carved gravestones automatically. He was in his forties, unable to find work, and depressed. Maybe you think that can’t happen to you if you become a mathematician. But you’re wrong. Martin Rees, Bill Joy, and many other distinguished experts believe that within a few decades machines will be developed that will be more intelligent than even the smartest human beings. When that happens, people will be obsolete; they will be phased out and will be replaced by computers and robots. This will happen to everyone eventually, but mathematicians probably will become obsolete before anyone else does, because mathematics is more amenable to computerization than any other field. Hence, computers probably will surpass humans in mathematics before they do so in other areas.
Sincerely yours, Ted Kaczynski
The Joy article mentions is here https://www.wired.com/2000/04/joy-2/ by the way, and includes discussion of Kaczynski.
I'm not sure I agree with this. I suppose it could be that we have different defintions of what "our world" means.
You might like the quote below. I suspect you're arguing that most pure math is performed for option #2 below (utilitarian purposes). Like I said, I'm not so sure.
In the temple of science are many mansions, and various indeed are they that dwell therein and the motives that have led them thither. Many take to science out of a joyful sense of superior intellectual power; science is their own special sport to which they look for vivid experience and the satisfaction of ambition; many others are to be found in the temple who have offered the products of their brains on this altar for purely utilitarian purposes. Were [someone to] drive all the people belonging to these two categories out of the temple, the assemblage would be seriously depleted, but there would still be some men, of both present and past times, left inside. Our Planck is one of them, and that is why we love him.
High end service will likely be human to distinguish itself from all the cheaper automation. Listening to humans play live music won't go away. Having a human touch when being cared for won't either.