But that's exactly my point: if all you want or need is competence, then according to the professor's own admission, an AI will do that. No need for your job, no need for grants, no need to teach. What is the purpose of teaching future generations if an AI will be better at mathematics than you ever can be?

And what I am saying is that either (1) the framing of AI as being the hyper-competent replacement for everything intellectual that we do is fundamentally flawed, and/or (2) it is necessary to understand, for the well-being of our own species, that "competence" and "results" are not the end-all and be-all of a task.

If we fail to appreciate the importance of doing and learning things for their own sake, and to find satisfaction in that process, then we will cede the task of thinking to machines. We can already see early signs of this. And the consequences of this short sightedness is catastrophic.

Let's be clear about the nature of education. Before a student reaches a particular level of self-discipline during their formative educatoinal years, homework is assigned because it is an effective mechanism to have them practice the concepts being taught to them, and to do this outside of the structured classroom environment. This activity promotes the crystallization of learning objectives and prepares the student for the next lesson, which builds upon the previous.

After a student becomes largely self-sufficient, the homework model becomes less about enforcement through grading, and becomes more about preparing the student to manage their own academic development outside of the lectures and office hours. The student goes to class because they understand they NEED to be there to learn, unlike a child who must be TOLD to be there.

In this regard, whether or not homework is graded, and whether or not a student feels a need to cheat or take shortcuts with homework, is really just a reflection of the student's maturity and sense of responsibility for their own intellectual development. Typically, a professor should not need to police what a student does on their own time; what matters is the ability to certify that a student has met the learning objectives--and that is done through examination.

So, what I find disturbing is not the question of whether this professor should grade his students' homework, or whether the students are using AI to do their homework for them instead of actually learning the material. As the old adage goes, cheaters are only cheating themselves--at least, that's what I would still like to believe.

No, what I actually find most disturbing is this apparent disconnect in the professor's views on the future of AI as they pertain to professional mathematics, and the impact of AI use on the education of humanity. He predicts that AI will be better than professional human mathematicians, and I think this belies a deeply mistaken perspective on the purpose of learning and doing mathematics, one that I am extremely surprised that a working professional mathematician would make.

Even if AI models far exceed the human capacity to prove theorems, will it ever FEEL enjoyment and excitement about doing mathematics? Because if it can't stir something in you, then why do it, and why bother teaching it to others? Why would you ever need to teach another student, if you could just always ask a computer instead? In fact, why will anyone in the future ever need to learn anything, if AI will be the replacement for our brains?

I am a human being and I feel. I dream, and I love. I love mathematics, and it is not simply the result or the answer that I love, but the entire process. The struggle, the failure, the questioning and working away at it until at last, there is UNDERSTANDING. And the flaw that I see my fellow humans are making, over and over, is this crazy focus on RESULTS. ANSWERS. GOALS. They seem to have forgotten how to enjoy the process of doing things, whether it is the restoration of a classic car, or composing a musical score, or deciding what to cook for dinner.

I mean, why spend months and months on taking apart a 1957 Buick engine, lovingly cleaning every component, repairing and sometimes manufacturing replacements, and reassembling it? Why, when you can have a new electric car that is far safer and more efficient, with more functions and conveniences? Let me be clear; I don't work on classic cars or have any experience with automotive mechanics. But even from my outsider's perspective, I instantly know, at a visceral level, why they do it. It is for the love of the process; to take this machine and build it with your bare hands so that you have a complete understanding of it; and that this machine is an embodiment of engineering, aesthetics, and a symbolism of the freedom of movement.

That's what AI will not, and will never, do. It can't fall in love with the process, because to do so is what it means to love learning, and is part of what it means to be human. And for a professor of mathematics to not appreciate this is, to me, very misguided, and does not bode well for the education of future generations.

wait as long as possible to choose between SpaceX and Blew Origin? You mean wait to see who will give the biggest bribe?
The only urgency is to give a big fat pile of money to another oligarch and rake in more grift

One other thing I forgot to mention. I'm skeptical that this "AI startup" actually did what it claimed to do, but since I have no evidence either way, I reserve my judgment until more details are given.

If the startup can't or won't provide evidence, that in itself is suggestive of some kind of fraudulent behavior meant to hype up the company, a la Theranos/Elizabeth Holmes. But in so far as the underlying scientific principles are involved, the strategy seems plausible. I just don't know if this company actually did it.

So I only remembered a little bit of the virology of phages from what I learned in school--namely, that they infect bacteria and that they are everywhere. And when I saw some of the early comments posted here that were big on knee-jerk reactions and scarcasm but small on actual science, I decided to read the Wikipedia article.

Phages don't infect eukaryotes; they only infect bacteria. And phage therapy has been successfully used to combat antibiotic resistance in humans, although the problem of resistance in general remains. This makes sense: bacteria replicate rapidly and have relatively little in the way of proofreading mechanisms, so when there is selection pressure, they mutate and develop resistance very easily, even to phages. So engineering a phage to target an antibiotic-resistant bacterial strain might work in the short term, but unless there's a way to cultivate phages that are able to adapt in response to (and not simply target) that strain, the strategy is intrinsically self-limiting.

To those comments drawing ill-informed comparisons to engineering viruses that infect humans, know this: phages are literally everywhere on this planet. They are far, far more abundant than bacteria, and most people can appreciate how ubiquitous bacteria are. You already have phages inside of you, and in fact, they form an entire ecosystem. Same thing with bacteria--you have bacteria all over and inside your body. You have more bacterial cells coexisting on and inside you than you have your own cells. And what's more interesting is that these phages seem to be protective by helping to maintain a balanced microbiome.

The concern I have with engineered phages is not that they would be harmful to the environment or to us, or that they could mutate to be harmful. That is extremely, extremely unlikely, because such a concern doesn't reflect an understanding of how phages actually function in real life and how they co-evolve with the bacteria they infect. If anything I would be concerned about spreading bacteria that become extensively resistant to antibiotics and phages. Thus we need better education about what phage therapy is, and to ensure that study participants are adequately informed of the potential risks and benefits. The direction such therapy would most likely need to take is quite similar to CRISPR and other gene therapies, in that it would need to be a form of personalized medicine. If we can develop computer models to help perform this personalization more efficiently, then I'm for it; such an approach may also prove useful for treating cancer.

Precisely. I alluded to this in my previous comment, but you give very simple and specific examples of this phenomenon.

Other examples with significant impact:

Ability to borrow money is almost nonexistent for the poor, except for usurious rates such as in payday loans or credit card interest. An absolutely astonishing percentage of Americans carry a balance on their credit cards from month to month, and pay interest on that balance. And the poorest Americans can't even access credit. This inability to borrow at a favorable rate impacts major purchases that would, in the long run, save enormous sums of money, such as financing a home or an automobile. A home builds equity and doesn't enrich a landlord. A car lets you commute to better jobs and saves time otherwise wasted on public transit.

Fines, fees, and consumption taxes as a proportion of income are vastly higher, and there is no legal recourse. Late on your credit card payment because your employer didn't pay you on time? The bank doesn't care and you don't have money to sue your employer, not to mention they might just fire you. Sales tax is extremely regressive; 8-10% makes no difference to the well off, but regularly stops the poor from being able to afford basic necessities--and many state/local governments continue to seek increases in sales tax in order to make up for budget shortfalls as a result of their own lack of fiscal discipline.

What bothers me is how the wealthy class is always quick to point out how much "assistance" is given to the poor, but when it comes to the poverty tax and actually having an equitable playing field in economic affairs, they are dead silent. And the middle class eats up this narrative, because they don't want to believe that they have more in common with the poor than they do with the rich. Most Americans are one health emergency away from bankruptcy. Most cannot afford to lose their job. Yet so many believe that they should direct their anger at the poor for "being lazy and taking the benefits their taxes pay for," when the truth is that the truly wealthy have rigged the financial and political system to pay almost no taxes and steal far more tax dollars than all of the poor are ever given.

It is a kind of mass delusion perpetrated by the rich in order to sustain their wholesale theft of the wealth created by the entire working class, and the fact that so few of us have woken up to this reality is what makes me want to scream.

What this allocation seems to suggest is that study participants who receive UBI feel compelled to distribute some of that income to their loved ones, because they too need assistance, and doing so improves their social circle's quality of life in ways that are not so material as buying goods and services. Therefore, if UBI were made available to everyone in need--and not just to study participants--then such redistribution would not occur at this rate.

What I've noticed with these studies is that critics of UBI and other forms of social safety net programs frequently come from entitled backgrounds. They have never known poverty and have formed this narrative of poor people "wasting" the money they earn or receive as the reason for their poverty. They can't understand why poor people don't just "find a better job," or "stop eating so much food," or "find a cheaper place to live." They look at the world through their own lens of plenty, and don't see how society severely penalizes the poor for simply being poor and extracts from them additional financial costs that the more fortunate do not have to pay.

In the same vein, there is this insidious undercurrent of elitism in the criticism that UBI recipients need to have their spending monitored and judged before they are entitled to it, because it reinforces this false narrative that poor people are poor because they don't use their money "wisely." Meanwhile, we have a billionaire class that truly wastes their obscene wealth on luxury yachts and monuments to their greatness. If anything, it is the poor--who have lived the experience of scarcity and have to decide every day what is truly meaningful in life--who should be entrusted to wealth, because every day they feel the tremendous pressure, anxiety, and insecurity of not having it, and therefore know how important it is to make sure that others do not suffer the same.

So when they give money to their friends or family when they barely have enough for themselves, you KNOW they aren't doing it frivolously. Unlike billionaires, who only love themselves, they know how important it is to share with the people you love.

We are a bunch of neurons meeting action potentials and firing synapses... Hard to see something conscious in there.

(Not that current AI is conscious, just that it's an eventual outcome.)

Do what you want way up there. The swing between summer and winter amount of sunlight is drastic. However, down here? The change makes it much worse. It takes months just to get back to baseline after the clocks change. I just donâ(TM)t care, either pick one or just move the clocks 30 minutes one last time and keep it there. why has no one thought of this? Did the Canadiens study that? Move the clocks by 30 minutes and keep them there.

This is absolutely correct, and it's extremely important to understand that this behavior is baked into the model. It's not even so much that it's "baked into" the model as it IS the model.

Ever since the earliest days of LLMs and generative AI, we have always, always seen what people call "hallucinations." But the only thing that qualifies such output as a hallucination is that we, the human observer, has judged it as such. By construction, the model DOES NOT KNOW THE DIFFERENCE. If it knew or "understood," it wouldn't have produced the spurious output in the first place.

So every now and then, we see some amusing audio/video clip of some human managing to fool or "break" an AI agent, and it makes the rounds of social media for people to point at and laugh and say "tee hee, how funny!" And then these same people, without thinking about what these hallucinations mean and what they imply about the intrinsic nature of the technology, immediately turn around and ask Claude or ChatGPT what they should make for dinner, or who to vote for, or who to hire and fire; or worse, give them access to their personal data and critical systems. That is a level of uncritical thinking and cognitive dissonance that ought to be profoundly distressing.

From a functional perspective, there is quite literally zero distinction between an AI generated pretty woman breaking and suddenly speaking in Cantonese during an English-language interview, and an AI agent that violates constraints imposed upon it and causes damage. They are both "hallucinations" in the sense that they are unintended behaviors/outputs, and as we have already established, the only meaningful arbiter of "intention" is our own human judgment. AI proponents try very hard to make excuses and minimize the severity of the problem. But it is intrinsic to all models.

Whether through laziness or ignorance, when humans cede their authority to interrogate and decide the truth for themselves and let machines do their thinking for them, who or what ultimately becomes the authority for that truth, and who is or is not accountable for the consequences? Who has a vested interest in controlling the source of truth and knowledge, and what are their motives?

People have been driven to delusion and suicide because of interactions with LLMs, and although you might be able to argue that they would have killed themselves regardless and were in need of treatment, no one can possibly know that, because that's not what actually took place.

But I think the more serious question is the framing of the premise: why is it that the point at which we ought to hold people accountable is if someone is killed? Who decided that the tipping point is when these AI agents start killing people, and why? Not only do most legal systems seek to prevent and punish abusive, antisocial, and outright criminal activity, a just society has a moral and ethical responsibility to apply rules and norms fairly. While we can see that the fair application of the law largely remains an idealistic fantasy and that those with wealth and status often escape accountability, the fact remains that adding AI to that privileged status certainly is not doing anything to help reduce that inequity.

So again I ask: why should agentic AI and their operators be permitted to do things that we would not allow under other circumstances? Just because some people find these tools useful does not excuse the requirement that they be safe and respectful.

Please do let us in on the joke and share your explanation of what you find so funny about this phrase.

âoeThis? This is Slashdot. This is what happens to people when they get too sexually frustrated.â

Because he is not (currently) a dictator, he can't make his own laws. He's limited in what he can do.

Tariffs are one of the few things in which he is mostly able to do unilaterally. When all you've got is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.

Are you suggesting that Alzheimerâ(TM)s is sexually transmitted?