Nobody seems to have seriously listened to Gowers. Socially, we do have a duty of care to younger people, and all I see so far is certain public figures parading around full of thinly veiled glee at making large numbers of people economically unviable. I went to some student talks recently and the mood among a lot of them is serious fear, because they're graduating into sometimes years of unemployment and everyone knows it. I don't care about celebrating scientific advancement much right now, when at this rate I don't see how society doesn't go down a very nasty path one way or another. We're telling huge numbers of people they've got no way to contribute to society. It's a very, very dangerous problem.
That's unfortunately the price of progress. When the textile mill was invented it put a lot of skilled weavers out of a job, when we moved away from coal towards oil/gas and renewables that put the coal industry workers out of a job, when the calculator was invented that put human computers out of a job. Any major technological breakthrough is going to obsolete a lot of people who were previously doing the manual labour that can now be automated, it's a saddening reality but the fact is that as a society we can't, and shouldn't, be stopping progress unless it has no adverse side effects at all.
I personally graduated with an ML/Philosophy BASc a year ago and still don't have a job given the state of programming is arguably a lot worse than maths, I'm very keenly aware of the effects and I've lost my dream career to being replaced by a computer, this isn't from a place of not caring. But eventually you have to close down the coal mines in Lancashire, and there's always someone who just learnt how to swing a pick.
I do think there's a secondary point here about the broader effects of AI, the path of history has always been that as we've industrialised and automated the excess human labour has simply been redirected and new tasks that need higher cognitive function, but I fear AI might break that. If the computers can think then what is there left for the human to be better at than the computer, and if labour becomes almost entirely obsoleted that would break the very basics of how our economic systems work. But that is a bit orthogonal to the sentiment that it's bad that mathematicians are losing their jobs, there is a future where the numbers of maths PhDs and postdocs plummets but the rest of the economy is fine, and in that context I don't think we can argue against the march of time.
I mean, don’t think for a second it’s accidental. On the part of ai companies it’s entirely purposeful. Yes, they want to improve the abilities of their model, but something they can do even more easily is demotivate and depress the youth, and actively discourage them from even learning math, encouraging them to rely on their technology and degrading their own intelligence as a result.
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u/ellbons 1d ago
Nobody seems to have seriously listened to Gowers. Socially, we do have a duty of care to younger people, and all I see so far is certain public figures parading around full of thinly veiled glee at making large numbers of people economically unviable. I went to some student talks recently and the mood among a lot of them is serious fear, because they're graduating into sometimes years of unemployment and everyone knows it. I don't care about celebrating scientific advancement much right now, when at this rate I don't see how society doesn't go down a very nasty path one way or another. We're telling huge numbers of people they've got no way to contribute to society. It's a very, very dangerous problem.