“Most people, I think, are feeling grief,” says Cornell University mathematics professor Steven Strogatz on The New York Times‘ podcast, “The Daily” yesterday. He was talking about how advances in AI—by March of this year, AI was doing math at the competency of “a very good graduate student”—are threatening to take away nothing less than his and his colleagues’ purpose in life.
I strongly recommend listening to this whole emotional interview, well led by Rachel Abrams.
Meanwhile, though, see what else this math square says that writers might relate to, on a bad day:
“You know what’s actually being lost is, we like to think of ourselves as heroes. And maybe that’s over. That’s the big news. It’s hard to be a hero if you can’t be the first to solve a problem or to understand something or to explain it to the world.”
“Think of whatever it is to do whatever your favorite puzzle is—jigsaw, sudoku, crossword puzzle—it sort of feels good to be stumped. And then it’s satisfying when you have a breakthrough. Everything clicks into place. People like that feeling and a lot of us live for that. We want that. It’s like an addiction. We want that feeling over and over. So we’re in the business of pleasuring ourselves that way. … I wanted to say it that way because I actually think it is sexual, slightly.
“What’s going on is there’s a quest. In our case, we want answers. We want solutions and we want understanding. We want ‘ah-ha’ moments, and so the fact that the problems exist and have to be seduced into yielding their secrets … it’s kind of sexy!”
“The highest compliment you could give to another mathematician is, ‘Oh, what an elegant proof.’ What does elegant mean for us? Elegant for us means something that has a surprise value, but that is also inevitable once you see it. You know, it’s a head-slapping thing, like, ‘That is so perfect, that is such a great argument, why didn’t I think of that?’ So for a long time, the AIs, the computers, were not producing elegant math. They behaved like machines. They would get the job done, but with no panache, no flair. But, by May of this year, everybody sat up straight when AI solved a problem that the world’s best mathematicians were interested in. And it did it with flair.”
He describes the problem, and the maniacal math genius/mentor who posed it—with deep feeling. As he describes this picture of the genius, Paul Erdős, and his eight-year-old pupil, Terrence Tao, who became and remains one of the great mathematicians in the world, he breaks down. “Happy as clams,” Strogatz describes them.
Strogatz relays a joke that’s going around among tech heads on X, about the gathering irrelevance of that very same Terrence Tao: “‘Put the fries in the bag, Terrence.’ … There’s certain people who are gloating, who have a feeling of satisfaction that the smartest kid in the class is now going to be out of a job, like the rest of us.”
So, the mathematician asks, what’s the point? “If the AI can do math better than any human being, sure I could sit there and learn from it. But I want to discover things too. I want that thrill … So if you take that away from me, what am I doing?”
And he goes to Ecclesiastes: “Everything is beautiful in its time.” And he says through tears, “If everything is beautiful in its time, we get to have a turn where we’re in love, we’re creative, we do what’s meaningful, we get to walk our dog, whatever. We do have a time. Otherwise, we’re dust, right? We’re ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The beautiful part is the in between.”
And Abrams, now in tears herself, asks Strogatz if AI is making him more religious.
“But I don’t think it’s about God. I think it’s about people. Because that I do believe in.”
This ole writer, too.
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