pfdietz

Canada needs a nuclear deterrent.

Why do you think tech bro billions aren't also subject to replacement by AI? They compete with each other, and if AI does their jobs better than they can themselves they are strongly incented to use AI.

Absent a world dictatorship there's always competition here. And fully superhuman AI eliminates the main objection to socialism, that you need markets with smart people to make an economy function. Full automated luxury communism (like Ian Banks) is a possible outcome.

The math community was not a global underclass. World wealth is increasing, the actual global underclass is seeing rapidly improving lives.

You may be seeing a loss of privilege due at least in part to the inevitable reversion to the mean of US economic dominance. But on a global scale, things are going well. AI will lead to a much larger pie.

I don't. I'm retired.

I'm also not going to live all that much longer, most likely, so it's kind of annoying I'm not really going to see any upsides to an AI world either. I'm discounting the possibility of our AI overlords figuring out a miracle like reversing aging.

But it is really f-ing cool that automated math is now a thing and we are seeing it. Eat your heart out, past me.

For theorem proving, once the statement is formalized, there's an oracle for correctness of the proof. For deciding if something is interesting, well, de gustibus non est disputandum, you know?

Experience with Lenat's AM decades ago had it go off making all sorts of uninteresting hypotheses. That's very weak evidence, of course.

This suggests people also have role for fundung "beautiful" or "the best" proofs, since that also involves taste. More generally, perhaps the role of people is to reveal their preferences, and that requires people be in the loop somehow. Maybe "math criticism" becomes the job. And if AI is to serve people in general, it needs to know these preferences.

Proving theorems will have lower payoff, but posing new questions (for AI to chew on) will have higher payoff. Math will go from theorem proving to conjecture farming/exploration. In a way this could be even more fun.

Of course AI can also farm conjectures, but they have to develop taste, which might be harder than just proving theorems.

The Erdos problem solutions have been accelerating, including a $250 problem and a $100 problem.

It's been fun watching the cope collapse from day to day. No one told me a slow takeoff Singularity would have so much schadenfreude.

When they see us coming, the birdies all try and hide...

Chickens descend from jungle fowl, which were carried out into the Pacific from SE Asia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_junglefowl

Style seems to me to be one of those things that shouldn't have IP. Oh no, what happens if it isn't protected? Society spends less money on parasitic fashion?

Have you read Charles C. Mann's book "1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created"? It's all about the global impact of the opening of the New World by the Europeans, and how the global exchange created and is creating the "homogenocene", the age of homogeneity. There's a part about a folk song in the Philippines that lovingly goes over the crops being grown around a village. They're all introduced.

Sugarcane is also thought to be originally from New Guinea, although it spread widely in prehistory.

Or clothing that deterministically degrades so it will qualify as unrecycleable. Maybe unlaunderable use-once clothing?

Unless, of course, the machine being constructed is the prover (and prompts) that proved the results (or achieved whatever result instead of the human achieving it.)

Lower bounds are really hard.

Adding up those n1 numbers, each at least n2 digits long, takes O(n1 * n2) time.

Ah, so you're saying none of us will benefit from the discovery of new mathematical knowledge?

You've just condemned funding math, even human-produced math.

Either math is useful, in which case AI math is useful, or math is not useful, in which case we can save money by having mathematicians sell shoes or clean toilets.

This is all a depressing and bleak future that I don’t look forward to.

Or, for the vast majority of humanity who aren't professional mathematicians, it's a liberating and empowering advancement.

I'm sorry if the automated digital theorem looms are eliminating the market for your handwoven proofs.

Press "4" if you have a rotary phone.

So, it's cheap.

In order to get a Ph.D., you have to do some sort of original research,

China has now introduced "practical PhDs" where you have to build some practical machine instead.

Wow. That literally has nothing to do with what I wrote.

You can also carry with you frozen gametes or digital genomes. Digital genetic information can be transmitted between systems at trivial cost.

What is considered recycling? Is convert the clothing into fuel pellets considered recycling? What about thermal decomposition for feedstocks for chemical manufacture (and what if 75% of the mass isn't useful for that and is instead burned in turbines for cogeneration)?

Down-cycling is a thing. Even aluminum and steel get down-cycled.

I have no sympathy for recycling fetishism.

They sometimes start improving again. In the context of your comment, look how the cost/kg to LEO has suddenly dropped radically. This was mostly due to institutional change that allowed previous non-technological barriers to improvement to be bypassed.

Moravec's Paradox strikes again!

Moravec must be at some level gratified things are arriving close to his predicted timeline.

In all of those cases, you need to have enough shielding to avoid spreading nuclear waste over a very large area -- that adds a lot of mass.

Conservatively it might add an order of magnitude, and likely less. This still renders future reusable launchers much cheaper per kg of spent fuel than reprocessing would be, unless you are projecting very large improvements in the cost of reprocessing.

You might object current launchers aren't cheap enough, but I wasn't proposing doing this right now with current launchers, so that would be a strawman objection.

Current costs to launch a kg to orbit are something like $2,000-$6,000.

This is false. Launch on Falcon 9 is under $1K/kg.

Moreover, current launch costs are just a milestone toward future launch costs, which promise to me much lower. Ultimately launch will be a few times the cost of propellant (just like air travel), so $10/kg is a reasonable expectation.

vaporizing in the atmosphere

How does this happen? Launch explosion? That doesn't vaporize an armored container. Entry from near-orbital speed? Also survivable passively.

The result of an accident will be tracking down the armored canister(s), cleaning up any local impact fragments, and prepared the stuff for another launch.

The armored canister doesn't have to be sent beyond LEO, so it could be reused, and doesn't impose a mass penalty on that beyond-LEO transport system.

You need to think more clearly about this.

Reprocessing is very expensive; $1000/kg and up. Launch to space will likely become much cheaper than this as fully reusable launch vehicles become available. Even if the spent fuel must be armored against accident the cost of launching it to LEO, and then to the moon, is likely to become much cheaper than the cost of reprocessing it here on Earth.

Space disposal has the positive advantage that the seven very long lived fission products are removed from the biosphere, along with the very long lived actinides like Np-237.

It's small enough a single person could write a test suite for the whole standard.