Eye For An AI (Liberal Arts)
"My other work? Is that really important either? I could try composing wonderful musical works, or day-long entertainment epics, but what would that do? Give people pleasure? My wiping this table gives me pleasure. And people come to a clean table, which gives them pleasure.

And anyway, people die; stars die; universes die. What is any achievement, however great it was, once time itself is dead?"

- Use of Weapons by Ian M. Banks, in Size Isn't Everything

Banks' novel from 1990 describes how a Culture citizen has resigned himself to providing (self-)service by wiping tables in lieu of creating music or plays, likely at least partly from the understanding that the quasi-omniscient AI Minds of the setting could outdo him - without perceptible effort - at any pursuit he wished to attempt anyway.

Before expanding on that, some updates on recent posts: on space, a newly-established National Space Agency of Singapore (acronym sharing the same letters as NASA) has targeted a functional operations centre by the middle of next year, with three active satellites under their purview. Singapore's location almost exactly on the equator has long attracted proposals for hosting space elevators, and with materials science having finally (almost?) caught up, hopefully our supposedly cash-flush government might look to steal a march for once.

On music, the creator of Emily Howell had analyzed (classical) musical composition in terms of language, concluding that it represented syntax but not semantics, which would appear to admit a reduced degree of complexity compared to text generation (consider Prisencolinensinainciusol, where the lyrics are designed to obey English word-level patterns, such that it infuriatingly sounds like it should be intelligible, but isn't. Then again, this happens with actual English hit songs too)

Well, writing's kind of done with too anyway, if posts on social media, and especially professional outlets such as LinkedIn, are anything to go by. It has been observed that decent writing had served as "proof-of-thought" since its inception, from how the quality of a person's jottings tended to reflect his mastery of the subjects being discussed, or at least indicated a certain level of intelligence. None of this is true nowadays, when anybody can just dump a mess of disorganized thoughts onto an LLM, and have the machine tidy and polish it up for them.


Humanity's Final Frontier?


Elon Musk was always a funny one
[N.B. It's Terminator versus Transformers for Team Red vs. Team Blue!]
[N.N.B. China is pushing for T800 to battle Deadpool. I approve.]
(Source: youtube.com)

Sitting and doomscrolling through an unending stream of supposed AI breakthroughs, it is easy to wonder: what's left for humans? On gross physical achievements, machines have long left us in the dust. Sawe might have gained immortal renown for running some 42km in under two hours, but a long-distance pace of 21km/h would get one cited for road-hogging, what with clunkers and heavy vehicles easily capable of at least thrice that speed. The deadlift world record (510kg) is peanuts to any old warehouse-rated forklift, so on and so forth.

But they're not... smart, right? Too bad for the nerds who paid for college, the blue-collar trades are safe!

About that, from recent advances in robotic fruit pickers, infrastructure maintenance and surgical assistants - all of which require fine manual dexterity - I wouldn't be too confident of that either, a view that is apparently also held by Moravec (whose famous paradox on the relative difficulty of replicating low-level perception and mobility skills was last referenced here in 2013). The main saving grace for humans, for a while at least, is the cost of robots; why pay thirty grand for Deadpool to grumble while picking strawberries, if one can get some illegal immigrants to do it for like eighteen bucks an hour, before going into how much safer it is to stiff them rather than Deadpool.

So okay, graphics artists are kind of hosed from how even governments and banks are going for AI slop, authors are sunk from how an increasing percentage of novels are ghostwritten by AIs, who are literally devouring past titles to remix them... surely there is some field that those smug bots will not be able to defile? Maybe pure mathematics, that most abstract and yet creative of disciplines? Certainly there is no way that those overgrown stochastic parrots could even begin to approach the subject through verbose dissimulation, much less advance it!

Uh, bad news here too...


Math (Sort Of) Falls


Gary Marcus being a bit of a wet blanket here
[N.B. The main thrust is that these solutions are a special case that current LLM-like models happen to be great on. While I'm not sure about that, the accusation of a lack of documentation by OpenAI does seem to hold.]
(Source: acm.org)

On the first of August, OpenAI leaked and then announced ten novel mathematical discoveries by its new Astra LLM-based reasoning model, alongside formal Lean 4 certificates proving the logic (if not the underlying assumptions, but one figures OpenAI's employees to be competent on that end). All appear to be fairly-longstanding open problems that were well-known to be unsolved by the (human) mathematical community, with the headline result being the third in the list, which is "an explicit construction of a non-sofic group".

Some disclosure here before continuing: while I have studied (some) computer science, the more-theoretical and mathy side was not my specialty (nor my strong suit), and thus the following discussion should be considered as by an interested layman*. Wikipedia has done a great job of intimidating the average reader with their description of a sofic group, as "a group whose Cayley graph is an initially subamenable graph" (so, uh, what's a "Cayley graph" and a "subamenable graph"?). One kind soul has attempted an explanation in (slightly) more relatable terms, and the author of a key theorem used in the proof has discussed the main breakthroughs on Mathoverflow, but all this will be skipped given that group theory is typically introduced only in the second year for mathematics majors, and hardly expected knowledge for college graduates.

The point to be made here then is: there were a bunch of very difficult math problems, that all of humanity's cleverest mathematicians together were unable to solve (as otherwise, they would probably have published it for tenure and bragging rights, or simply because it was the done thing to do). However, some soulless LLM came along and solved them - and not only that, for a mere US$2000 in token costs. Now, pure math may be a particularly parsimonious field given the lack of (expensive) experiments, but this appeared to be of little consolation to the wider math community, who had by the way just come together to formulate a Leiden Declaration on AI and Math.

Those mathematicians that did comment on the development were generally... not happy at all. The most-disseminated of these was perhaps Kirwin Hampshire's The Dark Night of Mathematics, which ominously begins with "I am going insane". In it, he predicts that there is nothing to be done about (better and better) LLMs scooping proofs left and right, and that if humans are to continue doing math, it would essentially be as a non-serious hobby (akin to wiping tables?). In response, Noah Smith has consoled that academic mathematicians may very well keep their jobs because they're, well, incredibly cheap (commanding a salary of US$5 billion per year in total, or less than 1% of a downtrodden Elon Musk), the AI discoveries will still be interesting to humans (who would otherwise not enjoy them) - and what's wrong with having hobbies**?


[*This would translate into a 1 or 1.5 (out of 5) on the standard computer science conference reviewing confidence scale, which roughly translates into "this is my best-effort guess out of obligation, but if somebody else comes along saying that he knows what he's talking about, you might want to listen to him instead". Thankfully, actual reviews tend to get a 4 (or 3 sometimes) from sensible assignments, though from how some major conferences are considering LLM assistance, they might not be required for much longer either. ]

[**Regarding this in particular, it was slightly surprising to realize that (AI) chess was barely discussed in either article, with Smith only mentioning it en passant and Hampshire addressing it from the comments section. It really doesn't feel all that long ago that AlphaZero defeating Lee Sedol was big news, with international chess effectively conceded to the computer(s) even before that. Heck - Magnus Carlsen, almost certainly the best grandmaster ever to live, can't beat his own smartphone app. Given the proliferation of chess literature, I'm just waiting for LLMs to commentate on their own games.]