alt Hacker NewsI am torn by these announcements. On the one hand there is the infinite potential on what we can disover, when AI prompts are solving outstanding problems. On the other, something is lost in an aesthetic sense when it wasnt a man working through this or with a novel insight. If an AI prompt runs on a data center for two weeks and then prints out p=np, it feels a little empty.
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It's a good outcome as long as the proof is valid and ubderstandable to humans and leads to the discovery of further knowledge. There has been decades of search in Theorem Proving; this is just the next step.
I resonate with that feeling, but on the other hand the humans reading the output will receive a pretty big boost in inspiration; new answers usually prompt new questions.
Every generation has felt some version of this.
"Keyboards are soulless. Handwriting is personal – as unique as fingerprints." - Joyce Carol Oates on typewriters
"This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth." - Socrates on writing