alt Hacker NewsI get that Tao is a mathematician first and I respect the fact that he stays 'in his wheelhouse' (he didn't write the post but he did post it on his blog). But I think it would be fair to extrapolate and to wonder about this question not just for mathematics but for all of science. Keep in mind that scientific knowledge can be hoarded or used to patent stuff and that there is plenty of evidence that OpenAI, Anthropic and possibly others are going to go after other sources of income[1] than just selling access to their AI inference engines.
I can imagine a future where these companies become the new Zaibatsus[2] holding patents across a wide variety of subject and with mutually re-inforcing silos of proprietary technology created by in-house AI that the rest of the world financed but does not have access to.
[1] For instance: https://www.reuters.com/world/anthropic-quietly-sets-up-biol...
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Good thing we have open source models from China, famous for ignoring copyright...
Lobbying others being banned from using AI for this kind of stuff due to bioterrorism etc is an excellent anticompetitive move.
Or even, a golden age or a dark age for human society?
I mean, a society devoted to enriching all humans in multiple ways will want mathematicians. A society that aims to just suck all the value it can out of a given human wouldn't need and so wouldn't have mathematicians, if the answers they give can be provided by a machine.
Intellectual property laws never totally made sense to me in the first place, but they make even less sense in the age of AI.
Who's "intellectual property" are we protecting, exactly, when a machine generates the knowledge?
I hope we can update before it's too late to matter.