alt Hacker News> There seems to be this distinctly toxic trait common among math and CS folks where you don't see work as work, like the median worker, but as intrinsically linked to your self-worth and reason for existence.
I don't see this as a toxic trait at all. Some people have the fortune and luxury to do what they love - I don't think that's a bad thing.
I think this quote from Gauss puts it very well: "It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, not possession, but the act of getting there, which grants the greatest enjoyment." So tons of mathematicians feel like AI is stealing this "act of learning which grants the greatest enjoyment", and I think it's fine that they are lamenting this.
This is inherently my whole problem with the "AI utopianists", who somehow think we'll all be happy once we're sitting around with no disease just eating bonbons all day or something.
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Did Gauss say that learning was only the greatest enjoyment when no one else was known to already know the thing you are learning?
This is inherently my whole problem with the "AI utopianists", who somehow think we'll all be happy once we're sitting around with no disease just eating bonbons all day or something.
I don't know about Gauss, but when I am given a more powerful tool, I use it to tackle harder problems, the kind that were out of reach before.
Call me when you run out of those sorts of problems. I'll propose some more.
Happiness is a pointless goal anyway. It's not a metric that can be used to measure the success or failure of any particular policy.