Interview with Micah Zarin

I’m not completely happy with this interview with Micah Zarin. It was nothing he did, it was me. I forgot to say that current-day AI wastes a lot of energy, and companies hope to use it to lay off people, and oligarchs are using it to extract lots of money from everyone. While obvious, these things are tremendously important and I should have emphasized them.

I was distracted by Micah’s fear that AI would make a career in math pointless, which really surprised me. So instead of giving my general thoughts on AI, I focused on putting myself in his place and imagining what to do in that situation. I suggested doing math with the help of AI as a way to overcome his fear and go ahead doing math while keeping abreast of new developments. If AI overtakes humans in math in his lifetime, which is far from certain, this could be a way to keep productively participating in math throughout this process. But I warned him to be very critical of what LLMs say, to lessen the danger of getting caught up in the ‘AI vortex’ that is turning many people into crackpots.

Mathematics, in case you haven’t been paying attention, is different from some other subjects because it’s an area where LLMs have shown some truly impressive problem-solving ability: read the various mathematicians’ comments in Remarks on the disproof of the unit distance conjecture where they grapple with this. But nobody really knows where this is going. So far LLMs have not shown much ability to invent new theories of mathematics, so it would be jumping to conclusions to assume AI will soon overtake humans in that realm. It would also be jumping to conclusions to assume it won’t.

Whatever happens, the real danger is not that AI will become too good, but that it will become too evil—most likely because of the oligarchs, corporations and governments behind it. I wish I had emphasized that point, which is always on my mind.

I think I succeeded in making another point, which is that life will not become pointless simply because some other entity gets better than humans at something and knocks us off our throne. To think that the meaning of life resides in our superiority is a childish attitude.