This is so well written, deep, funny, and sad.

> Looking up at the stars in wonderment, or enjoying a complex puzzle game, or being inspired by an encouraging teacher, and dreaming that one day an unfeeling corporate robot[1] will burn a rainforest to compile a list of 700 highly obscure barely-readable facts that might be true that nobody can understand as part of a marketing gimmick to raise hype for an IPO[2].

But if I am going to critique it's main point it would be this part:

> in the pursuit of advancing humanity’s knowledge as quickly as possible, many academics will recoil in anger at the suggestion that it is worth spending any time making results understandable to humans. It is inefficient to explain or check a result when those resources can be spent generating another.

While obviously ridiculous, I think this does not go far enough. The problem isn't that people don't care and resources should not be spent to explain AI results to human minds, the problem is that AI will soon be better at explaining itself than humans. The puzzle then changes from can AI formally verify and explain a proof to: do human minds trust the proof. Do we believe that the proof is correct and not an elaborate AI hallucination using tricks that are beyond our understanding. In order to trust it a formal verification is not enough unless it is human understandable. In fact human understandability is the only thing that matters. That is something that AI can never do on its own.

>In order to trust it a formal verification is not enough unless it is human understandable.

The whole point of formal verification is to remove the necessity of understanding most of the work. We only need to trust the formalization of the problem statement, the proof verifier, and the formalization of the result. We already have proof verifiers that humans understand to a high level, and the formalizations of the problem statement and the result are much simpler than the full proof.

I'm confident that the Navier-Stokes equations can blow up because I'm confident that Lean works correctly, and I'm confident that the mathematicians verified the problem statement and result correctly. This is despite the actual proof not being human verified yet (as far as I know), and despite the "human-readable" version not actually corresponding to the formal proof. The formal method still worked.

I'm all for advancing human understanding, even if it might lag behind machine understanding, but there is a way to have machines prove they understand something we don't: ask them to build something functional that we can't. If your hypothetical future comes to pass, and we ask the machine to build a cancer-curing healing ray, and it works, I'd say that's its own win. Then we can spend however long it takes trying to understand how it works. It's depressing and disempowering in a way, but I think overall I'd be happy with that future.

Your last sentence: "That is something that AI can never do on its own."

Never say never...

>And now that AI has solved all our problems, we can devote ourselves to more important work: going into quantitative finance, vibecoding sports-betting apps, consuming AI-generated TikTok shorts, and arguing with political bots on Twitter.

Grim but this is exactly where society is heading.

There are no shortage of artistic pursuits, subcultures, pick-up leagues, and more that you're free to engage with. Get off the beaten path and you'll find humans enjoying life in a wide variety of ways that are uncorrupted by AI.

> Get off the beaten path

I would really push back on this

What you're describing _is_ the beaten path. People who argue with bots on twitter are actually, vastly, the minority.

Go to your local park or bar and have a drink and try not to talk about the internet.

Nice, fair enough.

Except that engagement is not free. All of these things require money, and they require time that isn't already set towards the goal of making money to survive. And one of the selling points of AI is explicitly the redundancy of numerous workers, including ones parallel to myself.

I get that someone wanted to let steam off but this just sounds like they don't have any arguments so they went for the good old "in the future, you won't have free will and social media companies force you to be online" fable. An addicting algorithm isn't the same thing as fentanyl, you can uninstall the app in 5 seconds and getting it back with signing in takes atleast two minutes, enough to reconsider whether you actually want to spend time on it.

The toxicity of apps like Tiktok comes from muscle memory, not the quality of the content. Your thumb knows where the app icon is and opening the app happens quicker than you can think (literally). So offloading or uninstalling breaks this very effectively. The only thing that would still keep you on the platform is social connections. If somebody gets upset over you uninstalling Instagram or Snapchat, they aren't a good friend.

I think the author is hiding the ball a bit. The problem is that, for a long time, humans have attributed meaning, value, and social status to great cognitive insights. Taking physics as an example, it has almost always been the theorists who develop new ideas, not the experimentalists that test and validate them, who have won praise and acclaim. The name Arthur Eddington doesn’t have the same cachet as that of Albert Einstein. But now that the creation of those insights can be automated, there is a great wrenching as esteem shifts away from the former.

Well, maybe it’s a good thing that we are seeing this shift. Maybe it is good and right that we begin valuing your ability to exist in the real world, rather than play math puzzles on a sheet of paper. Because, while the AI labs are receiving a lot of attention and excitement now, that’s a short run phenomenon. Ultimately, people aren’t impressed for long by a machine doing something novel. Once it’s up and running, it fades into the background just like the combustion engine, or the dishwasher, or electric lighting.

Why Ai? Because its development was pretty much free and paid by the pension funds. The objective is supremacy and being the first entity and country to collect rent via Ai supremacy and block every other entity in their analysis; reality who knows what will happen..

It started with internet which was subsidized through military for sake of military supremacy and then it transformed to become a utility connecting everything and collecting information and it subsidized by the markets to collect rent from the world using this utility and now it is subsidized to replace labor around the world and collect rent from its use to discount labor.

Not a huge fan of the sentiment in this article, and the very cynical way it was communicated, but the references to the library of babel reminded me of this fun site.

https://libraryofbabel.info

> No rational person, least of all us masters of rationality in STEM, pursues these for the joy of creation, learning, or beauty

well yeah the purpose of STEM education is to be a factory to produce the correct worker for another factory

I sympathize with some feelings the author is trying to communicate, but the cynical and sarcastic style really detract from the authors points in my view.

Great satire, it is nice to see people with a human spirit left. The NYT should ask to republish this.

> (that’s philosophy, which I would never be a doctor of)

I'm in the office and was trying to contain my laughter next to my colleagues, but this tipped me over the edge

> From what I know about the academic community (mostly from Twitter and LinkedIn, which I assume are representative), there seems to be near-unanimous agreement that the purpose of math and science research is to gather a large quantity of potentially true factoids in a repository that nobody will actually ever read, in a ritual called “advancing humanity’s[3] knowledge”. That these results are well-written, understandable, pleasant to read or look at, or even completely correct is a secondary concern — in fact, in the pursuit of advancing humanity’s knowledge as quickly as possible, many academics will recoil in anger at the suggestion that it is worth spending any time making results understandable to humans.

Am I the only who thinks this is rhetorical? Modern mathematics is so far removed from the base average knowledge (lets just assume high school instead of going to axioms) that the only people who understand most (if not all new) mathematical achievement are the mathematicians themselves, heck not even all mathematicians, it needs to be spread and developed from "hot spots"?

Your math results are not "well-written, understandable, pleasant to read or look at" unless you literally operate with two or three levels within the proof paper compared to the average person who probably starts at an order of magnitude levels higher.

To the average person, asking a mathematician to explain something is the same as asking the AI/LLM. Both are asking an oracle to dumb it down to their level of abstraction.

To the person who are not career mathematicians, both LLMs and mathematicians do the same thing, pump out garbled output that they themselves understand, and to mathematicians, the difference is one probably explains using axioms rather than theorems.

As a mere software engineer, I found that many human written papers in my field (DSP, ML) aren’t exactly well-written, easily understandable or pleasant to read either, and it’s been the case for at least 15 years. In the past, I would frequently spend an hour or two trying to read a SOTA paper full of convoluted prose and dense pages of equations, only to realise that the algorithm is incredibly simple if visualised properly or even just written down as pseudocode.

Now with LLMs the process is much shorter. They can walk me through the algorithm step by step, translate it to pseudocode, explain equations, and most importantly, I can ask them questions and get clarifications, without worrying about seeming ignorant or exhausting their patience. With a paper, you’re stuck with whatever was written (and often, researchers aren’t good teachers, or intentionally over complicate simple concepts).

> AI has solved all our problems

What about the Collatz conjecture? AFAIK, it requires some novel approaches to mathematics, which would be a real testament to AI creative skills.

I don't doubt it will be solved some day, but as of now it's too early to say that all our problems are solved.

You may want to reread the essay. Many of the statements in it are not the sincere beliefs of the author.

> First, they came for the artists, and I did not speak out, because I was not an artist.

// actually FIRST they came for the programmers. and many of us were ultimately ULTIMATELY pretty tickled to get such a massive productivity boost. this anti-AI sentiment as seen here and in Jon Stewart's rant that all AI is good for is optimizing shopping carts or something... it's so upsetting see good folks buying into this and not realizing how much benefit it will bring. If anything, I've seen how much amazing power it has now given programmers such as myself... I can do what would take me years in an afternoon.

// Btw, can we retire the "first they came for the..." template, it's a little tired.

Such a weird take.

There's a library of babel simulator here: https://libraryofbabel.info/

Just hit "random." It's always gibberish. The odds of getting something that isn't gibberish are astronomically low, like winning the lottery.

The actual library Borges describes has 25^1312000 books, the very vast majority of which are utter nonsense. (As the simulator makes clear.)

Yet with AI, we're getting an abundance of very credible -- and, as Tao himself notes, frequently correct -- mathematical proofs. In these new AI math results, the ratio of signal to noise is high, which makes our current situation the exact opposite of the library, which is pure noise where signal emerges only by random necessity.

Above: Literacy crisis casualty

Causes:

    Failure to detect and appreciate irony and metaphor

    Failure to engage with core critique

Whoosh.

This is not a very upbeat post. It does not say much about the AI Library of Babel but I have been wondering about the same thing.

Dear friends: you may not like to hear this but the profit motive is what ruins everything.

I have a degree in Economics. I have read Adam Smith (and not just the Wealth of Nations, by the way!). I spent years on this stuff. I understand markets and for some things they are indeed the best solution. No argument there.

It is a FACT that some things in life should not be done for profit.

If we as humanity cannot protect fields like art, science, even healthcare and housing, from the ever-growing pressure to make a profit off of them, then we are truly doomed. AI is not the sole cause, it just expedites the process of destroying everything that is not maximally cost-effective.

Narrator: But this was a fiction. In reality, evidence of any profits being made was extremely hard to come by.

> I spent years on this stuff.

All I needed was entering a game of Monopoly after a few rounds had already been played.

I’m not doing it. Why are you?

...for money

if I had guaranteed access to housing, healthcare, and food I'd stop immediately

So if you are suggesting that life is now meaningless at status quo, it suggests that life will find new meaning....perhaps it will come in the form of a realisation that if corporations are in no ones interest, perhaps the better life is the one fighting against meaninglessness through our own redefinitions of noble pursuits...perhaps the most noble pursuit will become war against companies and executives in a post-modern religious crusade to reclaim some purpose in ones life. Perhaps murder is not a problem when you murder companies

That's the point - why are we doing this?

Of all the things we could be doing, why are we doing this?

Is it collective mental illness? Economic hysteria? A cult of virtual personality?

It's simultaneously irrational, obsessive, ecologically and politically catastrophic, and all-consuming - none of which are good things.

It's the same process that has been running - creation of complexity as a dissipative structure - but now with even less friction. Some say we'll transcend, I think we're spiraling into the language-navel of cartesian dualist logical positivist insanity.

I love the dissipative structure framing. It's the only logical explanation for all of this.

Datacenters in space are visionary -- they are maximally energy rate dense and they expand the area of energy absorption. Might be 100 years too early but that is where we are headed, after we turn all of the available biosphere of earth into computronium, that is.

The only superior technology left would be von Neumann probes.

> That's the point - why are we doing this?

> Of all the things we could be doing, why are we doing this?

Money. Capitalism. It's all a fucking grift. Always has been.

If you thought AI was going to usher in a post scarcity golden age of infinite wealth where all disease, hunger, want and inequality are solved and everyone gets to live their lives purely for pleasure and intellectual pursuit, where the Eschaton is in their Heaven and all is right in the world, and humanity spreads out amongst the stars as being of transcendent machine intellect or some shit you read in a sci-fi book then congratulations, you're the mark.

What if the rants slowly transition into violence?

"Data center death threats."[1]

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2026/10/12/politics/data-center-backlash...

When, not if...