Mathematical methods and human thought in the age of AI

3/30/2026 at 1:42:35 PM

> We assert that artificial intelligence is a natural evolution of human tools developed throughout history to facilitate the creation, organization, and dissemination of ideas, and argue that it is paramount that the development and application of AI remain fundamentally human-centered.

While this is a noble goal, it seems obvious that this isn't how it usually goes. For instance, "free market" is often used as a dogma against companies that are actively harmful to society, as "globalization" might be. An unstoppable force, so any form of opposition is "luddite behavior". Another one is easier transport and remote communication, that generally broke down the social fabric. Or social media wreaking havoc among teen's minds. From there, it's easy to see why the technological system might be seen as an inherent evil. In 1872's Erewhon, Butler already described the technological system as a force that human society could contain as soon as it tolerated it. There are already many companies persecuting their employees for not using AI enough, even when the employee's response is that the quality of its output is not good enough for the work at hand, rather than any ideological reason.

I'm neither optimistic nor pessimistic about the changes that AI might bring, but hoping it to become "human-centered" seems almost as optimistic as hoping for "humane wars".

by woolion

3/30/2026 at 5:25:48 PM

Not even sure if AI was ever "human-centered" . DARPA funded a large amount of AI reseearch from even the 1960s. The DART tool used in the Gulf War made back all of their previous investments. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Analysis_and_Replannin...

by zitterbewegung

3/31/2026 at 2:36:05 AM

I mean were computers themselves ever human-centered? What’s the difference between AI and a computer?

by hammock

3/30/2026 at 2:03:43 PM

> "free market" is often used as a dogma against companies that are actively harmful to society

This is a predominantly America-specific piece of propaganda, and it's pretty recent.

Adam Smith's ideas are primarily arguments against mercantilism (e.g. things like using tariffs to wield self-interested state power), something he showed to be against the common good. The "invisible hand" concept is used to show how self-interested action can, under conditions of *competitive markets*, lead to unintentional alignment with the common good.

Obviously that's a significant departure from the way it's commonly used today, where Thiel's book has influenced so many entrepreneurs into believing Monopolies are Good.

But the history of this is very Cold War-influenced, where "free markets" were politically positioned as alternatives to the USSR's "planned economy", and slowly pushed to depart further and further from Adam Smith's original argument about moral philosophy.

by cowpig

3/30/2026 at 3:09:12 PM

> arguments against mercantilism

It has been funny to watch the rise of "China is beating us" rhetoric against the steady backdrop of "mercantilism is obsolete/bad" dogma, because the elephant in the room is that China has been running a textbook mercantilist playbook.

by schmidtleonard

3/30/2026 at 4:45:29 PM

Looks to my uneducated eye like China has been enforcing competitive markets internally, with consistent economic policies. Meanwhile the US has stopped enforcing antitrust altogether and keeps violently changing its mind about economic policy every four years.

And then externally Chinese policy is oriented around suppressing the value of its currency, which is basically a monopolist's tactic--artificially lowered prices in order to crowd out competition.

I think that's mercantilist-ish, but kind of a modern version?

It's definitely the opposite of what the US does, the currency is the world reserve and therefore drives the price of the dollar above what it would be without trade, which I guess makes exporting from the US much more difficult?

Anyone who is an expert in global economics please correct me here :)

by cowpig

3/31/2026 at 2:13:40 AM

I mean they did execute a wealthy banker a couple years ago. So I think the mercantile class occupies a different place in society there than in America

by mxkopy

3/30/2026 at 6:46:30 PM

The government is a rare example of an extremely strong monopoly and not just a duopoly or a company holding significant marketshare. And yet people never seem to criticise it on those grounds despite it suffering from all of the same problems that corporate monopolies are accused of.

by slopinthebag

3/30/2026 at 8:40:25 PM

In democracies people can vote in control of the government to benefit themselves, unlike private monopolies. Corrupt autocracies get much criticism.

by tim333

3/30/2026 at 9:06:49 PM

The amount of political control individuals have in a democracy is much less than people think. I get to vote every few years for a small preselected handful of representatives, none of whom represent me or my views, and that vote is usually meaningless anyways. In my political life none of the parties I have voted for have won an election. So tell me how much control of the government do I have? How much do any of us have? Especially when the government itself often goes against the wishes of their voters anyways. The reason democracy is preferable to a dictatorship is because it prevents the government from doing things which are widely unpopular, like committing acts of genocide and political violence. But that's it really.

Remember, governments have a monopoly in areas of life that impact everybody constantly. Private monopolies do not, in every case you can simply ignore them and not purchase their products, and by doing so you exert more control over them than you do casting a meaningless vote every few years.

The idea of democracy being will of the people is pure fantasy. It's useful to prevent governments from doing really bad things, that's it. It doesn't even matter who you vote for, broadly speaking. Just that you are able to exert that pressure.

by slopinthebag

3/31/2026 at 12:09:26 AM

[dead]

by jkhdigital

3/30/2026 at 3:19:20 PM

> Thiel's book has influenced so many entrepreneurs into believing Monopolies are Good.

Haven't read his book, but the idea that monopolies are good isn't typically made in a vacuum, it's made relative to alternatives, most often "ham-fisted government intervention". It's easier to take down a badly behaving monopoly than to change government, so believing monopolies are better than the alternatives seems like a decent heuristic.

by naasking

3/30/2026 at 4:29:26 PM

How would a bad monopoly be likely to be taken down if not by government intervention?

by layer8

3/30/2026 at 8:15:43 PM

Open source vs. Microsoft is a great example.

by naasking

3/30/2026 at 5:49:40 PM

It eventually becomes so big and inefficient that it gets overtaken by new competitors.

by logicchains

3/30/2026 at 6:31:58 PM

A Monopoly implies an organization powerful enough to stop competition. Seems like this solution that relies on competitors is fatally flawed. If there are enough competitors to meaningfully compete then there isn't a monopoly.

by yoyohello13

3/31/2026 at 2:40:52 AM

Insert better horse/car analogy here

by hammock

3/30/2026 at 8:16:30 PM

You can only truly stop competition by government intervention.

by naasking

3/30/2026 at 9:16:26 PM

When an organization gets big enough it is indistinguishable from government.

by yoyohello13

3/31/2026 at 12:56:54 PM

No organization can ever rival a real government like the US due to the latter's monopolization on the use of force.

by naasking

3/30/2026 at 7:39:24 PM

A monopoly comes with serious moats, otherwise it wouldn’t be one. It can stay big and inefficient for decades.

by layer8

3/30/2026 at 7:49:41 PM

Not if they hire good to go and literally kill the competition.

by Jensson

3/30/2026 at 4:02:10 PM

Good for whom, exactly?

by mrcincinnatus

3/30/2026 at 4:17:51 PM

This seems like a classic straw man argument. Plutocratic oligarchs have been making the argument that private monopolies are better than representative democracy at basically any societal function for decades without any actual data.

by billiam

3/30/2026 at 4:08:10 PM

This seems like a classic straw man argument. Plutocratic oligarchs have been making the argument that private monopolies are better than representative democracy at basically anything for decades.

by billiam

3/30/2026 at 3:47:28 PM

>Haven't read his book, but the idea that monopolies are good isn't typically made in a vacuum, it's made relative to alternatives, most often "ham-fisted government intervention". It's easier to take down a badly behaving monopoly than to change government, so believing monopolies are better than the alternatives seems like a decent heuristic.

What? How is the first alternative poor government instead of multipolar competing companies? When was the last time a Monopoly was actually broken up in the US? ATT/Bell 50 years ago? lol

by vonneumannstan

3/30/2026 at 3:04:16 PM

Economic behavior is inherently game theoretic - agents take various actions and get some positive/negative reward as a result. Whether an agent's reward is positive or negative and of what magnitude, depends on the strategies employed by all agents. If some agents adopt new strategies, the reward calculus for everyone involved can completely change [1].

Over the past few centuries, countless new economic structures and strategies have been discovered and practiced. The rewards for the same action today and in the past can be completely different due to this.

So to me, if someone claimed more than a few decades ago that certain economic strategies and structures are good or bad, its simply not worth listening to them, unless someone reconfirms that the old finding still holds with the latest range of strategies. In that case, the credit and citation goes to that new someone, not the ghosts of the past.

[1] A good interactive demo https://ncase.me/trust/

by abdullahkhalids

3/30/2026 at 3:46:17 PM

> if someone claimed more than a few decades ago that certain economic strategies and structures are good or bad

As you point out, it is all game theory.

But things that arrange for the game to be more beneficial to everyone, that align our interests more, deserve to be called "good", regardless of their inability to universally do so.

The latter would be an impossible bar for anything.

Where I find things frustrating, is when someone thinks because something is "good", it somehow becomes "enough". (Think, capitalized versions of different economic schools of thought.)

by Nevermark

3/30/2026 at 7:29:30 PM

> Economic behavior is inherently game theoretic.

Game theory is just math. As with any math, the calculations can all work out, but that says nothing of how it reflects nature. All you can say is that if the axioms are all true, then this is the necessary outcome. Look for string theory as a cautionary tale here.

Game theory assumes rational systems. But we have over 6 decades of behavior science which contradicts that fundamental assumption. Economic behavior is not necessarily rational, and subsequently it is not inherently game theoretic. You will find plenty of dogmatic, idealistic, superstitious, counter productive, etc. behaviors in an economy. You need psychology, and not just math, to describe the economics which happens in the real world.

by runarberg

3/30/2026 at 8:24:35 PM

Game theory definitely does not require rational agents. Game theory says there are agents with certain specified strategies. Whether a strategy is rational from the underlying theory of value the agent adopts is completely separate matter. For example, its very common to study agents who always do one action no matter what others do or what the reward function is. Hard to call such actors rational, but that does not stop as from studying them.

by abdullahkhalids

3/30/2026 at 9:53:58 PM

When I said rational I meant it in this way. That rational agents will perform in a way in which maximizes their utility (or reward function). In psychology we call this theory homo economicus[1]. Regardless of theories of value, perceived rewards, and utilities, human beings have biases, prejudice, superstition, dogma, etc. etc. In real economies these non-strategic behaviors are consistently observed. This is why I say that economics are not just game theories, they are psychology, sociology, religion, as much as they are zero-sum games between actors.

> Hard to call such actors rational, but that does not stop as from studying them.

This is precisely why I object to your first post. “Shut up and do the math” has not done the wonders which string theorists had hoped. Game theory is a perfectly fine way to mathematics, and to study certain strategies, but it tells us nothing about the nature of economies in the real world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_economicus

by runarberg

3/31/2026 at 6:48:44 AM

I just re-read my comment (too late for edits) and there are a number of typos (including missing "not") that significantly degraded the syntax, but the point kind of came across anyway.

by woolion

3/30/2026 at 2:07:57 PM

Globalization was great for poor countries, not so much developed economies.

by Izikiel43

3/30/2026 at 2:17:32 PM

No it wasn't. Look at Joseph Stiglitz (Globalization and Its Discontents) and Ha-Joon Chang (Bad Samaritans, Kicking Away the Ladder) for counter-examples.

by js8

3/30/2026 at 3:11:35 PM

Oh come now - globalizations was great at the regional level.

It was not that great for sub groups within developed nations.

The original thesis believed that people would be retrained into other equally well paying roles.

Turns out people can’t retrain into new domains, and led to under employment.

by intended

3/30/2026 at 6:04:55 PM

Why not, because they're too old to learn, or because the support infrastructure is not there? I believe most people are capable of continued learning, but they might need help (financial etc.) to make the transition.

by esafak

3/31/2026 at 7:20:18 AM

Even with support infrastructure/money it didn’t work.

You aren’t going to transition into the same level of experience in a new industry.

If it’s jumping into tech/code, for example; even with the best resources, it’s a slog to get back to similar levels of renumeration.

Add in the fact that you have obligations, bills and dependents?

Theres never going to be enough money to keep people afloat while they change domains mid-life.

Check out the programs to retrain miners. Aside from fraud, there were also unrealistic promises.

However, leaving aside leakages - there weren’t that many entry level jobs for code in those regions in the first place.

The cultural differences (trades, physical labour vs code, abstract problems, sedentary work) were sizable barriers to success.

by intended

3/30/2026 at 2:37:42 PM

This isn't correct. The deal is that the poor countries get development and increased employment, and the rich countries get lower prices. Generally speaking both types of countries get richer.

That some workers lost their jobs is a symptom of any change. I don't know why people always get upset people losing their jobs. It's like death, if no one died relatively few people would be born. If you resist job losses you reduce overall employment and economic development.

by nutjob2

3/30/2026 at 2:47:31 PM

Are you serious? People get upset about losing jobs because they need jobs to pay their bills. Further, we often build our life identities around work; if you're a good car mechanic or a successful restaurant owner, you're proud of that. It's a part of you.

Having to repeatedly restart your career is risky, painful, and demoralizing. I have no problem seeing why people don't like that and why it can lead to populist backlash or even violent revolutions (as it did in the past).

By the way, to address your closing comment: people don't like dying either and tend to get upset when others die?

by chromacity

3/30/2026 at 3:30:58 PM

I don't think the point is that the transition isn't difficult. It is that there is an overall benefit that outweighs the challenges of the transition.

The sad part is that industrializing societies have not been very good at reconciling the benefits with the costs. The benefits first go to a select few and have seeped out to the masses slowly. Railroads in the US are a good example. The wealth accumulated by the Vanderbilts, Hills and Harrimans, did not get redistributed in any kind of equitable manner. However, everyday people did eventually gain a lot of benefit form of those railroads through economic expansion. (None of which address the loss of the native Americans, whose losses should also be part of the equation.)

by shafoshaf

3/30/2026 at 4:34:03 PM

My impression is that the transition is such an open-ended process that you can’t really call it that. It’s unclear if and when the challenges will be overcome.

by layer8

3/31/2026 at 1:42:02 AM

> I don't think the point is that the transition isn't difficult. It is that there is an overall benefit that outweighs the challenges of the transition.

In the abstract, sure. But not when you're on the receiving end. It's like with NIMBYism: we all roll our eyes at NIMBYs until it's actually our own backyard. You're not going to convince a coal miner that they're better off learning to code. You're not going to convince a software engineer that they're better off in the mines.

by chromacity

3/30/2026 at 6:13:36 PM

You're missing my point. Job losses are a fact of life, just like death. Why should people get upset about the fact that someone might lose their job, or die? It's not amoral. These things happen constantly to millions of people, we'd we worn out. We happily send young healthy people to their death fighting in wars so we don't have to. I don't see people weeping because the armed forces exist.

Or is this just some sort of PC bullshit, that we can't talk about this sort of progress without carefully lamenting job losses? If you're not useful doing a job, why should you be employed in it? That's the bottom line.

by nutjob2

3/30/2026 at 3:02:34 PM

Society is better if we sacrifice one horse and buggy driver job for two engineering jobs. The drivers suffer from that, but the net win for society is so plainly obvious that it's a better investment to retrain the driver or just pay the off rather than support a job that dying anyways.

by km3r

3/30/2026 at 3:24:12 PM

> Society is better if we sacrifice one horse and buggy driver job for two engineering jobs.

That's a "statistic" you're pulling out of your butt, and it's doing a lot of work. No one ever knows if something like that will actually happen.

It could actually turn out that AI sacrifices 100 engineering jobs for 10 low-level service or prostitution jobs and a crap-ton of wealth to those already rich.

> The drivers suffer from that, but the net win for society is so plainly obvious that it's a better investment to retrain the driver or just pay the off rather than support a job that dying anyways.

But what actually happens is our free-market society doesn't give a shit. No meaningful retraining happens, no meaningful effort goes into cushioning the blow for the "horse and buggy driver." Our society (or more accurately, the elites in charge) go tell those harmed to fuck off and deal with it.

by palmotea

3/30/2026 at 6:16:20 PM

> But what actually happens is our free-market society doesn't give a shit.

Maybe in the US, but in other countries those things actually happen. It's a political issue, not a moral issue with technology.

by nutjob2

3/30/2026 at 6:00:58 PM

> It could actually turn out that AI sacrifices 100 engineering jobs for 10 low-level service or prostitution jobs and a crap-ton of wealth to those already rich.

That's where wealth redistribution (Taxation) comes in. The USA is not good at progressive taxation, but everyone could be better off if it were implemented properly.

by esafak

3/30/2026 at 10:25:31 PM

> The USA is not good at progressive taxation

The top 10 percent of incomes pay 76% of all income taxes, the top 5% pays around 55% of all income tax.

I would say it’s pretty progressive.

by Izikiel43

3/31/2026 at 6:38:24 AM

> The top 10 percent of incomes pay 76% of all income taxes, the top 5% pays around 55% of all income tax.

> I would say it’s pretty progressive.

That's a lesson in misleading statistics. Inequality has risen to absurd levels, and just keeps getting worse. It's not "pretty progressive."

by palmotea

3/31/2026 at 8:08:25 AM

It would be ok if people lost jobs, and the products and services become cheap correspondingly.

But it would be a problem if people lost jobs and all the product and services keep costing the same as before, and get costlier over time as before...

by qsera

3/30/2026 at 1:31:28 PM

I skimmed the paper a couple of times, hoping to find the promised (from the abstract)

> pathway to integrating AI into our most challenging and intellectually rigorous fields to the benefit of all humankind.

There's very little insight here though. It seems mostly a retread of conversations we've been having in the academic community for a few years now. In particular, I was hoping to see some discussion of how we might restructure our educational institutions around this technology, when the machines rob students of the opportunity to develop critical thinking skills. Right now our best idea seems to be a retreat to oral and written examinations; an idea which doesn't scale and which ignores the supposed benefits of human+AI reasoning. The alternative suggestion I've seen is to teach prompt engineering, which seems (a) hard for foundational subjects and (b) again, seems to outsource much of the thinking to the AI, instead of extending the reach of human thought.

by gradstudent

3/30/2026 at 4:23:07 PM

Wait it seems like doing unscalable things - like face-to-face teaching/examination - is exactly the sort of things that humanity can afford to do as it benefits from the surplus free time generated by AI efficiently doing the scalable things.

by ak_111

3/30/2026 at 1:39:47 PM

Physical classrooms don't really scale either, is that really a fundamental problem?

by BDPW

3/31/2026 at 11:44:24 AM

I don't know if this is what the GP meant, but obviously classrooms do scale, in the sense that almost every kid in the world has access to a classroom. But arguably, for better or worse, this scaling was enabled by "cramming" many of those kids into relatively large classes, with little 1:1 attention from the teachers, and with standardized (mostly multiple-choice) testing, rather than old-school oral testing.

As I see it, it is a very salient question - what would the economics of global schooling look like if we decided that it's imperative for every student to get personal pedagogy and regular individual professional oral examinations for their schoolwork?

by falcor84

3/30/2026 at 1:57:05 PM

Indeed. Education isn't supposed to "scale". We've mucked around with education so much and subjected it to tech fad after tech fad that we hardly have anything resembling education.

Because this has been going on so long, most people's reference point for what constitutes "education" is simply off, mistaking "training" or something like that for it. But the purpose of education is intellectual formation, the ability to reason competently, and the comprehension of basic reality, which enables genuine intellectual freedom (there are moral presuppositions, too; immorality deranges the mind). This is what the classical liberal arts were about.

The very bare minimum criterion (and it is a very bare minimum) for someone to be able to claim to be educated is not only knowledge of their field, but knowledge of the intellectual nature, foundations, and basis of their field in the greater intellectual scope. I would not hold someone with only that bare minimum in especially high esteem vis-a-vis education, but even that bar is higher than what education today provides.

by lo_zamoyski

3/30/2026 at 2:28:05 PM

There are simply not enough teachers who can provide such an ideal, imagined education, at least not for the current rate of teacher salaries (and it's very far off). The educational strategy has to scale to real people, real teachers and real students as they are in the flesh, not some ivory tower pipe dream. We've had decades of this "we should teach how to think, not what to think".

Alternatively,if you don't care about scale, as in rolling out a system to the population at large, then yeah, this kind of advanced education exists, it's just very selective and is in advanced extracurricular or obtained through private tutors.

by bonoboTP

3/30/2026 at 3:40:34 PM

This also assumes that universal education is a sensible aim. I think that's doubtful and that it contributes to these sorts of burdens and waters down the quality of education in the process.

As a concrete example, for a few decades now, we're been pushing primary school students toward university education quite aggressively and broadly. It was quite common to scare students toward university by claiming that without a university degree, they would be flipping burgers at McDonalds. This, of course, is completely false and it is disgraceful that such dishonest and manipulative tactics were used. Today, because of rising university costs and the dubious value of most university education, we're seeing this idea challenged at the level of the university. Gen Z's interest in trades has increased by something like 1500%. I don't see this as a negative. In Germany, for instance, there is a more balanced distribution across trades and university.

Now, I admit that the situation is a bit different in the case of primary education, but here, too, I think we do well to think in terms of reform rather than technology and patching up a pedagogically and administratively broken system. The American education system spends an inordinate amount of money on each student with little to show for it. If, for instance, those funds were allocated wisely, then a number of problems would likely go away or become smaller issues.

Of course, what does "allocate wisely" mean? Education systems require a principled grasp of what education is for. If you don't have a sound anthropological grasp of what it means to be human and how education is supposed to enable one's humanity and serve human persons, then you are in no position to run an education system or decide school curricula. I cannot stress this enough. Our education system today is very "pragmatist"; we're constantly told we're being prepared for a career and a job market. That's not education: it's job training. Of course, schools are quite mediocre as training facilities, because they're sort of a halfway house between training and whatever residue of classical education still lingers. So that's one distinction: training vs. education. Now, if we simply accept this distinction, we should ask: how should one organize training on the one hand and education on the other to enable each to be successful within its own circumscribed domain? And what if we keep things as local and decentralized as possible? I guarantee you would not see the inept system we have today.

So, with this...

> There are simply not enough teachers who can provide such an ideal, imagined education

...I agree, but again, my view is that at best we are buying time with these sorts of technological gimmicks. We're also social animals. We cannot keep isolating ourselves behind technology under the pretext of "practicality".

by lo_zamoyski

3/30/2026 at 5:36:14 PM

Yes, Germany has different educational tracks that are decided fairly early, at 10 or 12 years old (with some opportunity to change tracks). I don't think Americans like this idea.

Still, 40% of young adults have a tertiary degree (https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2025/09/education-at-a-...) while it's 47% in the US, so I wouldn't say it's a huge difference. And its not just a US thing, Denmark stands at 45%. So I wouldn't spin too big of a narrative around this.

Education is a field where decade after decade they try some new fad which is basically the old fad re-dressed and never really learn much. That's because teachers and their methodologies don't really have that big of an effect. A stable non-chaotic learning environment and access to the learning material though any kind of presentation, and books gets you to pretty much as good as it gets. To have a real effect, you need private tutoring for the gifted or very small groups of talent nurturing, which goes far beyond the default curriculum. But again, these don't fit the current zeitgeist, so they will keep on pushing "critical thinking" and "how to think", no matter how much they fail.

by bonoboTP

3/30/2026 at 2:30:33 PM

Yes. Tools like Khan Academy help lots of talented kids to progress in the curriculum beyond what's available in physical classrooms available to them.

by bonoboTP

3/30/2026 at 2:46:31 PM

> when the machines rob students of the opportunity to develop critical thinking skills

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature. Machines don't rob people of critical thinking skills, people do. Mostly people do it to themselves, often inheriting it from their parents or social environment.

by nutjob2

3/30/2026 at 5:17:45 PM

[dead]

by swimmingbrain

3/30/2026 at 2:01:37 PM

> We assert that artificial intelligence is a natural evolution of human tools.

While nowhere in the paper this is actually asserted but the abstract, a whiggish narrative of a genuinely unprecedented technology --such that it can replace and supersede human "labour" altogether (one is reminded of The Evolution of Human Science by Ted Chiang)-- sounds naive at best, dangerous at worst.

by sendes

3/30/2026 at 2:05:27 PM

I don’t see why “natural evolution of human tools” implies “such that it can replace and supersede human labor altogether”. Can you clarify?

by jebarker

3/30/2026 at 2:12:15 PM

A common error in historical thinking tends to see human tools essentially as a positive linear plot between time and progress. But these tools until AI had the common property of being enhancing of human cognition, because they couldn't do the thinking _for you_. AI can do just that, and for all the benefit it brings, seeing it simply as the next step in the "natural evolution of human tools" is alarmingly disarming coming from frontier thinkers.

by sendes

3/30/2026 at 2:50:41 PM

> these tools until AI had the common property of being enhancing of human cognition, because they couldn't do the thinking for you

I have a different take, centered around this idea: Not everyone was into thinking about everything all the time even before AI. I'd say most people most of the time outsourced actual thinking to someone else.

1) Reading non-fiction books:

Not all books, even the non-fiction ones, necessarily require any thinking by the reader. A book that narrates history, for example, requires much less thinking than something like "The Road to Reality" or "Godel Escher Bach."

Most of us outsourced the thinking and historical method to the authors of the history book and just passively consumed some facts or factoids. Some of us memorize and remember these factoids well, but that's not thinking, just knowledge storage.

Philosophically, what's the difference between consuming books this way and reading an LLM's output?

2) Reading research papers:

Most people don't read any research papers at all. No thinking there. Most people don't head to some forum to ask about latest research either. Also, researchers in most fields don't come out and do outreach regularly.

Indeed, an LLM may actually be the only pathway for a lot of people to get at least _some_ knowledge and awareness about latest research.

Those of us in scientific, engineering, humanities, healthcare fields may read some to many papers. But only a small subset reads very critically, looking for data errors, inconsistencies, etc. For most of us, the knowledge and techniques may be beyond our current understanding and possibly without any interest in understanding them in future either.

Most of us are just interested in the observations or conclusions or applications. Those may involve some thinking but also may not involve any thinking, just blind acceptance of the paper's claims and possible applications.

3) Coding:

Again, deep thinking is only done by a small set of programmers. Like the ones who write kernels, compilers, distributed algorithms, complex libraries.

But most are just passive consumers who read some examples online or ask stackoverflow or reddit for direct answers. Some even outsource all their coding entirely to gig sites. Not much thinking there except pricing and scheduling. What's the difference between that and asking an LLM or copying an LLM's answers? At least, the LLMs patiently explain their code, unlike salty SO users!

----

IMO, most people weren't doing much thinking even pre-AI.

Post-AI, it's true that some people who did do some thinking may reduce it.

But it's equally true that those people who weren't doing much thinking due to access or language barriers can actually start doing some thinking now with the help of AI.

by lovelearning

3/30/2026 at 3:01:47 PM

> I'd say most people most of the time outsourced actual thinking to someone else.

Someone else being human, until now. That may change. That's the whole point!

But I concur with your general point on the upstream production of thinking and knowledge. Indeed, such elite thinkers are those in economic history referred to as the "upper-tail human capital". Terence Tao being one of them giving license to the kind of thinking that accepts AI as a simple tool that is not fundamentally breaking our relationship with technology is what exactly I am protesting.

> But it's equally true that those people who weren't doing much thinking due to access or language barriers can actually start doing some thinking now with the help of AI.

If only we keep thinking that thinking is a comparative advantage of our species, I suppose!

by sendes

3/30/2026 at 2:41:51 PM

* For certain speculative definitions of AI

by nutjob2

3/30/2026 at 2:13:16 PM

I'm glad I can still count on HN to come across the correct use of a lesser known definition of a word.

by Zigurd

3/30/2026 at 2:40:19 PM

> supersede human "labour" altogether

For certain types of labor this has always been the case.

The idea that AI will entirely replace all, or most, human labor makes no sense and is just AI hype.

Like all technology before it AI will improve most people's lives.

by nutjob2

3/30/2026 at 3:31:34 PM

> Like all technology before it AI will improve most people's lives.

1. Let's be clear: what you're describing is faith.

2. And what are you smoking to assert "all technology before ... AI [improved] most people's lives"?

by palmotea

3/30/2026 at 6:00:03 PM

> 1. Let's be clear: what you're describing is faith.

And what I am countering is not? You can easily argue technology generally improves lives. Is it optimal? Beyond abuse? No. Does it have unintended consequences? Yes. Are we better of without it? No.

> 2. And what are you smoking to assert "all technology before ... AI [improved] most people's lives"?

OK social media is an unmitigated disaster, I'll give you that.

But, for example, nukes have given us the longest period of relative peace in history.

by nutjob2

3/31/2026 at 6:31:03 AM

>> 1. Let's be clear: what you're describing is faith.

> And what I am countering is not? You can easily argue technology generally improves lives. Is it optimal? Beyond abuse? No. Does it have unintended consequences? Yes. Are we better of without it? No.

The faith part is assuming it will always turn out as well as it has in the past. But every technology is different, and the patterns of the last 100-200 years are not some fixed law.

Look at each technology and its characteristics with fresh eyes, and think of the consequences without that assumption. That's not faith.

> But, for example, nukes have given us the longest period of relative peace in history.

I think celebrating nuclear weapons is a bit premature. A non-zero chance of obliteration over a long enough period of time becomes a near-certainty.

by palmotea

3/30/2026 at 2:08:43 PM

> Today, unlike in the Luddites’ time, we are already seeing skilled workers replaced not with lower-wage human labor, but with AI.

To me this is the weakest claim of the article. This claim been thrown around endlessly without proof.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE

Software Engineer job openings for instance is at 2 year high (still far lower than covid dislocations though), but arguably all Enterprise AI was built or deployed in the last two years. We should have seen a crash in the job openings if the AI job replacement claim was correct.

This is something I've spend some time thinking about (personally written article, not AI slop): https://www.signalbloom.ai/posts/why-task-proficiency-doesnt...

by GodelNumbering

3/30/2026 at 6:56:46 PM

In fact, the paper has an error in the argument that AI might find Fermat's theorem to be incorrect due to definition of natural numbers including a zero, because paper's version of a theorem explicitly says that the number should be greater than two, and zero cannot be greater than two.

Surprisingly, this mistake proves the author's point that human can implicitly understand what was said, and that it still has value to it, even if it's incorrect.

by gettingoverit

3/31/2026 at 12:01:26 AM

The paper explicitly states that n is greater than 2, but the issue is whether a,b,c can be 0.

by areyousure

3/30/2026 at 8:04:40 PM

The short blog post announcing this paper: https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/03/29/mathematical-metho...

In particular:

> This is an unabridged version of a solicited article for a forthcoming Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of Mathematics. […] took over a year to write – which means, at the current pace of development in the field, that some of it is already slightly out of date.

----

Edit: The post at https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/116319186983426174 mentions also an (entirely unrelated) popular-math presentation titled “What does it mean to think like a mathematician?” https://terrytao.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/ta... which is interesting too (despite the ChatGPT-generated illustrations and repeating stuff Tao has said before, on his blog etc.)

by svat

3/30/2026 at 3:22:41 PM

Is there a better illustration of the power of UX than the fact that a messaging chat interface was able to set free all of human knowledge from copyright, whereas a bittorrent client couldn't?

by vasco

3/30/2026 at 11:05:37 AM