[1] https://www.cnn.com/2026/10/12/politics/data-center-backlash...
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.
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.
> 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.
Grim but this is exactly where society is heading.
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.
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.
All I needed was entering a game of Monopoly after a few rounds had already been played.
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.
Causes:
Failure to detect and appreciate irony and metaphor
Failure to engage with core critiqueAm 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.
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).
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.
... the fact that this shit doesn't even scrape the ass of more than 500 million people, 60% of which are utterly useless with or without (mit oder mit ohne) ... neither sacrasm, nor cnysims or inorys will uplift this worst of all narratives ever written.
this is all soooooo baaaaaad
// 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.
> 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.
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.
You can sense the fear and anxiety in that article.
Is existence not enough anymore? Do humans need more?
I'm in the office and was trying to contain my laughter next to my colleagues, but this tipped me over the edge
well yeah the purpose of STEM education is to be a factory to produce the correct worker for another factory
if I had guaranteed access to housing, healthcare, and food I'd stop immediately
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.
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.
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.
People fundamentally misunderstand the nature of mathematics: it's not "flat" like most of common people's daily pursuits. It consists of building upwards, on top of previous concepts.
In other words, AI is like an oracle: it can tell you all kinds of stuff, but since you probably don't understand, you won't act properly.
Never say never...
tocs3•40m ago