Google did that, Facebook did that and every other company who boasted their user-base numbers did that. They sold user attention and harvested user data. Nothing new here.
When Deep Blue beat Kaspaorov, it was not the end of career for human players. But since mathematics is not a sport with human players, what are the career prospects for mathematicians or mathematics-like fields?
1. This result is very far from showing something like "human mathematicians are no longer needed to advance mathematics".
2. Even if it did show that, as long as we need humans trained in understanding maths, since "professional mathematicians" are mostly educators, they probably aren't going anywhere.
I wouldn't say professional mathematicians are mostly educators. The educating that mathematicians do even at graduate level to non-future-mathematicians can mostly be done (not fully at parity due to depth of understanding that we accumulate but close) by non professional mathematicians. Most of the education is to other current/future mathematicians in my limited opinion.
> ... are mostly educators, they probably aren't going anywhere
Educator business survived so far, only because they provided in-person interactive knowledge transfer and credentials - both were not possible by static sources of knowledge such as libraries and internet. But now all that is possible without involvement of human teachers.
Tao's broad project, which he has spoken about a few times, is for mathematics to move beyond the current game of solving individual theorems to being able to make statements about broad categories of problems. So not 'X property is true for this specific magma' but 'X property is true for all possible magmas', as an example I just came up with. He has experimented with this via crowdsourcing problems in a given domain on GitHub before, and I think the implications of how to use AI here are obvious.
So, humans lost all of their evolutionary learnings and confused about what to eat. This doesn't happen with any other animal. And humans call themselves as an advanced race of animals. Not knowing what to eat is regress, not progress.
Things went well as long as mind was a servant of the body. Then it became the master and dictator of body. The mind started posing itself as a scientist and started questioning everything that were well-tested over centuries. It came up weird things such proteins, vitamins etc, but it forgot that what mattered was the big picture.
Body suffered silently as it lost it's most critical servant whom it trained over millennia.
It was enough to know that water flows down the slope, apple falls to ground, Sun goes around the Earth and life follows a rythm of seasons. Human life never needed Kepler's laws, relativity, quantum physics, computers, cars or sugar.
It's not too late. Listen to your instincts and body signals. Live on a farm (farm means crops and gardens, not just animals). Eat like your ancestors did. Eat less, eat varied food, more of greens and grains, mostly raw with a bit of cooking or heating.
My sister's cat will eat food until she vomits, and if my sister isn't quick enough with the clean up, the cat will try to eat her own vomit until she vomits again.
If you put me alone in a room with a pallet full of warm fresh Taco Bell fried cinnamon sugar frosting balls, I too will likely involuntarily perform the scarf and barf.
There is something deep in our mammalian systems that never quite shook off the food scarcity thing, I think.
More than once I've seen dogs eat their own shit or shits from other dogs/cats
Anyways, if you pay close attention to how people live in advanced countries you'll notice we do almost everything we can to fuck up our health: bad sleeping schedule, way too much time spend siting, bad eating habits, &c. People half starving in the 1700s on a mediterranean diet were doing better than the average modern american when it comes to health.
That's really not true at all. For example, rabbits love sweet stuff like fruit and will readily kill themselves by eating too much, which causes their delicate hindgut fermenter digestive system to shut down.
Like humans, they simply aren't adapted to conditions where they have unlimited sugary food like fruit, so they will eat too much when given the opportunity.
How is that "like humans"? Rabbits and humans have completely different digestion and physiologies, the former relying on hindgut fermentation. No human has ever died from eating too much fruit, period.
I'm a pretty big fan of the cancer treatments that saved my mother, the emergency medical treatment that saved my wife, the antibiotics that saved my brother. Also, it is -15C outside, and I am very much enjoying central heating.
With that said, I do partly agree with you. I do think that becoming too divorced from the natural world drives a great many ills.
I think the challenge is finding the balance. We sure don't have it now.
Sqrt(2) being halfway between 1 and 2 multiplicatively, leads to interesting stuff. For example consider two integers A and B. They have a dual in the pair A+B and A-B. Well, not quite. You need to scale them down by 1/sqrt(2). If you do that to the duals, you get the originals again.
> As a web developer, I am thinking again about my experience with the mobile web on the day after the storm
In some villages, where plenty of stone is available, people used it for everything - roof slabs, pillars, walls, flooring, water storage bowls etc. Also, villages which had plenty of wood around, they used it for everything.
As techies, we say there is an app for everything, or there is a web-technology for everything. When you have a hammer in hand, everything looks like a nail.
The only problem is, when you are alone and not looking at your phone, you tend to observe people around. But unfortunately, looking at others is seen as being a weirdo, while looking at phone is considered super normal.
Also, the reason people feel comfortable with dogs is because, you don't need to act or talk in way to impress the dog, while technically not being alone. You don't get this freedom while being with people, unless you are the boss of the gang. The lack of freedom is usually offset of by the benefit of sharing, laughs and a feeling that you have achieved your goal of impressing others.
> But unfortunately, looking at others is seen as being a weirdo
No it’s simpler than that:
1) sitting alone - you’re a weirdo
2) sitting doing nothing public, staring off into space like you’re a zen master - no, you’re a weirdo
3) blogposting how you sat alone in a public space for 30 minutes and how this is an “unbearable joy” - do I need to spell it out?
This person needs help. They are having an episode. If someone has gone so far as to have this level of emotional outburst by leaving their phone at home, there’s deeper issues to unpack.
For the rest of us, sitting down at the cafe to have a nice drink and something to eat while we look at the cars and foot traffic going by is a perfectly normal activity.
Everyone is just looking the stage to understand what's going on. No one has a script in hand that tells you what role you are going to play on that stage. The stage is full of smoke and fog. Hardly anything is visible. The entire play is being constantly re-scripted, redesigned, new pactors jumping in from nowhere, actors suddenly growing up to be monsters and filling up entire stage.
Nope we just reading HN and getting amazed. Seriously, any serious commitment requires g9od enough visibility into future prospects. You can't simply throw half a million into a garage project and then struggle to keep up with the fast changing scene on the stage.
