Theoretical Computer Scientist: AI Just Changed Math Forever, with Scott Aaronson

Scott Aaronson (0:00)

Open AI just released solutions to 400 major open problems.

Joel (0:05)

No way.

Scott Aaronson (0:06)

You haven't seen that, yes.

Joel (0:07)

I have not seen that.

Scott Aaronson (0:08)

Yes, no matter what happens, there are immediately, I have learned, there are people who will say, well, of course AI could do that. No one ever doubted that AI could do that, even if those same people, you know, did doubt it six months ago.

One of them is a problem that my wife had been working on for the entire time that I've known her. It's called the Unique Games Conjecture. And there were many, many experts working on this for 25 years.

Joel (0:40)

Why was it the biggest day in the history of math?

Scott Aaronson (0:43)

Well, I mean, because open AI just released solutions to 400 major open problems.

Joel (0:50)

No way.

Scott Aaronson (0:51)

You hadn't seen that, yes.

Joel (0:52)

I have not seen that.

Scott Aaronson (0:53)

Yes, yes.

Joel (0:55)

What does this mean?

Scott Aaronson (0:58)

Well, it means that the nature of math as a human subject is forever totally different from what it was before.

It means that our job as humans, if we have a job as mathematicians, as theoretical computer scientists, theoretical physicists and so forth is going to mostly involve working with AIs and understanding and explaining and directing what they're doing. Because in terms of once you decide what problem you want to solve, they are just better than us at solving them.

Joel (1:41)

So help me understand this. My background is software engineering for large scale business applications.

Scott Aaronson (1:47)

The AI apocalypse already arrived for software engineering a year or two ago. Oh, yeah. And I've been riding that wave.

And now it's come for us, basically, right?

Joel (1:57)

So you guys were safe for a little bit when you saw it?

Scott Aaronson (2:00)

Yeah, that's right. There was a year or two when people could delude themselves that, oh, software engineering, of course, AI could do that, but math is truly creative and pinnacle of the human intellect, and no AI is going to replace us at that.

And that's now completely untenable.

Joel (2:21)

Did they really think that?

Scott Aaronson (2:23)

I mean, no matter what happens, there are immediately, I have learned, there are people who will say, well, of course, AI could do that. No one ever doubted that AI could do that, even if those same people did doubt it six months ago, right? And they say, oh, that thing is trivial, right? Whether it's chess, whether it's beating the human, the top human player at Go, whether it's solving Math Olympiad problems, right? Even solving one of these Millennium problems, as we saw a month ago, right? Each time you get people saying, well, that's not impressive. Wake me up when AI does X, right? And then sooner or later, AI does do X, and then they have a new excuse.

They have a new reason why it doesn't count. I mean, this is a consistent pattern that we've seen for decades, right? People just refuse to say in advance what it is that would impress them, and then stick to that.

Joel (3:23)

Because of the craft, Scott, it's uniquely-

Scott Aaronson (3:26)

Because of the craft, right? No, I mean, they have this prior that can't be, I think by now it's clear that it can't be overcome by any amount of evidence. Because if it could be, then it already would have been.

Joel (3:38)

You're exactly right. We also see this in generationally across software engineers, where one generation complains that the other generation's lost the craft, they've got these new tools, they don't understand the mastery, they don't need to live at this level anymore. So this has been happening forever.

Scott Aaronson (3:55)

Right, right. No, but I mean, this is, you know, there's been like a whole sequence of steps toward higher and higher abstraction. And now this is an enormous leap where, you know, like when I was teaching my 7-year-old, you know, how to, a daughter, how to program, you know, she just wanted to say, well, let me just describe in English what it should do. And then you do the technical part. And I had to explain to her, like, no, that's not what programming is. You know, you can't just say it in English. You have to translate it into this very, very formal language. And then, you know, five years later, it became what it is.

Right? Now you do just say in English what you want.

Joel (4:34)

Welcome to the party. Right.