The association for legacy mathematics.
I think a consequence of ASI/post-scarcity will be a massive growth in “spirituality” or Buddhism.
Bullish Buddhism.
Buddha’s message is incredibly simple.
He’s just like a friend saying, you have something on your face from lunch. You missed it. Check.
Very soon all of humanity is going to be looking at AI super intelligence with awe and amazement as it transforms the world.
Like the sun rising and lighting up the landscape where there’s nothing we do to interfere, we just marvel at it as it does its thing.
At least hopefully it’s like the sunrise, and not like the sunset.
To think humans will do any meaningful math in the future is missing the point.
The lessons learned to help scaffold future math mechanism described here will be used—just not by humans.
Sure humans can still do math recreationally, but to think they will meaningful contribute is naive. It’s like saying that manual human calculators who did arithmetic would continue to do so in the age of computers. Yeah we still do arithmetic but 99.9999…% of arithmetic is done by digital computers now.
AI is already, or at least will be very soon, far superior to every single human in every area of mathematics.
We’re entering the age of post-human contribution.
Terence Tao made a very powerful point:
“In most cases in pure mathematics, the problems are posed not because we desperately want the solution to these problems in and of themselves, but because we have seen from past experience that human-directed efforts to solve these problems tend to spur further development of the field through the efforts to solve such problems, and then to digest any partial or complete solutions that emerge for further insights.
Prematurely solving the problem by purely AI-powered methods—particularly without full transparency into the solution process—can contaminate this process to the point where it actually becomes a net negative for the progress of mathematics as a whole.”
I’ve been following Terence Tao for like 20 years, and I have always been impressed by the clarity of his thinking.
This clarity stands out even more in this difficult moment, as AI labs turn mathematics into a battleground in their race for supremacy.
In this race, they risk damaging one of humanity’s highest intellectual endeavours.
Not sure if I posted it then but in January my prediction was that within 18 months we would see the first big obvious impacts of AGI on society.
10 months to go.
With incredible breakthroughs like Astra we feel right on schedule.
When I started training physically seriously at 18 most of the people I was training with had short term goals.
I want to lose x weight in the next few months. I want to get big for summer. Etc.
For me, I wanted training to be a lifelong pursuit.
So I set a goal to be at a certain size/strength/bodyfat… at 30 years old. 14 years into the future.
Most of the people I trained with back then are fat and out of shape now.
I’m 32 and in the best shape of my life ever. Still getting better every year.
This is the value of long term goals.
One way to view the nervous system is as the highest-order layer of an organism’s defense system, with the neocortex enabling its most sophisticated forms of threat prediction and avoidance.
Behaviorally, this is obvious: immunity protects you from threats that have already reached the body; the brain allows you to detect and avoid threats before they do. An animal can learn to avoid the lion rather than merely survive the damage it causes.
Seen this way, it’s unsurprising that the brain would also be deeply involved in regulating immunity downstream. The immune system must continuously decide what matters and how strongly to respond. The brain helps determine what information gets prioritized in the first place—through perception, attention, learning, and prediction.
The interesting idea is that attention may therefore not just change what enters consciousness; it may change the biological information available to the body’s defense systems.
Did you know attention help regulates your immune response?
"Our findings therefore establish a causal
link between attention and immune regulation in vivo, suggesting that processes often considered autonomously regulated, such as inflammatory responses, are influenced by the voluntary allocation
of attentional resources."
nature.com/articles/s41562-0…
AI alignment.
Who aligns humanity?
No single group, it’s a coordinated effort that involves game theory. We align ourselves, together.
AI alignment will likely be similar.
I’ve always found it useful to explore both extremes to find the most useful middle ground.
It seems like society does the same thing. Historically we oscillate between extremes and over time find a more sensible middle ground.
Now AI is doing math amongst or above the highest level of mathematicians in the world.
But still they’re mostly working with our current theories and ideas.
The next stage will be AI inventing entirely new frameworks and fields of mathematics.
Perhaps even finding better foundational representations that deprecate some fields of mathematics in favor of better frameworks.
Yes, we are definitely past PhD-level intelligence.
Humans largely won’t be able to keep up. AI itself will do most of the verification, while direct human verification becomes less and less important. Automated methods like symbolic verifiers will become far more useful—and the human role may eventually amount to checking whether the output light is red or green 😂
We may reach a point where things are moving so fast that, for all practical purposes, we accept something must be correct because its results work.
We know Einstein’s theories were correct because humans verified them—but later, technologies like GPS provided another practical layer of verification.
In the future, it might look more like:
ASI: produces an extremely complex mathematical proof that is nearly impossible for humans to verify
Humans: “Hmm, I’m not sure this is corr—”
ASI: “Well, here’s a working cold-fusion device built from the math.”
Humans: “Okay, well, we have unlimited energy now… I guess it checks out 🤷♂️”
I’ve spent well over 10,000 hours studying math in my life, yet I can’t understand these proofs, at least not without weeks of digging deep into each topic. What’s more, none of my math PhD friends know much about these problems either, and they can’t verify most of them without working directly in the field (yes, math is VERY diverse).
LLMs are getting smarter than the experts themselves, and I’m not sure we have enough bright human minds to verify everything that will come out of them in the coming years.
Remember when we compared AI intelligence to PhD students? I think we’re past that.
OpenAI just solved 10 frontier math problems for roughly $2,000 in inference.
If a human mathematician produced only these results over a 40–50 year career, they’d likely be considered one of the best mathematicians of their generation.
The machine did it quickly, cheaply, and across multiple fields.
People still think AGI will arrive as a gradual productivity boost.
It may look more like entire elite human careers collapsing into a few thousand dollars of compute.
The singularity is near.