Observers describe recent AI advances in pure mathematics as evidence that current systems already outperform humans on advanced problems, framing the progress as the start of a posthuman era

SNSteve Newman@snewmanpv

I think we are in the process of discovering that humans are bad at mathematics. A gibbon would scoff at an Olympic climber; the human body is not optimized for climbing. We're getting mounting evidence that our brain may be far from optimal for advanced math. No disrespect to mathematicians. I was a two-time IMO silver medalist; I'm just smart enough to appreciate that some people are much, much smarter. But it's starting to look like math is somewhere on the midpoint of Moravec’s paradox; between chess (computers surpassed us some time back) and cooking (probably many years to go, for general capabilities). It's fairly hard for us, and so it looks like computers are going to surpass us. AI math still has important weaknesses. For instance, AI systems have not yet shown any ability to identify interesting research directions, or develop new concepts on which further work can build. But they are starting to look superhuman in some respects. And once AI *starts* to become superhuman in some domain, we all know what happens next.