AI has recently been solving complicated math problems that have stumped mathematicians for decades (most notably in regards to the Navier-Stokes equation).
Many mathematicians are critical of AI’s methods.
The meme is from the film “Throw Momma from the Train” in which Larry (Billy Crystal) plays a writing professor, who is working on a book throughout the film in which he has trouble finding the right opening sentence. He keeps coming up with “the night was hot “, “the night was humid”, “the night was damp” “the night was moist” but everything he came up with sounded lame.
Finally, at the end of the film, the woman pictured, who Owen’s (Danny DeVito) mother (who Owen has been trying to get Larry to murder for him) tells Larry that the line he is looking for is “the night was sultry”.
Larry, realizing that was perfect, becomes enraged at how she came up with that so effortlessly when he had been struggling the entire film to do so.
I was listening to NPR today and they had a mathematician that teaches at Conell having a legitimate existential crisis on air as he sees their profession being made redundant before his eyes.
Add “The feeling of power” to the mandatory reading list in middle school / high schools maybe. Then they can have ai summarize and write a book report for them, and if they at least read the book report ai wrote for them they would see the irony maybe.
Listened to it today, radiolab. I thought it was super interesting to hear him talk about it solving these problems and we can’t actually prove it or understand it.
I think the problem a lot of people in the math and science world are having with the easy AI answers is that it's skipping the part of solving the problem that actually gives us value. Some of the math equations are tied to phenomenon that we already know works but we don't know why it works and adding the ai answer doesn't tell us anything new. Plus by skipping to the end of the book we could be missing out on extra knowledge we didn't know would be there. Like what if you were reading the greatest apple pie recipes book and you decided to ask AI to summarize the best recipe in the book. Sure you got the best apple pie recipe but you skipped over one recipe that happened to be the cure to cancer. In research and experimentation you never know where the process is going to take you, curiosity is your greatest ally over brute forcing answers
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u/AdministrativeCap176 1d ago
Explanation needed