It’s really fucking me up the way AI boosters and friends are treating mathematics as a natural science whose goal is to uncover mathematical facts in the number mines. I’m not even staunchly opposed to platonism, but my god. That’s not even how natural science works!

Random idiot on r/singularity

That stance assumes we still need to fully understand the manual mechanics in order to apply the end result.

​Saying we lose out on the “journey” is like an 18th-century laborer complaining that the steam engine will create a society where no one has the endurance to swing a 20-pound hammer for a full 12-hour day.

Do we lose something through abstraction? Absolutely. And I understand why people would mourn that. But do we need to have the endurance to swing the hammer to build a modern skyscraper?

We aren’t losing the ability to do math, we are just moving up a layer of abstraction, transitioning from the laborers to the architects.

Also look out for the new obnoxious metaphor of “what if aliens descended from the sky and handed us their science and proofs, how is this different”. First of all shut up. Secondly we should assume the aliens in this scenario have reason, intent, and the ability to communicate through language. You’re imagining they’re using the scientific method and not divination from wiggling their proboscis in the fourth dimension. Which is quite different from OpenAI’s big dump on scientific practice.