Jacob Tsimerman, one of the four mathematicians who won the Fields Medal this year, so basically one of the smartest people alive on earth today, lamented in one interview that his job as a mathematician is no longer secure because of the rise of AI, after the news that multiple open problems, at the very forefront of mathematical research, have all been resolved with the aid of AI.

And as expected, or perhaps as unexpected, Jacob has since resigned from his post as a professor of mathematics from University of Toronto and became an AI researcher at OpenAI.

“Depressing” is not the word I was looking for. 

“Futile” is.

Even just a few years ago, I would have dismissed AI as, rather, hyped, no more than just a curiosity, a fluke perhaps, just another set of springes to catch the mindless woodcocks of the general populace. I used AI and I was confident that I was smarter than AI. And now, it’s a different story. AI is now smarter than me, and that means it’s now smarter than 99% of the American population (my extrapolation of where I stand on the bell curve comes from my SAT score in high school, which placed me in the 99th percentile; most people would agree that SAT is just an IQ test by other means).

It’s a matter of time before it’s smarter than 99.9% of the American population, and if we take the American population to be a microcosm of the world’s population, then, well, very soon, 99.9% of the entire world population.

What’s more? Recent research has actually shown that people generally prefer AI writing to actual human writing, and in multiple experiments involving double-blind testing, readers rated AI writings as “better-written”, “more persuasive,”, “better organized,” more coherent, more poetic, and even more “sensational”, sensational in the sense of being related to the human sensations, so more human-like!  

So if you are a good writer, and you produce good writings, you are merely approaching the level of AI, because, by default now, AI writes better than 99% of all humans. 

And if you want to be a good writer, you have to imitate AI writing, as indicated in another study which shows that the rise of AI has caused more people to change the way they communicate and, so, instead of machines imitating humans, there is now a reverse osmosis where more people started to imitate the machine. 

You see these clipped, short, abortive sentences that I’ve been writing, so unlike the convoluted, dense, Germanic sentences that I used to write? Because modern readers prefer this kind of writing, with lots of breaks, paragraphs, punching sentences and lots of punting clauses. 

Nobody can read Edmund Husserl’s style of writing anymore, myself included. I noticed my attention span has shortened significantly when I can no longer sit through a concentrated reading of my own writing that I wrote from ten years ago. Something was wrong with my own attention span, I quickly realized. 

What’s the point of any human endeavor at this point … when AI can do it better?

What’s the point of doing math? 

What’s the point of writing poetry?

What’s the point of writing anything at all?

What’s the point of reflecting on life, philosophizing on relationships, conjuring up romantic and erotic scenarios, planning adventurous trips abroad, learning new words like “fatuus ignis” or “nictitating membrane” 

…. 

when AI can do all those things much better and much more efficiently?