A Changing Field

The software field is in a knot-twist about AI; but the people who are doing some of the best thinking about the impacts of AI are mathematicians. (Note: I’m going to use AI here because it’s the parlance of the times. I continue to be very frustrated by the terminology flattening caused by continuous use of the term AI -- the difference between LLM, agent systems, generative video and image systems, audio processing, transcription, virtual manipulation and ink detection, and more is enormous, but we flatten everything into a single pair of characters: AI. This lack of nuance makes us weaker as a society, but for the purposes of this post, I’ll take the battle as lost.) The famous mathematician and talented communicator Terence Tao has been leading the charge, or so it seems, on thinking through some of this. He has invited mathematicians to write guest posts on his blog, a good number of which I have read. I quite enjoyed “What should we tell our students”, especially the metaphor of…