Laypeople support technical fields for technology, not art

Some people think that LLMs should not be used in technical fields like programming or mathematics, because those fields are actually art. True or not, this kind of argument is not going to be persuasive to the general population. The argument goes something1 like this: It doesn’t matter how effective LLMs are at technical fields like programming or mathematics, because one of the essential values of those fields is that they’re art. While it looks to laypeople like these fields exist to solve practical problems, what they’re actually for is to produce works of beauty, or to express something distinctively human, or to spend time contemplating the infinite. Simply solving the problems misses the point in the same way that building an infinite poem generator would miss the point of poetry. I agree that programming or mathematics can be beautiful. I remember being mildly awestruck at learning epsilon-delta proofs, and I have written a lot about the kind of software I think is elegant.…