What have you done for me lately?

Cartoon © KAL and The Economist Artificial Intelligence remains a pejorative term. Opposition to building data centers (the new NIMBY issue) features in our current election cycle. But, stop and look around, not everything about AI is bad. In addition to performing all sorts of routine back office work, AI just solved mathematical problems that had defied mathematicians for years. Actually by October 6th OpenAI was claiming to have solved 372 of them. No matter that a mathematician friend pooh-poohed the first of these by saying it wasn’t a problem anyone was bothering to try and solve anyway. It was solved. It seems to be true however that one objection to AI solutions is that they are short on argument about the steps in the process, seeing the answer as the priority — while mathematicians favor the process as the hard bit to explain. Surely investigations into the process can continue even after we have the “answer”. AI is breaking old codes which nobody’s been able to break since…

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