Casey Noon

This was fascinating.

And this is actually the reason we wanted to have you on today was to talk about this response, this declaration, the Leiden Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics.

This is a basically declaration signed by something like 800 mathematicians so far that I would characterize as like a very worried document.

They are upset about the use of AI in their field, what they consider the irresponsible or reckless use.

They make a bunch of statements about how these technologies are producing plausible but unreliable or even incorrect arguments, which are hard to distinguish from sort of correct proofs.

So help us understand this declaration and kind of the perspectives of the mathematicians who are putting their names on it.

I'm sure this is a naive perspective, but isn't this just what people in every discipline feel when there's a new technology that does the thing that they used to do better than they do?

Wouldn't the Abacus Guild have been writing declarations about the dangerous new calculators?

They wouldn't have bothered.

They were very violent.

Oh, I think writers and musicians feel very threatened by AI.

Just to offer that, like I think there's a very similar response happening in the creative community.

Right.

I think programmers are an interesting exception to this sort of defensiveness, because for the most part, I think, like, many programmers are very excited about the tools that allow them to just, like, do their jobs better and faster.

And obviously, they're worried about the future of their own jobs.

But I don't think you're seeing this kind of, like, Leiden Declaration backlash anymore.

to the use of AI for programming.

But I think it's interesting to see just the list of kind of all-star mathematicians who have signed this declaration, including, we should say, Terry Tao, who we just mentioned is like fairly excited about the use of AI, also signed this declaration saying, hey, wait a minute, we gotta be like careful and put some rules on the road here.

Yeah.

I'm just kind of wondering, like, is the future of AI and math more likely to be sort of a bittersweet acceptance, or is there going to be this kind of principled resistance pushing back and saying, like, no, this is still going to be the domain of humans?