Terence Tao

Incredibly limited.

Even language, the English language is a technology.

It's one that's been very internalized.

Yes, yeah, yes.

So humanity, plural, has much more intelligence, in principle, on its good days than the individual humans put together.

It can all have less.

Okay, but...

Yeah, so the mathematical community, plural, is an incredibly super intelligent entity that no single human mathematician can come close to replicating.

You see it a little bit on these question analysis sites.

So there's Math Overflow, which is the math version of Stack Overflow.

And sometimes you get very quick responses to very difficult questions from the community.

And it's a pleasure to watch, actually, as an expert.

I think the younger generation is always really creative and enthusiastic and inventive.

It's a pleasure working with young students.

The progress of science tells us that the problems that used to be really difficult can become trivial to solve.

I mean, it was like navigation.

Just knowing where you were on the planet was this horrendous problem.

People died or lost fortunes because they couldn't navigate.

And we have devices in our pockets that do this automatically for us.

It's a completely solved problem.