Terence Tao

But I have been willing to sort of leave some portions just, okay, I'm going to do something which is not my usual thing.

And maybe it'll be a waste of my time, but maybe I'll learn something.

And more often than not, I feel like I've gotten a positive experience, which is not something I would have planned for.

And yeah, so I believe a lot in serendipity.

And maybe there's a danger actually that, you know, in the modern society, it's not just AI, but we've become really good at optimizing everything.

And maybe we are optimizing, we're not optimizing, I love optimization.

With COVID, for example, we switched a lot to remote meetings.

And so everything was scheduled now.

And so we kept busy, at least in academia.

We met almost the same number of people that we met in person, but everything had to be planned.

You had to schedule things in advance.

And what we lost out on was sort of the casual, knocking on the hallway, just meeting someone,

while getting a coffee.

And there's some serendipitous interactions that you may think are not optimal, but actually are really important.

You know, when I was a grad student, I would go down to the library to look, I had to look for a journal article.

You had to physically go down to the library, check out the journal and read your article.

And sometimes the next article, you know, you can just browse through and the next article is also interesting.

Sometimes it wasn't, but you could accidentally find interesting things.

which is something which has basically been lost now because you can just type in, you know, if you want to access an article now, you just type it into a search engine or even an AI and you can get instantly what you want, but you don't get sort of the accidental things that you might have gotten if you'd done it more inefficiently.

There have been times when I spent a year once at the Institute for Advanced Study, which is a great place to, you know, there's no distractions.