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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   18885 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 5, 2026

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A Big Day in the Culture War

Apologies for any incoherency or grammatical errors; today's events led me to down more than my usual share of booze.

Earlier today, big things happened in math. No, not Claude providing a sub quadratic 3SUM. OpenAI released hundreds of notable math results, in a GitHub repo.

Fun results:

  1. Hilbert's tenth problem over (\mathbb{Q}) is undecidable

  2. The quasi-Riemann hypothesis

  3. The rational Hodge conjecture holds for every CM abelian variety

  4. Integer multiplication can be done in sub-log-linear time. Oh, there's also a sub-log linear DFT.

Thoughts and observations:

  1. Mathematicians are big mad. View the relevant subreddit on our progenitor site. Most there are probably, at best, adjuncts at community colleges desperately coping with the downward trajectory of already marginal careers, but it's fair to say that the writing is on the wall for mathematicians. There's probably a double digit number of grad students staring into a glass of whiskey tonight and thinking of hanging themselves.

  2. My immediate question was about whether this closer to the current peak of performance, or just a lazy demonstration of OpenAI's power. So, I took one of the particularly interesting preprints to me (memory and precision in Gaussian models) and tested whether it's at the edge of capabilities or not. 30 minutes of back and forth with Astra (itself behind OAI's internal model) resulted in a significantly stronger result, on multiple dimensions. While I finished my first bottle, I spent a fair amount of time convincing myself of the result; I was convinced the strengthened results were plausible. Write this off as AI psychosis if you want, but try it yourself; I'm genuinely curious for what you get. (The back and forth, here, was entirely me saying "you can do it!", "keep at it, I believe in you", and "you've got this, finish it!")

  3. Probably the most important line in OAI's announcement post is "The average result used the equivalent compute of roughly three hours of ChatGPT Pro thinking." This isn't a case of OAI spending millions for a marketing bump. My bet is a kind of Pareto distribution: most took minutes, not hours, with a long tail around Riemann-level results pulling up the average significantly.

  4. Notably, ML related results are nearly entirely absent from this batch of proofs; maybe a half dozen touch on it, distantly. Some problem indices are skipped in overview.md. Conspiratorially, my inclination was to think they filtered them out for competitive advantage. I can't find any evidence of that in the GitHub repo or any of the preprints (equally plausible: deduping), so maybe they judiciously decided not to point their mathematical ballista at ML. ML also doesn't have a meaningful bank of rigorous conjectures, so given the conjecture sources, maybe they're not yet digging into ML math. But color me skeptical.

  5. Does math matter? Is it something to advance civilization and technology, or an artistic pasttime for humans to create logical beauty? Likely both, today, but this is an almost nuclear detonation against the latter.

Mathematicians are big mad. View the relevant subreddit on our progenitor site.

I did. Most of the top comments do not have an angry tone. It's more like, a mix of resignation and excitement. With some mad mixed into it.

Anyway and more importantly, it might be time to start thinking harder about the key question of our time: is it over for humancels?

Not any time soon, I think, but I tell you this: social positions in which being human is an inherent part of the value proposition are starting to seem like much more appealing things to devote one's time to than STEMing it up.

I'm thinking positions like prostitute, politician, athlete, stage actor, bartender, socialite, rock star, cult leader, man who makes money by befriending rich people, or man who makes money for taking the fall when an organization gets in trouble.

If y'all got any other ideas, share 'em. Cause it's time to strategize. Unless you're rich already, in which case: all good. Unless Skynet scenario.

I hope the AI-boosted productivity gains soon outstrip the job losses and we get the utopian diseases-cured Star Trek scenario instead of the Great Depression or Skynet ones.

From "The Power of Intelligence" by Eliezer Yudkowsky:

I have observed that someone’s flinch-reaction to “intelligence”—the thought that crosses their mind in the first half-second after they hear the word “intelligence”—often determines their flinch-reaction to the notion of an intelligence explosion. Often they look up the keyword “intelligence” and retrieve the concept booksmarts—a mental image of the Grand Master chess player who can’t get a date, or a college professor who can’t survive outside academia.

“It takes more than intelligence to succeed professionally,” people say, as if charisma resided in the kidneys, rather than the brain. “Intelligence is no match for a gun,” they say, as if guns had grown on trees. “Where will an Artificial Intelligence get money?” they ask, as if the first Homo sapiens had found dollar bills fluttering down from the sky, and used them at convenience stores already in the forest. The human species was not born into a market economy. Bees won’t sell you honey if you offer them an electronic funds transfer. The human species imagined money into existence, and it exists—for us, not mice or wasps—because we go on believing in it.

Which is to say, no, soft social skills are not going to become some last redoubt of human economic value. AI is perfectly capable of sending e-mails, talking to you over the phone, doing sales, writing a story, drawing a painting, acting in movies, composing a song, working as a therapist, dating you, becoming a pop idol†, etc.

AI can do anything a remote worker can do. And it's only a matter of time until drones and robots become good enough that human bodies are unnecessary as well.

We have to deal with the fact that the human era of producing value is coming to an end, probably in the next few years, certainly in the next couple of decades.

If our AIs are not aligned (they aren't), we all die. If our institutions are not aligned (they aren't), maybe a few elites survive but everyone else lives or dies according to their whims.

†Hatsune Miku was a vocaloid, not an LLM, but she is a proof of concept that you don't need to be a physical person to achieve stardom.

We have to deal with the fact that the human era of producing value is coming to an end,

Value is really an agglomeration of scarcity and social elements. Even today, it's possible to see a trend of concrete material wealth losing "value" to a human element. People often are willing to pay extra for functionally equivalent handmade products, farmers markets, and original art pieces. Food in terms of calories is valueless in a way our ancestors might not be able to comprehend, but there remains expensive food.

It seems quite possible that post-material-scarcity doesn't necessarily imply that human physical and emotional labor is zero-value.

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