One Hour. One Dead 80-Year Math Problem. Welcome to the End of College As We Know It.

“Am I afraid of losing command to a computer?  Daystrom was right.  I can do a lot of other things.  Am I afraid of losing the prestige and the power that goes with being a starship captain?  Is that why I’m fighting it? Am I that petty?” – Star Trek

Plot idea:  Gilligan ate the last box of cookies on the island.  Ginger snaps.

My first exposure to the concept of thinking machines was almost certainly Star Trek.  My first exposure to talking monkeys was Planet of the Apes, but that’s a story for another day.

On Star Trek, the computers were always one bad logical paradox away from exploding.  Yes.  Literally exploding.

Were they sentient?  Sure.  Helpful?  Usually.

But give them an infinite loop and boom, here comes the smoke, and sparks.  The classic was something like Kirk saying, “Computer, listen to me.  I have infinite power, so can I make a burger that is too big for me to eat?”

The Star Trek A.I. that comes to mind right now is M-5 from the episode The Ultimate Computer.  In this episode, Kirk and his crew get replaced by this fancy new computer that runs the Enterprise™ like a dream until M-5 just decides to start killing people.  The machine went full neurotic.  And turning it off?  It took its creator have a full meltdown, since they don’t make Adderall for computers.

I spilled Adderall in my F-150, and turned it into a Ford Focus®.

I bring this up because an AI just solved an unsolved Erdős Problem®.  What’s an Erdős Problem® other than an excuse to us a Hungarian letter?  Well, it’s part of a series of math problems cooked up by a dead vagabond mathematician named Paul Erdős.  The guy wandered the world like a couch surfing hobo with a PhD.

This particular problem had stumped humans for eighty years.  Then OpenAI’s model rolled up and disproved the whole thing with a counterexample so elegant it made a human mathematician sit up and say, “Huh. That’s clever.”

Not “good for a computer.”

Just . . . clever.  People hadn’t solved this problem.  But A.I. did in about an hour.

Anyone who still says “AI is nothing more than a pocket calculator” is wrong.  Dead wrong.  This isn’t crunching numbers faster.  This is synthesizing ideas and creating original solutions to problems that have vexed mathematicians everywhere.  Oh, sure, it’s easy to beat them up and take their money to buy yourself something you like because they have poor upper body strength, but they’re good in math.

Maybe Kim wouldn’t be so chubby if he had to run for office.

Just like Kirk struggled with what the hell he was supposed to do if he wasn’t driving a starship the thought that has to be entering the minds of mathematicians everywhere is, “what’s the point if a computer can do what I do?”  Though, to be fair, Captain Kirk would later become a police officer in Southern California and a lawyer in Boston, so he landed on his feet after they no longer needed him in Star Fleet.  But he had decent upper body strength.

And that leads straight to the question of college.

College is getting pozzed by GloboLeftists to the point that math and engineering professors are publicly demanding a return to acceptance based on test scores.  They’re tired of getting stunning and brave students who can’t noodle their way through middle-school math and, well, can’t read either.  These are the same professors who used to pretend everything was fine because they were fighting for tenure.

What’s the difference between a tenured professor and Hamas?  You can negotiate with Hamas.  (meme as found).

They’re saying the quiet part out loud because their departments are filling up with kids who couldn’t pass a seventh-grade fractions test but have opinions on everything.  However, now we have A.I. that can solve unsolved mathematical problems.  And college students that can’t read or do math.

As I’ve written before, participation in college took off after Griggs v. Duke Power.  That 1971 Supreme Court decision basically told companies they couldn’t use IQ tests for hiring anymore.

Why?

Because black people didn’t score as high on average.  So how could companies legally discriminate, sorry, select, for the bright employees they actually needed to, you know, keep the power on?  Simple:  require a college degree. A degree became the new IQ test, just with more debt and fewer guarantees.

Now college is facing the twin problems of not being able to bring in the smart students or even requiring kids to read, while AI is everywhere.

What is college even for anymore?  What’s the purpose?

My experience with college is that it provided a chance for me to change.  The teachers always said, “next year it would be harder,” and it finally hit for me my second semester of my freshman year. Calc 2, Physics 2, and Chem 2 (the thermodynamics part) all at once.

I will say that when I took thermo I didn’t feel so hot.

I had to bear down and learn to study.  It changed me for the better.  The concepts I learned there were truly fundamental. They gave me a leg up on my career because they changed the way I thought and challenged me in ways that mattered.

But if college has turned into writing prompts (or, since they can’t write, speaking prompts) into an AI and turning in the A.I.’s product, what’s the point?  I know, people said the same thing about calculators dumbing down schools.  I’m sure they said the same thing about slide rules.  But I know what multiplication is and how it works, and could even do long division by hand if I had to.

A.I. is different, fundamentally, than a calculator.  A.I. can’t think in the human sense, but it certainly can synthesize and create original solutions to problems that have vexed the physically weakest people on campus.

So why college?

For most people, college shouldn’t exist.  Alternate paths should be wide open for entrepreneurship, or welding, or HVAC, or any of the dozen trades that actually keep the lights on and the toilets flushing.  People wanting a sociology, psychology, or anthropology degree should be limited to about one-twentieth the number of sociology, psychology, or anthropology professors currently working in the United States, because teaching those subjects is about all those degrees are worth in the real world.  Oops, forgot!  They could also work in the fresh retail coffee production and distribution industry.

I’ll go out on a limb and say college should be limited to those professions where people die if you’re wrong, or where the work is useful in making cool weapons, which means people die if they’re right:  physics, chemistry, engineering, medicine, the hard stuff.

I see why people get addicted to glue.  They just get attached to it.

My plan would turn subjects like Women’s Studies into a hobby.  Which is what they already are, but at least under my plan you don’t have to play $48,000 a year.  Add in allowing employers to use IQ tests again, and then you don’t have to worry about hiring idiots.  They might be evil, but at least they won’t be idiots.

Look, the M-5 computer on the Enterprise® eventually got shut down because it went off the rails.  And real A.I. isn’t going to explode in a shower of sparks, but it’s already doing things humans couldn’t.

College, meanwhile, is busy proving it can’t even teach basic literacy to the people it lets in.  The old model is broken.  Even my old professor, Dr. Zaius©, agrees.

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

49 thoughts on “One Hour. One Dead 80-Year Math Problem. Welcome to the End of College As We Know It.”

  1. My plan would turn subjects like Women’s Studies into a hobby. Which is what they already are, but under my plan you don’t have to play $48,000 a year for that hobby.

    It almost fits, but I think there is an “l” extra in there.

    The nitpicker

  2. One of my calculus professors at Auburn had solved an Erdos problem with two other faculty members. I remember him telling us about it in class. The prize they received was a bottle of a rare vintage of wine.

    He was an interesting guy. Within the first week, he had memorized the name of all of 20+ students in the classroom.
    JB

  3. I picked a good week to start sniffing glue.
    Substack has a great one about AIdolatry GIGO being Maximum Overdrive from comrade Stephen King.
    No loyalty oath to Israel? AI brain center has sent the kill bots.

  4. AI is still bullshit.
    The problem solved could be done with brute force, it didn’t take creativity of any kind.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_distance_graph

    Trillions of dollars will be wasted and millions of lives ruined so that billions can be made by a handful. Fink of Blackrock is already talking about the need to raid 401k and savings accounts to fund data center creation.

    https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/larry-fink-warns-americans-pensions-113500059.html?guccounter=1

    2. The “data” centers are going to create 1984 surveillance on steroids. Bible prophecy watchers call it the Beast System, no one will buy or sell without allegiance.

  5. I think there is one other factor with college. When I got my Engineering degree the majority of my core subject professors were Engineers or had done technical work in industry. That is very much not he case now.

    1. Ditto that. I was fortunate to have some really good professors in undergrad, but even I could see the decline that was starting to happen as they were bringing in more foreign professors who had no experience, nor were they very capable.

      It’s only gotten worse. In more recent years, my employer decided to partner with a major university where we would provide funding and they would work on innovation projects to help us develop new products. Majority of the profs had no idea how to do the work they were supposed to be expert in and needless to say, their grad students weren’t learning anything either. We often had to them in some of the basic testing/prep just to get the project moving.

      The weird part was it all unfolded just like the Somali Learing Center scandal. We would hire some of their students from this program and they would immediately start setting up new projects to fund their incompetent friends/profs back on campus. It was pure insanity but our management had been DEI’ed so badly that they were too stupid to even understand what was going on.

      1. The problem is frauds promote frauds and no one gets fired for being a dumbass. The smart tech guy who can do is relegated to fixing the jeets screw ups and stays on the floor. Computer bozos and deis move up the management ladder. We now live in a country which our greatest fear should be that everything doesn’t break the same day.

  6. So what are people needed for now? From the SciAm article, “The experts also hastened to add that, without humans intervening to “clean up” the AI’s work, the result wouldn’t be so convincing. “The human still plays a vital role in discussing, digesting, and improving this proof, and exploring its consequences,” wrote mathematician Thomas Bloom in the “reflections” document.”

    Great – so now a person can be the “The Groom of the Stool” for an AI platform.

  7. The broader issue is that of the “education” system as a whole. The shrinking returns we get for the ever increasing investment ought to have driven us to a serious examination of the entire thing but we can never have an honest conversation about education without someone immediately doing the meme “Won’t someone please think of the children?!”

  8. Everything in life is subject to this truth:
    “Sooner or later everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences.”
    H/T to Robt Lewis Stevenson

  9. For me, undergrad was about making beneficial lifetime connections and “social life”. After a year, hated engineering and switched to Finance, which was a better fit. The two semesters of Calc were valuable, though.

    MBA school taught me how to think. Two of my professors, Lonnie Strickland & Art Thompson, proceeded to write the best selling undergrad & grad school textbooks on Strategic Management. It has amazed me that neither left Tuscaloosa for an Ivy.

      1. “Ivy isn’t what it used to be.”

        I grew up thinking Ivy’s were special and that MIT was the mecca of the engineering profession. I was quickly assuaged of this opinion when I got to school as my MIT-trained professors weren’t any better than the others. If anything, some were a bit worse and I had a few that were just downright incompetent (not what I would expect from an elite school).

        The weird thing about working in engineering field is that the Ivy’s don’t really seem to exist at all. I ran into a few MIT trained engineers over the years but zero from the other schools. Others have noted that an Ivy education is really more about credentialism and gaining a network than it is about getting an education. That may be true, but to work as an engineer, you really have to have that edu-macation part (which may explain why Ivy engineers are rare).

  10. Nobody, as far as I know, regards AI as just a calculator. They admit that it’s not even a good calculator! What it IS good at, though, is finding patterns, and returning the context in which it found that pattern. That is, predicting what follows from what was prompted. If you tell it that “strcpy(” is a security hazard, it can scan a pile of source code and tell you where it was found. If you ask it to test a piece of software, it will remember that most software tests result in a “Passed!” message, and so it will send one of those to you!

  11. As I grew close to retirement, I realized the caliber of engineers had lessened to the point the math required was now easily completed with the help of software. It made me think of the programmers that wrote the software, and how their skills would lessen as computers took on more of the work. Without electricity, the entire 21st century is unable to function, and is reaching the point calculating with nothing but a pencil will become a lost ability.

        1. John-

          Have the CD. Fav song on it is “The Ballad of Lady Di”. Drunk divorced floozie…

    3. Had a discussion with a German engineer – same thing over there. I had ordered something ‘interesting’ so they sent the salesperson over to figure out why and we had a great conversation.

  12. Half the problem is, the portion of the population currently in college with no real reason or right, thinks they’re smarter than everyone else, and college is where they belong.

  13. A Star Trek moment that stuck in my mind was from TOS – on a black and white TV. All I remember is that the computer had taken over the Enterprise and was keeping them from boldly doing anything. Kirk ordered the computer to calculate pi to the last decimal place, and it got so busy, it forgot about being an A-hole. Err… forgot it was taking over the menial tasks for its humans.

    Silly me, even at 14 (or whatever I was), I thought the computer should know there is no last decimal place. Maybe it’s a good idea to leave that out of the programming for AI, just in case.

  14. I dunno, when I read the writeup of this “AI success,” I think of a combination of the Kobiyashi Maru approch coupled with brute force.

    I’m not so willing to accept that AI actually synthesized a solution rather than very quickly ran through myriad scenarios already rationalized within the logic of the propmt. This is reinforced by the fact that nobody can say the solution proof is the most optimal because a human mathematician has already found a more. optimal proof.

    1. But it is solved. I did hear one physics prof (Columbia, I think) say that A.I. can do in a day what a physics grad student can do in a month. (going from memory, so not exact)

  15. We’ll all be living in caves after everything is outlawed, but then you can be sure that living in caves will soon be banned in order to protect endangered bats.

  16. AI works just fine. We just make the perennial mistake of assigning our bias of intent to the question of efficacy. Progress and her social and economic rewards have long been lashed to the purpose of separating our earthly works from our spiritual purpose and our humanity from our daily lives.

    The tools of humanism to make us less human. Since being human is the problem. College and similar institutions reflect a people. Right now thats garbage. Garbage in garbage out as the systems guys like to say.

    We’ve already tried the learn to code go stem or not at all. The last thing a people needs is a bunch of engineers without literature, scientists without history, technicians without philosophy, or designers without art. We need to reclaim it all.

    The lizard king wants to go to mars. So lots a jobs for good little technocrats. But a people without a soul reaching for the stars is just another ponzi of progress that steals the stars in the eyes of our kids before they even know who they are of from where they come.

    I understand we have ceded all our institutions to the machine and so the appeals and copes to cling to the few remaining islands of reality in the tempest of progress, but the coming solutions including AI to the problem of being human are consolidating the long march and generations of taking the ring, accepting the gauche and debased materialism and manifold proxies for truth and beauty into our own hearth and homes.

    This is a time when we are called to restore the story of our people in our own homes and carry it forward in all that we do such that the stewardship of truth and beauty is our highest calling. The spark must be kindled in the cold mechanized perpetual year zero.

    The impulse to optimise and arbitrage and negotiate with this evil system must be tempered with this calling. “my son is a successful engineer” is not enough.

Comments are closed.