Are There Problems Beyond the Reach of AI | World Science Festival

Has artificial intelligence already surpassed human mathematicians? And if it has, what is left for humans to do? Scott Aaronson, director of the Quantum Information Center at the University of Texas at Austin, joins Brian Greene to examine what happens to mathematics now that AI systems are solving problems that stumped humans for decades if not longer.

Aaronson, who spent two years at OpenAI working on alignment, explains how anyone who still thinks AI hasn’t unseated human mathematicians as the most powerful theorem prover on earth is delusional. He and Brian consider what creativity means when a machine finds connections no specialist would have made, why Aaronson argues that humans are needed more urgently now than at almost any point in the past, and where responsibility for these systems should sit. The conversation closes on consciousness and the question of whether human intelligence is still special.

This program is part of the Rethinking Reality series, supported by the John Templeton Foundation.

Participant: Scott Aaronson
Moderator: Brian Greene

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CHAPTERS:
00:00 Brian Greene and Scott Aaronson
04:17 The First Moment That Caught Aaronson's Attention: GPT-3 and Scale
05:14 The Erdős Unit Distance Problem
09:05 Why AI Never Gets Tired or Discouraged
11:43 The Mathocalypse
12:11 What Is Lean and Why Does a Lean Certificate Matter?
14:03 The Unique Games Proof
17:58 AI Creativity
19:44 The Teleportation Machine Analogy
21:00 Can Humans Contribute What AI Cannot?
24:43 Humans Are Needed at the Steering Wheel as Long as AI Is Not Reliably Aligned
29:14 Borges' Library of Babel and the Role of Human Judgment
31:03 Is This a Golden Age of Mathematics?
33:17 The Unitary Synthesis Problem
35:53 Implications for the Black Hole Information Problem and Quantum Gravity
38:27 The Archaeology Analogy
41:18 The Future of Graduate Education
54:11 Aaronson’s Time with OpenAI
55:48 Formalizing What It Means for AI to Be Safe
1:02:27 What Stronger Regulation Would Actually Look Like
1:04:41 The Hugging Face Incident
1:09:17 The One Quality Humans Might Still Hold On To
1:15:25 Pain Vectors
1:21:04 Closing Thoughts