[ExI] [Extropolis] Dispatches from the last days of human relevance

[John Clark]

On Thu, May 28, 2026 at 11:39 AM Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com>
wrote:


> *> Regardless of how it turns out, it is going to be an interesting ride.I
> am astonished that I am alive to see it happening.*
>

*I agree completely!  *


*John K Clark*




>
> Best wishes,
>
> Keith
>
> On Thu, May 28, 2026 at 2:59 AM John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > Quantum computer expert Scott Aaronson wrote this yesterday:
> >
> > ===
> > Dispatches from the last days of human relevance
> >
> > By Scott Aaronson
> >
> >
> > As most readers have presumably heard by now, Paul Erdös's Unit Distance
> Problem from 1946---one of the central open problems from the field of
> discrete geometry---has been solved by GPT5.5Pro. Erdös had conjectured
> that, given n points in the plane, at most n1+o(1) pairs of them could be
> unit distance apart. Using high-powered results from algebraic number
> theory, GPT refuted this, constructing a set with n1+ε unit-distance pairs,
> for ε ~ 10-38. Shortly afterward, Will Sawin, a human (!), improved GPT's
> construction to get ~n1.014 pairs. Meanwhile, the best known upper bound
> remains n4/3, improving Erdös's n3/2.
> >
> > he entire process seems have been one-shot: my former student Lijie Chen
> simply gave GPT the problem, then GPT thought for a while and output a
> several-page argument that, on analysis by human experts, turned out to be
> correct. Of course there's selection bias here; we're not hearing as much
> about the hundreds of other problems GPT was given that it didn't solve
> (isn't that the case with humans too?). Clearly, too, GPT was helped by the
> facts that human mathematicians had wasted most of their time trying to
> prove Erdös right rather than looking for a counterexample, and that, even
> if they did look for a counterexample, they'd need to be experts in
> algebraic number theory to find this one, which hardly any discrete
> geometers are. So, maybe that suggests that AI, right now, is "merely"
> picking various medium-hanging fruits that human mathematicians missed for
> contingent reasons? With emphasis on the "right now."
> >
> > In a companion paper, OpenAI helpfully included commentary from Timothy
> Gowers, Noga Alon, Will Sawin, Daniel Litt, and many other experts,
> reflecting on the breakthrough, the path that GPT took to get to it (which
> can actually be seen by examining its chain-of-thought), and what this
> might mean for the future of mathematical research.
> >
> > I heard the news maybe an hour after it broke, when some UT grad
> students came to my office to tell me. For what it's worth: these students
> were morose, musing about how everything might soon be over for young
> scientists and mathematicians like themselves. I don't know whether they're
> right, but I feel like I should tell the truth about what their reaction
> was.
> >
> > Then, a few days later, a team at DeepMind, including my UT Austin
> colleague Swarat Chaudhuri, announced that they were able to use a system
> called AlphaProof Nexus to settle nine more (!) Erdös problems, many of
> them in additive combinatorics, along with miscellaneous other open math
> problems. Notably, in this case the AI also fully formalized its proofs in
> Lean.
> >
> > And then, just today, Jelani Nelson alerted me to a new CS theory paper,
> which solves a longstanding open problem about electrical flows on graphs
> using a proof from GPT5.5Pro.
> >
> > It seems to me that we're now over the top of this particular
> rollercoaster, and it will keep accelerating until we reach the bottom,
> wherever that might be. I don't know whether to hope or dread that
> solutions to P versus NP and all our other great problems will be included
> in the ride---that our role, as human mathematicians, will be reduced to
> (at most) deciding which questions we find interesting and then
> understanding AI models' answers to those questions.
> >
> > But maybe that won't happen. Maybe the new AI mathematicians will soon
> hit a wall, because they lack the uncomputable quantum gravity microtubules
> of Penrose and Hameroff, or some other magic human ingredient. The
> fantastical thing is that, one way or the other, we're going to find out
> empirically before very long.
> >
> > ________________________________
> >
> > Readers may have also seen the news that multiple prizewinning entries
> in a short fiction contest called the Commonwealth Prize, give overwhelming
> indications of having been written by AIs. As Kelsey Piper puts it:
> >
> > There are, let’s say, also some noticeable similarities in the prose
> style between the winning stories that were flagged for AI use. AI chatbots
> love metaphors and similes, and they often spit out ones that sound vaguely
> pleasing but are logically incoherent or ascribe properties to things that
> don’t make sense.
> >
> > “The Serpent in the Grove” gave us, “The girl smiled like sunrise over a
> sink.” “The Bastion’s Shadow” says, “She carried it now in her bag, heavy
> as a charm.” “Mehendi Nights” describes something as “swaying against
> plaster like a warning bell.”
> >
> > The Commonwealth Foundation, whose judges chose these stories, hasn't
> exactly covered itself in glory---saying, on the one hand, that it strictly
> forbids AI use but on the other, that it will continue taking authors at
> their word that they didn't use AI, no matter the immensity of evidence to
> the contrary. As many others have pointed out, judges more familiar with AI
> would've ironically been better placed to notice the signs of its use.
> >
> > If only there were some sort of automated way to detect AI-generated
> text. Someone should really get on that problem, don't you think?
> >
> > ________________________________
> >
> > But maybe we should just throw in the towel---as some of my colleagues
> have already done in the context of undergraduate projects? Maybe we should
> simply say that a good story is a good story, regardless of what manner of
> entity produced it?
> >
> > As it happens, just last week I read my very first AI-written story that
> affected me as a story, to the extent that I wanted to read it more than
> once. This happened when I gave GPT5.5Pro the following simple prompt:
> >
> > Write me a story about the most ancient Israelites that’s riveting like
> the stories of the Bible but that’s also consistent with all of the
> archeological evidence.
> >
> > You can read the result here. One of my Facebook friends called it
> "disturbingly good," and I share that assessment. Of course, I'm well aware
> that GPT could easily generate a thousand stories like this one---sampled
> from the same probability distribution---and then I could even do
> statistics on which tropes were the most common. This makes it feel silly
> to overindex on the first story that happened to be output, and yet somehow
> I did.
> >
> > ________________________________
> >
> > I feel like at this point, both the prophets of AI utopia like Ray
> Kurzweil, and of AI doom like Eliezer Yudkowsky, could be forgiven for
> asking: dude, will you listen to us YET? Do you still find it prudent to
> call this new form of terrestrial intelligence a stochastic parrot, a
> laughable fraud, or a fad that's about to go away? Fear it all you want,
> hate it even, but at least respect it!
> >
> > Which brings me to the other big AI news from the past week, namely that
> Pope Leo released his first encyclical, which is entitled "Safeguarding the
> Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence." I read it and ...
> well, I certainly agreed with the theme that such a world-changing
> technology needs to be developed for the common good (as the Pope would
> have it, like the walls of Jerusalem), rather than for the profit or vanity
> of any one individual or company (in his analogy, like the Tower of Babel).
> I had quibbles with some of the other parts. Zvi Mowshowitz, as he often
> does, had a superb paragraph-by-paragraph analysis. Amusingly, there are
> indications that parts of the encyclical were written by AI.
> >
> > To me, though, maybe the most notable part was that Chris Olah, who
> leads Anthropic's interpretability team, was standing next to the Pope at
> the ceremony, and delivered his own remarks. I felt like Chris, who I met
> even before Anthropic existed, was a non-obvious yet inspired choice here,
> one of the rare figures in frontier AI whose technical and moral authority
> are both completely unimpeachable by anyone.
> >
> > And so, at this momentous era for the human project, and no less of an
> authority than that of the Vicar of Christ himself, the Supreme Pontiff and
> the Successor of Peter, I hereby throw myself on the wisdom and mercy of
> ... uhh, Chris Olah and his team at Anthropic.
> >
> > Chris, if I am soon to share the earth with entities that can prove the
> Riemann Hypothesis and solve quantum gravity after 30 seconds of thought,
> then may you understand those entities well enough to cause them to be nice.
> >
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