In math world, do people hate calculators?
This post presents a thought experiment that is based on this claim: “AI is to art what calculators are to math”. In which art refers to visual art, writing, and music.
Imagine math world. Math world is like our world in every significant way, except that the primary method of human expression is math. People communicate through math. Culture is math. People dedicate hours to performing mathematical operations and share their pages of equations in the same way we currently share art. People are emotionally invested in math. People buy beautiful abacuses in the same way that artists in our world buy fancy pens. People say things like “Anyone can add”. Math world’s Bob Ross has a show called “The joy of linear algebra”.
Now imagine that the calculator is invented. How do the people of math world react? Presumably people who are bad at math embrace the calculator because it allows them to communicate at a higher level. But what about all the people who are good at math? Do they rage against the calculator? Do they say someone’s equations aren’t authentic because they weren’t written by hand? Do they shame people for using the calculator, and wish to go back to the days when using an abacus was the only choice? Do they try to burn down calculator factories? Do they invent “calculator detectors” that claim to be able to tell if you used one, and then forcibly inspect everyone’s work using this? If someone uses the calculator to discover a new equation, do they try to discount it because it wasn’t done by hand? Do they start adding mistakes to their calculations to prove it was done by a human? Do they stop writing the little squiggle over their 7s because the calculator writes the squiggles and they don’t want to be mistaken for it?
And if they did do all these things, how would you feel about it? Do your feelings on this match your feelings on people who use AI in this world? Why or why not?
My current theory on why some people are so vehemently opposed to AI, with a level of rage, hatred, and paranoia that is significantly more extreme than their feelings on other things that are as bad or worse (for example, far less people write tirades about the environmental impacts of golf, factory farming, etc. And a lot of people who are against AI from a “it’s plagiarism” standpoint are still perfectly fine with piracy, fanfiction, and other things that are equally contradictory to their allegedly pro IP standpoint) feel this way due to cultural factors rather than any of the actual problems with the technology.
Math doesn’t have the cultural significance that art does. Most people consider math something to avoid, automate away, and “solve” as much as possible, rather than something to savor the process of. I think that if the cultural roles of math and art were reversed, the same people who hate AI would switch to loving AI and hating calculators. And if you are reading this and thinking “but that’s a false equivalence, the process of doing art is valuable, not just the end result, whereas the other part of math that matters is the end result”, this is in fact what I mean by art and math having different levels of cultural significance.
Culture is what causes you to believe that writing an essay does something important to the human brain and/or soul that solving an equation does not. Culture is why you think a painting is beautiful but a differential equation is not. Culture is why you think letting a computer help with your math homework is a beneficial time saver that you could not do without, but letting a computer help with your english homework is deplorable cheating. Culture is why you think we shouldn’t force kids to memorize the multiplication tables but should force them to memorize the rules of grammar. It’s not an inherent fact of the universe. It’s your culture.