Pope Leo on “AI alignment” — whose values will these systems be “aligned” with?
Ricoeur on reading, very relevant for LLMs that act via the interface of language: "reading ... is at its best a struggle between two strategies, the _strategy of seduction_ pursued by the author in the guise of a more or less trustworthy narrator ... , and the _strategy of suspicion_ pursued ...
Came across the well-known quote of Oppenheimer in a book: “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.” That's the way it is with AI now.
I find the "digestion" metaphor (i.e., mathematicians "digesting" AI-generated proofs) vulgar and off-putting. It's a sign of the times, genuine intellectuals like Yuri Manin are being replaced by a new generation whose identity is shaped by narrow professionalization and impoverished imagination.
Quine's indeterminacy of translation obviously applies to the process of translating mathematical texts to their Lean formalizations. Useful to keep in mind in the context of all the current AI-and-math discourse.
Peter Winch, writing in 1958, prefigures a lot of the current obsessions at the intersection of AI and language:
“[H]e did not mean to imitate those philanthropic models who make a profit out of poisonous pickles to support themselves while they are exposing adulteration, or hold shares in a gambling-hell that they may have leisure to represent the cause of public morality.” (about Dr Lydgate in _Middlemarch_)
