Jul
26
2026

“Then I realized who was telling me this.”

Noah Smith wonders What will more intelligence actually do for us?

Not a lot of people expected that AI would come for the mathematicians before it came for the truck drivers, but it did. The other day, an AI model disproved the Jacobian Conjecture — an 87-year-old open problem that human mathematicians had struggled to solve. The greatest living human mathematician, Terence Tao, turned to AI to help him understand the solution. Around the same time, AI solved a very important open question in quantum cryptography. Solving Erdos problems has now become almost child’s play for the best AI models. And this is the worst AI will ever be at math. Model capabilities, and the amount of compute available, both continue to increase at rapid rates. (Meanwhile, long-distance trucking employment is slightly higher than it was a decade ago.)

I don’t expect mathematicians to actually lose their jobs en masse, of course.1 But it’s becoming clearer and clearer that humankind has invented machines that are smarter than we are. Intelligence isn’t defined for machines the same way it is for humans — AI’s capabilities are spiky in different ways than ours — but it’s undeniable that the technology is improving rapidly in every domain of cognitive capability. It’s still possible to find some mental tasks that humans are better than machines at, but those final advantages tend to disappear almost as quickly as we can identify them. “AGI”, or “ASI”, or whatever you want to call it, is certainly here.

And yet…the world remains much the same. In lots of sci-fi books, as soon as artificial superintelligence arrives, it bootstraps itself to even more godlike intelligence in an explosive “singularity” that rapidly transforms the entire physical universe. Lots of people, especially “AI safety” and “effective altruist” types, expected things to play out basically the same way in reality. But looking around, not much has changed since we entered the intelligence explosion. There’s a huge data center boom, and most people use AI on a daily basis, but we still live basically the same lives — driving to work or taking the train, sitting in front of a computer, scrolling on our phones, collecting a paycheck. People are staying in their jobs longer, but employment hasn’t been disrupted in a significant way:

Noah's got fact-based speculation out the wazoo, and he could well be on target. This observation seems very Hayekian, and I don't mean Salma:

You can’t transform the world unless you can (in some generalized sense) understand it, and you can’t understand the world unless you can measure it, and our ability to measure the world is inherently limited and finite.

Today's headline is a punchline from an old joke.

Also of note:

  • I blame Andrew Carnegie. Robby Soave notes some rhetorical trickery: Zohran Mamdani tells Jon Stewart socialism is just having a library. The relevant Zohran quote from the recent interview:

    If you and I were to introduce the idea of a building that lends out books for free, we would be slandered in the same way that so many new ideas are slandered today, and yet that's the library. The same thing with the fire department, the same thing with public schools.

    Robby's riposte:

    This is all completely ridiculous. If a government provides some public services, this does not mean the government is socialist. Socialism should not be defined as maintaining a slightly more generous welfare state. Socialism is a political and economic system in which the means of production are owned in theory by the workers themselves rather than fat-cat capitalists. In actually existing socialist systems, the means of production is owned or at least controlled by a powerful central government with sweeping powers to allocate resources, set prices, and determine who does what. The strictly two-class system—workers and capitalists—envisioned by socialist theorist Karl Marx in the 19th century does not really exist, as there is no clear distinction between the two. In the modern economy, the relevant factor is public vs. private. Socialist governance is characterized by the hollowing out of the private sector and sharply limiting the free market in favor of top-down, centralized control of the economy—often via the nondemocratic aspects of the state such as regulatory bureaucracies.

    But don't expect (say) Jon Stewart to say that.

  • So far. But the year's not over. Jeffrey Blehar has a early nomination for The Most Irresponsibly Stupid Column of the Year. (NR gifted link)

    The column is from Nancy Armour in USA Today. (That link now includes a memory-hole disclaimer: "This column has been updated to provide further context and clarity." I assume Jeffrey's working from the original.)

    Armour’s column is so stridently deranged that its title announces up-front that you’re taking a temporary trip to the moral funhouse: “It’s Time to Stop Pretending That Caitlin Clark’s Flops Are Harmless.” First off, for those prone to misusing the phrase “begging the question,” here is a perfect example of a title that does just that: it assumes that what we’ve seen are flops. I see a woman who has, quite frankly, been kicked around the court like a hackeysack by opposing teams for several years and is complaining to the refs about not getting foul calls, as players often will. How is that harmful?

    Because in Armour’s moral world, the real threat here is not to Caitlin Clark’s right quadricep but rather to the dignity and safety of the black women who play against her. As Armour describes it, if Clark “flops” during a game . . . she’s apparently encouraging her white fans to take justice into their own hands and lynch the hated blacks. I’m not kidding about this, though I wish I were:

    It shouldn’t need reminding this country has an awful history of Black people being harmed, even killed, in the name of “defending” white women. The irony of the WNBA’s All-Star Game is that it’s happening this weekend in Chicago, the hometown of Emmett Till, who became an icon of the civil rights movement after his tragic murder. The local art gallery is currently hosting an exhibit imagining his life if he hadn’t been lynched. While it’s incumbent on the WNBA to do more to protect its players, there also should be an expectation on Clark to recognize the broader implications of her actions being weaponized.

    First off, marvel at that rhetorical stretch. Emmett Till was killed in Mississippi by Jim Crow racists in the Fifties, which is just like Caitlin Clark complaining after being fouled at next week’s All-Star Game . . . and it’s all connected because Chicago. (This one fact alone meant I had to write this. Somehow it’s always MAGA country’s fault.) Then step back further and gaze with disbelief upon the neo-Stalinist moral logic: because others might react badly to her public disapproval at being abused, she must remain silent (and take more abuse). It is howlingly, outrageously wrong — a complete inversion of all accepted principle.

    Disclaimer: I have never knowingly watched a WNBA game.

  • I see what you did there, Deirdre. Deirdre McCloskey provides A Reading List of Real Economics anyone who's looking for a respite from … imaginary economics, I guess. Buried in the middle of the list:

    “Donald” McCloskey, The Applied Theory of Price. A PDF is available at Deirdre McCloskey’s website. Deirdre is Donald’s smarter sister. The book has hundreds of problems, in the style of an engineering text.

    Good news: Deirdre did not have her sense of humor removed in the operation.