Artificial intelligence is also influencing scientific research
The second “World’s Top Scientists Forum” was sponsored by the Shanghai Municipal People’s Government, initiated by the World’s Leading Scientists Association, the China Association for Science and Technology as the guiding unit, and the Sequoia China Charity Foundation as a global strategic partner. . There are 44 Nobel Prize winners, 21 Wolf Prize, Lasker Award, Turing Award, MacArthur Award, Fields Medal and other award winners, more than 100 outstanding young scientists and Chinese and foreign academicians.
At the Mobius Forum on the morning of October 31st, the Fields Prize winner Sir Timothy Gowers also made a speech. Sir Timothy Gals is a British mathematician and winner of the 1998 Fields Medal. In the report, he mentioned that one question is: What will mathematics look like in 2100? What’s more interesting is that artificial intelligence is likely to affect mathematical research. In the future, it is likely to prove an axiom or formula that can be proved directly by inputting into a computer.
The following is the content of the report.
Sir Timothy Gals:
I want to talk about a very simple question. What will mathematics look like in 2100? It may not be easy to answer. First of all, I don’t want to say this, but I have to say that we don’t know what human civilization looks like in 2100. At that time, there was no mathematics or not. The whole civilization would collapse, which would threaten the development of mathematics. Climate change and other various problems made people feel that we have no energy and resources to engage in pure mathematics. If these purely mathematical research institutions survived in 2100, I believe that the mathematics that are currently being done may not exist in 2100.
Of course, I am not enough for three minutes. I can expand this point. I can tell you about my reasons soon. I will talk about a lesser possibility. Most mathematicians may say that this is not the reason. It is very important that mathematics is now more and more extensive. Every time solving a problem will create 10 new problems, so the scope of mathematics is getting wider and wider.
Another reason is that the harder we work, the easier the fruits will be picked. Everyone sees the papers in mathematics writing longer and longer, because it is more and more important to achieve an original achievement. It is difficult. The entrance threshold of the mathematics industry will become higher and higher, which will make young people feel that they do not want to learn mathematics, but learn machine learning.
I think the bigger threat comes from artificial intelligence, I am talking aboutIt’s not just deep learning. Now artificial intelligence has not yet reached a major breakthrough. I personally think that I have done some research in the field of artificial intelligence. I think computers can prove some formulas, axioms and theorems themselves, and computers will be self-contained. It will start to slowly retreat. It will become more and more difficult to exceed the machine, and the threshold of the mathematics industry will become higher and higher. If the machine reaches a certain level, we will prove an axiom or formula in the future and directly prove it by inputting it in the computer. I think this phenomenon will become more and more common in the future. All aspects of human beings will be threatened by artificial intelligence. We must rediscover the new meaning of survival, thank you.