In The Wake Of The Latest Unprecedented AI Proofs, What Now For Mathematics And Mathematicians?

In this view, mathematicians will still prove theorems and come up with counterexamples, but they will do it because they enjoy it, not because their career depends upon it. Society will benefit from the coming flood of new AI-derived results, as we move from an era of proof scarcity to an era of proof abundance, but there will still be a place for human mathematicians to interpret those results, to pass them on to the wider community, and to build on them, probably using AI to do so. In this respect, they will become what the “technical philosopher” Logan Graves calls “priests”

On Techdirt.

How copyright is being abused to censor Albania’s Flamingo Revolution

As that indicates, this is not a new problem. Walled Culture the book discusses similar cases of copyright being abused for the purposes of censorship, notably as part of online “reputation management” services. These often use false claims of copyright infringement to remove material that is damaging or embarrassing to their clients. The application of similar censorship techniques on a large scale against politically inconvenient material in Albania shows how copyright continues to be perverted for purposes far from the purported ones of encouraging and rewarding creativity.

On Walled Culture.

The End Of The Line

An absurdly slow, cold crawl across

The Thar desert, dotted with small dark

Shrubs, which - of course - by night were imposs-

ible to see, during a ten-hour journey mark-

ed otherwise by nothing.  A single train track

To the honeycomb-stones of Jaisalmer stopped short

Of the walled town, as if suddenly lack-

ing the will to move.  The sullen, tethered thought

I had no hotel chilled me.  It was just fool-

ish. I did try: from Jodhpur, I booked

A long-distance call, waited a hundred cruel

minutes, connected, spoke, failed.  It looked

Like I’d doss down with the camels.  It should have been clearer:

This would all be lost, with the end of a mobile-less era.

(18.9.26) v 1.5

Moody Sonnets.