LLMs, Math, and being Human

LLM's have really been tearing it up in the field of math lately.  Really phenomenal stuff as my brother pointed out to me recently.

Here's the thing though, we tend to forget that math is actually a language invented by humans.  Sure, the most useful language - the language of logic, the language of science.  But just like writing clear prose, people who are good at it tend to be smart people. So, we feel especially threatened when LLMs sound human or do math!

However, since the LLM's already blew us away with their ability to write clear expository essays - of course math was next.  Those same underlying connections between the tokens of language that enable it to strip away the fluff and get at the foundations of the relationships between words and ideas in language is exactly what math needs too.

Now, we must think about what it means to be good at being human if some of our core skills are being eclipsed by machines.  Emotions, intuition, the absurd, the irrational?  Nick Cave has often written that music is at its most powerful in its original form:  in-person performances where the group of humans on stage is in emotional resonance with the audience.  

My role as a teacher has never been clearer (or more difficult).  I can't pretend like my primary job is to explain the physics cleanly and in a well scaffolded way.  Really, I am there to make sense of the relationship a person can have to physics:  the beauty of it, the way it can transform and sharpen your thinking, the impact it has had and will have on society.  In a way, share my own emotional response to physics with my students.  This was probably always true, but it was never as clear to me as now.