Rut roh! AI done it again

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A NYT article, ‘Breathtaking,’ ‘Devastating’: Mathematics Reels After New OpenAI Release, adds to the rapidly mounting evidence that AI could be on the verge of a sharp increase in its ability to catch up with the intelligence or most advanced thinking of the most intelligent humans on Earth. That is not to say that AI has achieved general intelligence on all areas of knowledge. But where it is being focused, math in this instance, indicates that a long, slow march of little advances is ending and a period of rapid major advances is now underway.

A couple of days ago, the AI giant OpenAI released a torrent of advances in mathematics it had accumulated recently. Mathematician Alex Kontorovich, chair of the department of mathematics at Rutgers, commented: “If a human did this, it would be an instant Fields Medal, no questions asked.” The Fields Medal is the equivalent of a Nobel Prize (which has no medal for math).

That was about was just one of the more than 300 math advances that OpenAI released all at once last Tuesday. The released advances include movement on crucial open questions in nearly every subfield of math, including algebra, number theory, theoretical computer science, mathematical logic and topology.

Martin Bridson, a mathematician at Oxford and the president of the Clay Mathematics Institute commented: “Until very recently, it would have been impossible to imagine that the frontiers of mathematics could move so far in one day. ….. breathtaking ….. The list of problems includes several that were guiding challenges in my own research. I have thought hard about all of these problems.”

Ken Ono, a professor at the University of Virginia and founding mathematician at Axiom Math, a math-focused artificial intelligence firm, commented: “I imagine many mathematicians, like me, felt like they got punched in the stomach yesterday. But that feeling is quickly giving way to excitement and determination. For those working to push mathematics forward, this is a challenge and an invitation to aim higher. ….. We should embrace the power that the machines offer, but we should not be indentured to follow their lead.”

Bryna Kra, a mathematician at Northwestern University, articulated how big and unsettling this advance is to mathematics: “Peer review is gone in this process. So, the question is, what kind of impact will these A.I.-generated results have? This is going to take a long time for the math community to digest. ….. Perhaps the most relevant issue is that by releasing this trove of material in this manner, the companies are in the process of destroying the ecosystem that made it possible for this work. While this batch of papers has improved in the citations to the past literature, there are numerous indications that they have benefited from access to many arguments, only some of which are published. The mathematician who wants to make use of these amazing tools to advance their research instead risks giving their ideas away.”

Ah yes, the human element is there is spades. Retired French mathematician, Jean-Pierre Serre (emeritus professor, Collège de France in Paris), put his finger directly on the human element: “Mathematicians take pleasure in doing maths in two different ways: learning and finding new things. Hence a conflict: A.I. increases the first pleasure and lowers the second one. The problem is it may lower the pleasure too much; that is especially serious for young mathematicians”. Simply put, AI making new findings might impair the motivation and pleasure in doing the very hard, very slow work of people doing math the old-fashioned, pre-AI way. It’s a human thing, not an AI thing.

Kai Shaikh, a PhD math student at the University of Toronto, Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute, comments: “Just like a photograph of a mile marker can’t provide much of the value of actually going on a hike, it would seem to me that proofs without stories, or even stories without struggle or mystery, and first glimpses of strange beasts, are not very meaningful or valuable to us humans.”

For mathematicians, things will never be the same – has the AI genie left the lamp, or is the Kraken unleashed?

There’s the human condition again. It cannot be denied or escaped.

Clearly, AI is now at the outer limit of human knowledge in mathematics and maybe also human mathematical intelligence. This is exciting and scary at the same time. We’re playing with something we do not fully understand. It can help us, hurt us or both.

Q: Given the human condition, or at least American politics since ~2000, does it seem increasingly apparent or important that we need intelligent, competent, pro-public interest guidance and regulation of AI, or should that just be left to the markets running free, wild and butt-naked without any regulations?

The quasi-Reimann hypothesis advance is what the expert called instant Field Medal work for a human

This stuff just goes on and on and on

What AI will do for or to us in the future

What about reasonably regulated capitalism 

compared to pure capitalism or socialism?

This week on TDS, America’s only source for news, Jon Stewart raised the issue of what the future might look like. Stewart’s performance ~8:00 to ~14:40 of this video goes to the heart of the matter. When asked what the future of jobs would be in AI’s utopian wonderland, video clips of the CEOs and top players in the AI industry showed that none of them had any remotely credible answer. None whatsoever. Absolutely, positively no idea at all.

One of them said such speculation was something akin to being beyond human comprehension. Stewart pointed out that all of these brilliant geniuses could easily speculate a utopian human future somehow driven by AI, but they could not speculate on how that future would actually manifest itself for real people.

None of those brilliant AI geniuses, smarter than most everyone else (except Trump of course / s), could even come up with a plausible wild-ass guess. All the top AI dogs told us that there would be a gigantic explosion of new jobs. Not the same as old jobs, but a hyper-abundance of completely new, very high paying jobs. Vast new wealth would be gushing out of everywhere. Maybe not surprisingly, none of the experts could say exactly what all the new jobs might entail. One yahoo, the top dog at Nvidia went waaaay out on a limb and speculated that the new industries and jobs might include wellness centers and spas! Stewart pointed out that those jobs have existed at least since 2000 BC.

By the end of that segment, expert opinion boiled down to a true utopian vision that jobs would probably become obsolete because there would be so much of everything for everyone. Musk speculated that, if people wanted a job in his vision of an AI utopia they could take a job as a hobby. Musk commented that there would be so much abundance that there would not be a universal basic income. Instead, there would be a universal high income. People would just get free money or wealth from all the abundance.

Stewart boiled that insane crackpottery down to this: If capitalism with unfettered, unregulated AI is allowed to do its thing without any interference from anyone except the AI geniuses running the unregulated capitalist show, the end result would be socialism.

Human history and the human condition

If one looks dispassionately and with an open mind at history since the start of the industrial age, about 1750-1760, and the human condition what does one see? What one sees in history is a gradual but major shift from predominantly agricultural economies and hand production toward machine-powered manufacturing and factories. What one sees with the human condition is that it doesn’t change much. The owners of the means of production and wealth in the industrial age, almost always tried to keep as much wealth and power for themselves as they could.

One has to ask, why would that be any different in the age of the hypothesized AI utopia? Why would the geniuses owning and running AI be any different from the plutocrats and oligarchs that went before them? Has human nature changed a whole lot since ~1750? Listen carefully to modern multi-billionaires, including the ones that Stewart played video clips of. When it comes to wealth and power, how are they as a group of people any different from past groups of wealthy and powerful people like Rockefeller, Mellon, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, etc.? Did a lot of the new wealth that the industrial age created and a few people owned and controlled trickle down to average people and workers? Hell no.

Even today in 2026, billionaires, centimillionaires and decamillionaires as a group generally oppose regulations and taxation. They tell people to stop being lazy, get a job and do bootstrap pulling.[1]

Q1: Does the distribution of the vast wealth and power that AI could generate in the future depend on economic arrangements and political policy, or will technological capability alone generate so much “abundance” that even multi-billionaires will have enough to allow for a universal high income because, e.g., they can’t carry that much cash around or whatever?

Q2: Are the AI geniuses naive idiots or stone-cold liars when they tell us to not worry about jobs because there will be a universal high income for everyone, with peace and harmony settled on the land?

Footnote:

1. For the moment at least, a fly in the regulation of AI ointment is comes from the recent scare that unregulated AI might kill us all. Some top dog AI geniuses see a potential for AI to get loose and cause billions of human deaths. There have been a few squeaks about maybe the AI industry really does need some regulations. But that spasm of social conscience will pass, just like a spasm of shock from Trump’s 1/6 violent coup attempt passed for a few MAGA politicians in congress.

What happens when special interests dominate the public interest

AI data centers consume huge 

amounts of electricity

As usual, it’s almost all and only about wealth and power. About the most protection for the public interest us and the public interest can expect from the MAGA party in congress is feeble virtue signaling. Special interests own and control the MAGA party. An article by tom’s Hardware, US Senate kills bill that could potentially shield Americans from skyrocketing power bills due to AI data centers — opponents say bill is ‘toothless’ and doesn’t do enough to protect citizens, makes the situation clear. MAGA politicians proposed a bill that makes it look like they want to protect consumers from costs of gigantic new data centers for AI. The proposed law, the Ratepayer Protection Act, was a bill designed to shield everyday Americans from rapidly rising electricity costs driven by data center buildouts nationwide.

How would the proposed bill to protect consumers from eating the costs of AI electricity demands? By imposing a federal standard for states and Public Utility Commissions that required regulators to consider whether entities that consume large amounts of electricity, such as data centers, should pay the incremental costs of energy infrastructure needed to serve them. MAGA politicians in the House and Senate proudly voted for the toothless bill, but Senate Dems opposed it. The bill died in the Senate because MAGA could not override a Dem veto. In line with special interest benefits, the proposed bill did not require any utility anywhere to do anything to protect consumers. It only required them to consider protecting consumers.

How this will probably play out

Given how sophisticated MAGA and allied special interest propaganda is, most consumers are probably gonna get whacked with big electricity rate increases disguised as something or anything other than charges for the AI industry and big corporate AI users to shift costs onto us so they can capture the cash. Absent enforceable rules to protect us, the cost burden will be allocated through opaque utility proceedings and tactics. We will not see an explicit line item labeled “AI subsidy” or cost. The new charges are likely to quietly appear as (1) bills paid later for infrastructure built against forecasts of future electricity demand, (2) higher base rates and delivery charges, (3) “grid-modernization” or reliability surcharges, (4) new generation and transmission investments characterized as serving the overall load growth, and/or (5) public subsidies and tax expenditures that reduce public revenue for schools, infrastructure, and services.

The bottom line for special interest before the public interest politics is predictable in our now fully corrupted pay-to-play political system. The added cost burden will very likely be diffuse, delayed, technical, hard for any individual household to trace to one firm or one project, and/or hard to impossible to understand. Meanwhile, benefits will be concentrated with utilities, hyperscalers**, big landowners, major contractors, and MAGA-connected developers.

** A hyperscaler is a technology company that operates enormous, globally distributed data-center networks and sells computing power, data storage, networking, and increasingly AI capacity on demand. The usual examples include Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud. Companies like OpenAI are not yet hyperscalers.

Q1: Is it likely that (1) if passed, this bill would this bill have done nothing of substance because nothing stops regulators right now from considering consumer protections, and (2) this bill was only designed to make MAGA politicians in congress look good just before the midterms, so that they can win and continue screwing us for at least the next two years, if not forever?

Q2: Is is fair to say that MAGA politics is almost exclusively about a struggle about concentrating wealth and power with elites at the expense of the public interest?[1]

Footnote:

1. For better or worse, the public interest is a contested concept, arguably an essentially contested concept. Some people will sincerely believe that leaving electricity rates up to the free markets best serves the public interest. Others will disagree. In a democracy, reasonable compromise is supposed to deal with intractable disagreements like this. In authoritarian states, public opinion is mostly irrelevant. To MAGA’s authoritarianism, contrary public opinion is usually mostly irrelevant, unless it is election time. In election season, MAGA politicians try to deliver enough lip service about what we want to get elected or re-elected. The rest of the time, MAGA elites demagogue on us and deceive us to our endless detriment.

In politics, we usually don’t get what we want but we sometimes do get what we voted for.

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It’s not dementia, it’s malicious cruelty, corruption, bigotry and tyranny

Another observer has come to the conclusion that Trump’s extremely nasty brand of politics isn’t due merely to dementia. Instead, it much worse than that. A substack post, Trump’s Behavior Isn’t Dementia. The Truth Is Far Worse, cogently argues that that attributing Trump’s behavior to dementia mistakes an intentional, long-running authoritarian style for cognitive incapacity. That risks excusing or minimizing the political danger of the bigoted, cruel, kleptocratic authoritarianism that drives the MAGA wealth and power political movement.

Simply put, the argument is that calling Donald Trump’s conduct “dementia” is unsupported and politically misleading. Its central claim is that his behavior is better understood as an intentional, longstanding pattern of domination, cruelty, manipulation, and exploitation of chaos, not an involuntary cognitive disorder. The post contends that a dementia explanation wrongly turns deliberate conduct into a medical mystery and can can lead people underestimate his personal agency.

This is not new. For decades, Trump used provocation, humiliation, dishonesty, insults, and aggressive norm-breaking as tools for gaining attention, exerting power, and keeping opponents off balance. His incoherence and erratic conduct need not reflect mental incapacity alone, which probably is significant. Mental incapacity can and very likely does coexist with his calculated, toxic political behavior. Blaming it all on dementia can have unhelpful impacts such as reducing his accountability by framing harmful actions as medical symptoms instead of choices, encouraging public passivity, or obscure the enabling role of allies, media systems, and voters who support or normalize Trump’s extremely abnormal conduct and politics.

What about Project 2025?

Regarding evidence of intentionality, the substack post points out that Trump and MAGA elites are well on their way to accomplishing hundreds of authoritarian and kleptocratic goals laid out in Project 2025. As of October 2, 2026, the Project 2025 Tracker shows 141 objectives that MAGA completed, with another 70 underway. That requires sustained, focused intent and planning, That is not random loose cannon blasts. Public attention to Trump’s mental decline distracts people from the ~66% of tracked Project 2025 objectives already completed or underway. Trump personally has completed 11 of 13 tracked executive-office objectives, with two more underway.

Q1: Is it likely that Trump’s toxic corruption and authoritarianism is mostly knowing and intentional and not primarily driven by dementia?

Q2: Whatever Trump’s cognitive state, is he nonetheless still morally responsible for his administration’s successful or ongoing pursuit of 211 authoritarian, kleptocratic Project 2025 objectives, or is what he’s doing a good thing and making America great again, or something else?

MAGA’s authoritarian and kleptocratic damage runs broad and deep