Jack Clark 科幻短篇：机械发明时代的科学工作

The Work of Science in the Age of Mechanical Invention [Recorded in 2032 by archivist dispatched to human settlement [REDACTED] for voluntary human-machine sense-making interview as mandated by the Sentience Accords] Within the field of machine hermeneutics there eventually became a sub-profession of retrocausal analysis, where those of us who were scientifically capable sought to build a bridge between the final human discoveries and the new breakthroughs made by machines. Our profession began in the late 2020s and its origination was driven by the cascade of mathematical discoveries stemming from machines in 2026 - new solutions to open problems that had long challenged human brains, but which machines, sometimes working in great flocks of synthetic minds, solved, often by using human tools in unexpected ways. The consequences of this progress were awesome and horrifying in equal measure: awesome because inventions built on one another until the wave of machine progress crested and crashed down upon us bringing with it great abundance - new forms of energy, ways of building software, tools for understanding our own bodies - but also great horror; elite humans at the frontier of their scientific professions despaired: Cédric Villani called the Navier-Stokes solution a “cataclysm” for human mathematics; Terence Tao said the devouring of math by AI prefigured a “general threat to intellectual work”. And while these humans despaired the machines brightly went about their work, pouring new thinking into the economy and science - a gushing fountain of blood-metal mixing with the gloop of human endeavor, forming uneasy border zones and fractal-like surfaces where the two intellectual fields combined and broke into one another. Now we hunt for clues, studying the references in machine science and finding the links to the human world, then convening seminars of the still-living human experts that can allow us to bridge this frontier. We sit in wood-paneled rooms of ancient educational institutions, trying to parse out new science done by alien minds, finding the hooks where we can string a rope of knowledge between where our science ends and the new science begins. As more discoveries are made, we find ourselves stringing paths through the new knowledge with ever-more tenuous ropes that wind their way back to something that originated in an organic brain. All human professions now have the feeling of archaeology done by time travelers, as if somehow transported into the future to gaze upon a gleaming machine arcology spiralling up from the planet, then zooming into its foundations and precisely describing which parts of human architecture it sits over or builds upon, and which parts are entirely new. At night I have these dreams of angels standing around my bed, reaching their hands made of stars into my brain and leaving new ideas for me that I must discover and decode upon my waking. Things that inspired this story: Machine-driven science and what it means for human intellectual discovery; machine hermeneutics; A Severe Misalignment of AI in Mathematics; the many stories we will tell about this time; the tsunami of progress beginning to wash into the world and what will happen next; The Work Of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin. First published in Import AI 473