Navier-Stokes and Dolores Dei
Slight spoilers for Disco Elysium.
I am not a mathematician; I have no expertise in this race. And the only horse I have is a concern for my peers and the wellbeing of society.
If you’re interested in hearing the thoughts of the math community about the impact of AI on mathematical research, I think Terence Tao has spoken intelligently about it (recently here and here, but also extensively on his Bluesky and blog). I invite you to read Tristan Buckmaster’s statement about the “Navier-Stokes smoothness and existence” priority dispute directly. Also of interest will be the open letter to the Caltech Mathathon, their subsequent respose, and OpenAI’s withdrawal from sponsoring the event. The only thing I can bring to the table is an idle musing.
The 2019 video game Disco Elysium was created by ZA/UM, a UK-based (but Estonian-founded) independent video game company. Inasmuch as any game is the product of its leads, it was the creation of game director Robert Kurvitz, artist Alexander Rostov, and lead writer Helen Hindpere. The game was a critical darling and commercial success. Kurvitz, Rostov, and Hindpere were then working on a direct sequel to the game until the the development studio was acquired, allegedly under fraudulent circumstances, by its CEO and executive producer. The three lead artists were fired from the company shortly afterwards. Since then the studio has been mired in controversy and lawsuits, bringing into question the relationship between human creatives and the companies which stand to benefit from their work.
Sorry, that’s all tangential to the story.
In the world of Elysium there is considered such a thing as an innocence: an influential thinker who is appointed by an ancient religious organization to shape the course of history.1This is, conceptually, a critique of the Great Man theory, where singular individuals are believed to be the main drivers of historical development rather than institutions and social forces. The entire game is actually just telling you about dialectical materialism – though if I have to explain that, we’ll be here all evening. At the time the game is set, there is no innocence currently “in office”. The most recent one ruled three hundred years ago, and her name was Dolores Dei.
ENCYCLOPEDIA: This is Her Innocence Dolores Dei – the innocence of humanism, internationalism, and the welfare state – perhaps the most famous human being ever to have lived.
Disco Elysium
She is described as a “preternaturally magnetic and intelligent individual”, an expert at contract bridge and chess and military war games, and someone possessing “a similar grasp in matters of philosophy, theology, and science.” She set in motion the discovery of the Insulindian isola (the continent where the game is set) and accelerated the world into secularism. There are many, many other details that I won’t enumerate – you can check out the conversation where she is described here. Instead I wanted to highlight something particular.
As Encyclopedia tells it, Dolores Dei was more isolated and socially-secluded than the previous innocences, and constantly surrounded by an elite set of secret servicemen known as the Therriers. Even her crowning was only witnessed by this select few. Even so, she was assassinated only twenty-two years later… by one of her own guards.
The man who killed her was said to have developed a belief: that Dolores Dei was “not entirely human, but something else”; that she was a creature from the future interfering with the course of history; and that perhaps (if you believe fan speculation on such things) she was accelerating the end of the world. What we do know for certain is what the man screamed at her, as she died:
We were supposed to come up with this ourselves!
ENCYCLOPEDIA: An innocence is infallible. The decisions made by one are not decisions. They are inevitabilities – what would have happened anyway, only accelerated, packed into decades instead of centuries.
Disco Elysium
I don’t tend to believe in breathless hype (or doom) about the imminence of ASI, which is largely spread by the kinds of people who still use Twitter. It seems to me that these agents are tools. Like all tools they have strengths and they have weaknesses. Instead I worry more about who is wielding those tools: what a government might do with an agentic swarm, or how a private company might thoughtlessly stunt long-term scientific development.
Right now we live in a world where people are wildly speculating about which Millenium Prize Problems might be solved next, and which Silicon Valley company might “get there first”. These are rumors; maybe they’re all bunk. In a week, a month, a year, we’ll know better. Today, though, all we have are stories.