Scientific work is too often challenged with this kind of question. If all you care about is results you know will happen you will never discover anything you don't allready know.
Yes to you and the person you are responding to! And the boorishness here is coming from a "tech person" [0], no less.
What have the technologically capable people who were the ones architecting these systems the past few decades given the world: a handful of Big Tech behemoths, with all the terrifically negative, stultifying effects that has had. The computing world has been willfully fragmented, and the landscape is awash with casualties; namely, every person out there who is terrified of their computing devices, who panics when the first pop-up screen appears.
Which is surely the minority on here, but in the big bad world, I would guess it's easily a majority of people.
And then the computer types have the gall to ask what number theory has done for humanity..!
The following should go without saying, but let's say it anyway: just because tech-y startups continue to attract historic levels of investment, doesn't necessarily mean that the stuff the tech world produces is in anyway useful or special or good or interesting. If you're not going to read a book or something on the topic (number theory), at least browse a couple of wikipedia articles, or get an LLM to summarise it for you, or something.
[0] I'm guessing this entirely from the tone and the forum we're on. Please tell me if I'm guessing incorrectly!
Dismissing purpose, and living in aimless complacency, is also boorish.
I don't want to come off as anti-pig here, pigs are OK. Number theory is OK too, it's probably the branch of mathematics I dislike least. But it's laudable to sometimes ask "what is it all for?", without wanting to attack or threaten anybody's occupation. No easy answer is available, but it's worth asking.
> No easy answer is available, but it's worth asking.
Beyond "expanding our knowledge about 'x'", a lot of disciplines don't have much of an answer, so I don't see the value in asking the question apart from trying to dismiss the relevant discipline.
So many of our technological advances have relied on chance discoveries (e.g. penicillin), so we can't predict ahead of time what the end uses are going to be. This is especially the case with maths as it is so abstract, but where would we be without Boolean logic, public key cryptography, information theory etc.?
> > No easy answer is available, but it's worth asking.
> .. trying to dismiss the relevant discipline
Yeah. The question is worth asking yourself, your teachers, colleagues, and your friends.. but usually not worth asking (or answering!) strangers on the internet.
This type of “but what is it all for!” question has a huge asymmetry where it’s easy to ask and hard to answer, so it comes across as trolling. And if you’re talking to an adult individual who wants to argue not even about the priorities of basic research but the fundamental point of any of it, you can be pretty sure any conversation about the subject is pointless. People who want to take an anti intellectual stance aren’t waiting to hear a good argument before they change their point of view..
I have a PhD in the humanities, have taught at the college level, published work of interest to no one outside of a small group of specialists, and am a professional software engineer (concealing my field and CV because my story is unusual and I like privacy).
I wouldn't identify the tech world with intellectual work. I mean, setting up a lemonade stand is arguably intellectual work if we use the term in a broad enough sense.
By intellectual work, I mean (and most people here mean, I think) that which has no clear or intended use other than to explore, master, discover, learn -- pure research, study, teaching -- or isn't justified by real-world, practical "usefulness."
I tend to share just about all of Jaron Lanier's views on the tech world you're describing -- critical of free and open culture, unimpressed by and dismissive of LLMs and "AI," hostile to social media, and overwhelmingly disappointed.
Intellectual, academic, edifying work continues, entirely separately, to be worthwhile. I don't ask what number theory does for humanity, because I don't expect or need it to be useful in any popularly "practical" sense, any more than I expect a poem to be.
The resources that public basically "donates" to the science are limited and there's always the question of priorities. Not just money, but people themselves. This is very valid question. One could argue that there's potential in studying almost everything: prime numbers, deep space, exotic matter, crash particles to each other, discover language structure, develop new programming paradigms, model economic behaviour, model nuclear winter. But those who giving money, need to choose and allocate. And those who want to study prime numbers while receiving money from government, inevitable need to prove why this particular study has value.
That validation already happens. I worked as a scientist for a decade before I went to industry, getting grants was a constant struggle - agencies and politicians don't just give out money randomly. One can argue that these processes aren't perfect and that some money gets wasted, and that it makes for weird incentives - but that's a whole other debate.
And even that time pales before the mental toll. When I first went about writing a grant application, I thought it would be technically easy---I knew the bureaucratic details would be tedious, but otherwise straightforward. Oh boy, I think it was the most mentally taxing, soul crushing work-related task I ever attempted. I failed to submit, by the way. My research output also plummeted that year.
Classic "penny wise, pound fooling" crap. We could probably be a hundred or more years ahead of where we are if we stopped sabotaging ourselves like this...
This type of expenditure is a rounding error. We spend more dollars on charging phones that is then spent on flipping videos on TikTok. And TikTok only exists because of this type of curiosity based research. Not to mention antibiotics, refrigerators, cars, GPS, etc, etc, etc. The list is literally too long.
100% of all progress is science/technology/infrastructure. Without it we would be living in caves.
