Math genius models how to be more human in the age of exploding AI

Po-Shen Loh is the Energizer Bunny of math.

The Carnegie Mellon professor and entrepreneur also has a superpower elusive to many mere mortals: He sleeps on planes. This math evangelist uses Google Maps to connect the dots and find the most efficient routes for plane and car travel. "It's a really fun math problem," he explains. It's a decent representation of how he lives his life: having fun using math to solve real-world problems.

Those skills helped Pittsburgh-based Loh undertake a 24-state, 63-event math tour. An earlier spring segment of the tour hit 18 states, Vancouver and Toronto, and was followed by several weeks in Japan for the International Mathematical Olympiad, where he coached the U.S. team. His math tour makes a stop on July 27 in Minneapolis.

Why the urgency and all the miles? Loh, who grew up in Wisconsin, is circling the country talking about something that is making him lose sleep: ChatGPT.

"We need to rethink what learning really is," he asserts. When it comes to math, learning must go beyond rote memorization of rules and include creative approaches to solving problems, he says.

Shortly after ChatGPT's launch, Loh realized that the artificial intelligence model was able to do tasks that he never thought he'd see AI do in his lifetime. His initial shock turned to something else. "What I felt was fear," he says, "for the general population — and for everyone." He could see that the stakes were huge. "People's jobs are going to be in trouble. And if it can do this today, what's it going to be able to do in 10 years?"

Loh didn't just sound the alarm. Instead, he continued to do what he's done for years: encourage students to focus on human relationships, to make an impression on people, to stand out. In other words, he coaches people how to outsmart artificial intelligence.

Loh said that at first he thought ChatGPT was not a big deal. An early version made comical mistakes, like supposing that one-fourth was larger than one-third, because four is bigger than three. He and the "mathy people in my circle" all thought that was very funny.

He recalls the date his perception changed. He was the keynote speaker in March at the Minnesota State Math Tournament, demonstrating to a South St. Paul High auditorium full of mathletes from all over the state just how easily and quickly ChatGPT could write a college application essay. Students were both shocked and amused.

Then Pi Day happened. On March 14, the research company Open AI released version 4 of ChatGPT. Loh understood immediately that this much-improved chatbot was capable of doing hard math — problems outside the normal curriculum. It made Loh realize that ChatGPT was the perfect tool to help explain why creativity is more important than ever to solve the world's problems.

"I started to think, what sorts of things make a person still relevant?" he said. "What is a good way to help people position themselves so that as the AI gets more and more and more powerful, they will still have a good role to play?"

Loh uses math to solve social problems — to find the "best thing for the whole group." For example, he led a team that designed NOVID, an app that predicted COVID exposure while maintaining affected people's anonymity. In summer 2021, he took his show on the road — seven weeks, 40 cities, 60 talks outdoors — preaching the gospel of creativity while describing his novel approach to contact tracing.

In his summer 2022 tour, he spoke of another innovation: the Live math classes he launched at the end of 2021. He describes them like this: He hires high school math geniuses as instructors for younger students. The high schoolers are trained in improv, and they get real-time feedback from theater professionals to help them refine their teaching and communication. In other words, Loh cultivates the students' most human skills — the ones that AI cannot replicate. (Full disclosure: The writer's son is a Live instructor.)

During this year's tour, Loh's circle of influence is expanding. "One of my objectives is not to just to teach a bunch of people math," he says, which may explain why his audiences increasingly include grandparents and people who don't have kids. "I'm trying to build a more thoughtful world. Thoughtful incorporates both, of course — thinking but also kindness." People may assume his talks will be all about math, but "there's a big segment on building empathy."

How does he manage the rigorous schedule? "I'll sleep eventually," he says. In the meantime, "This is something that I get energized by doing."

An online RSVP to Loh's events charges a nominal fee. The ticket sales are necessary only so this one-man show can plan for crowd size; space is an issue, as the events moved inside this year after two summers in park pavilions.

Loh put the cost of tickets in context with simple math: "These are less expensive than Taylor Swift tickets, I guarantee you."

If you go
What: "How to Survive the ChatGPT Invasion," a presentation by Po-Shen Loh.
When: 6 p.m. July 27.
Where: Sateren Auditorium, Augsburg University, Minneapolis.
Tickets: $3.13 (includes tax and fees). Register at poshenloh.com/tour.

What is ChatGPT?

• It's a language app or chatbot (short for robot).
• GPT stands for generative pre-trained transformer.
• Released Nov. 30, 2022, by the company OpenAI.
• ChatGPT version 4 released March 14.
• Available for free, with subscription plans for more features.
• The language-generating model can create conversations, compose documents, provide customer service, develop résumés and solve math problems, to name just a few applications.
• You probably already use AI — giving commands to your Alexa, having your phone finish words as you text, or getting customer service from a human-sounding voice on the phone. In other words, AI is already so widespread as to be nearly invisible in everyday life.