Hacker News Reader

HNHacker News

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by fortzi | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

fortzi·

AI doing the math for us means that we are not doing the math. To people who like doing math, this is depressing.

I’m baffled every time I see people who just don’t get that.

View on HN

Most people care much more about the results than mathematician's enjoyment.

The result is that humanity will progressively become worse at math because no new student will have had to take the steps to figure things out themselves. How long it is possible for society to rely purely on AI math results remains to be decided.

This seems to assume a finite number of interesting math problems. Good mathematicians should be able to learn new techniques from the LLM generated proofs.

Maybe most people don’t find it depressing. That takes away nothing from the experience and feelings of those who do.

There is not a fixed amount of math to be done in the world.

Maybe, maybe not. But your "AI native mathematicians" aren't actually doing math, they are letting a machine do math for them. That is a lamentable future.

Are you implying that there’s always some math that AI isn’t doing? No worries, AI will do it “for you” tomorrow.

I'm implying that people can still do math even if AI is capable of signing it. Millions of kids still learn and do arithmetic despite calculators being able to do it for them.

Arithmetic is used in daily life. Mathematical research is work that some people dedicate their careers to, if not their lives. At least they used to.

People will still learn math, but way less people will study it, relative to today.

I hope I’m wrong.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com