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Comment by regularfry | Hacker News Reader

We have people who want to fill those positions because there are enough people who find it rewarding enough. Take away reasons why they would find it rewarding and you will have fewer theories and results that will advance our civilisation.

And yes, fun counts. Nobody said this had to be only a hardship.

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Money doesn't work that way though. There are plenty of jobs people would like to get paid to do, that doesn't mean someone needs to psy them to do it.

I'm well aware that if at some point AI is good enough to replace me as a software engineer then I won't have a job. I don't expect a company to continue to pay me simply because I enjoy it if there are cheaper options out there.

Math is no different.

As long as that company doesn't expect me to continue in their employment if I stop enjoying it, then we understand each other.

Total compensation includes fun.

Oh sure, you're well within your right to leave a job when you're sick of it. Nothing wring with that.

So what? Why should my life be ruled by money alone? Why should my life not have a mix of intrisic and extrinsic motivational drives? Why should I respect a company like OpenAI that disrespects my mix of extrinsic and extrinsic drives when I am the customer?

Or am I just a product to them?

This is really the critical thing: the fun is the incentive. (Or at least the dominant incentive in math, historically.) As economists like to say, the overarching lesson in economics is that incentives matter. Reduce the incentives and participation will decrease.

Perhaps that won't matter if we enter an era where AI participants are the main participants who matter for discovery-level mathematics. But it would likely be what economists would see as a market failure if only a small oligopoly of AI participants, closely held behind closed doors, is able to fill that intellectual role.

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