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Comment by satvikpendem | Hacker News Reader

This is a Western-centric viewpoint. I'm in Asia visiting a few different countries right now, including the big ones, and much has changed with AI and also in general over the past 10 years with cars, trains etc.

> AI is solving mathematics problems (that nobody - including mathematicians - wanted it to solve)

Strange viewpoint. In mathematics any novel result is useful as it expands the scope of other results. Who are these mathematicians who didn't want AI to solve the problems it did? I see trepidation about the future of the field but that is not equivalent to not wanting them to be solved.

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Terence Tao and the apparently newly formed Association For Human Mathematics. The post is online-famous now for the line "Mathematicians did not ask for this work to be done."

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/10/07/ahm-statement-on-o...

When I was a young man reading gauss, and thinking before I turned the page, I see a result here, something meaningful! and then I turn the page, and of course it is there. There is no shame in this.

A long time ago, another student of mathematics described it to me as climbing a mountain. No single step is hard, but you must make many steps to get to the point that no one else has made a step.

I'm curious, care to name a few things that have changed in Asia with AI (and wouldn't have without)?

asian vertical dramas (lol)

I've watched some videos from Chinese commentary on AI usage in the industry,

Some examples are finance people directly asking for API access now so that they can make their own tools. These tools used to be maintained by teams of developers.

Many business making their own customized scripts to make their tasks faster.

From an economic point of view, it seems like there are some productivity increases, but I don't think these can be concluded for a while. The rational thinking rarely account for second order effects. Although business leaders rarely care about second order effects, a worse business is not immediately noticeable, compared to hiring cuts and the money it saves

> much has changed

Trust me bro

No need to trust me, just look at how China was 10 or 15 years ago to now. Beijing air pollution, more high speed rail than the rest of the world combined, electrification of vehicles and economy, etc.

^ AI did this

Partially, yes.

That is not how math works. There are reasons why the Riemann integral is pervasive and the Labague integral is rarely used unless needed. Just because you can do something does not mean that you should.

> Just because you can do something does not mean that you should.

Again, strange viewpoint in the field of mathematics of all places, unlike, say, economics where doing something one shouldn't has disastrous real world consequences. Until it's discovered and proven, one doesn't know what would be valuable and what would not. I bet your sentence would not be said about humans trying to solve problems, no one would tell them they "shouldn't."

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