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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

The bulk of the people on this planet do not make their money in advanced math but in mundane jobs that are well within the capabilities of AI as it is today. It will take some time to figure out how to put it all together but all of those jobs are on borrowed time unless there is some kind of regulatory action to stop that from happening.

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Perhaps. But as someone who uses AI to automate something that seems in the bucket of things you are talking about - it's harder than it seems, the edge cases are endless, claude code is worse at building real systems than people think and humans are doing a lot more than people realize once you start trying to automate.

All I'm saying is the math advances of late really hasn't changed much outside of math as far as AI is concerned.

Agreed, in the meantime, try finding work as (a) a translator (b) a junior programmer (c) a copywriter (d) a proofreader. And so on. There are so many job categories that are already feeling the impact of AI that I think it is wrong to focus on the plight of the mathematicians, I think their jobs are - for the most part anyway - still safe. It's the low end of the information processing where the real damage is.

Sure. I guess the reason some people don't feel so bad for the math folks is the people in those careers you highlight tend to not have the asset a math researcher has - a giant brain that is valuable outside their little world of math proofs.

Like bankruptcy, automation will happen gradually and then suddenly. This time last year LLMs hadn't solved a single open mathematics conjecture of note. Within months they solved a millennium prize problem.

Robotics is likely to follow a similar trajectory. You can say that robotics is not clinical like mathematics is, yet it kind of is, you can create simulated training environments of any complexity.

It's a bad analogy. Math proofs lend themselves to just throwing more compute at the problem both in training and at inference, you can verify when you are done. Most tasks don't lend themselves well to training or inference.

Robotics isn't really a coherent grouping. Some things that would be termed "robotics" are already "solved", other things aren't even close and need actuating and sensing capabilities that are miles off or so cost prohibitive that it doesn't make any sense.

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