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Comment by nritchie | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to believe Grant but I find this assault on mathematics to be dehumanizing and demoralizing. AI has destroyed a major source of "life's meaning" for many people who pursued mathematics. Imagine waking up one morning to find that an alien technology has solved the problem you had dedicated your life to (and many more to boot.) Not another mathematician but an alien technology. As a scientist, I don't want to end up as a laboratory assistant to an AI. I can take not being the smartest human in the room, but I'm pretty sure I don't want to spend my life serving a silicon master.

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> Imagine waking up one morning to find that an alien technology has solved the problem you had dedicated your life to

I'm sympathetic to mathematicians but this does not paint them in a good light.

If your primary purpose is SOLVING the problem, you should be ecstatic! If your primary purpose was rent-seeking so you could play with puzzles*, you'd be very upset.

* I find this characterization overly harsh, but if you're mad about your problem being solved, maybe you weren't in it for the right reasons

It's completely natural to be attached to the process of your job, rather than the outcome. It's not a phenomenon restricted to mathematics. We can say it shouldn't be like that, but it is.

Don’t forget about emotions.

There’s something here about the journey not just the destination.

Press a button and problem solved is not too fun

I'm not entirely sure this is fair. My belief is that mathematics exists in the intersection between art and science. I don't believe in progress for its own sake, so I'm inclined to say those interested should undertake it for the art, or to "play with puzzles." The rent-seeking argument and "weren't in it for the right reasons" is the same argument as calling musicians sellouts when they start making money. Making money doesn't make you a sellout, but it can.

There is a difference between the process of solving a problem and a problem being solved. If I solve a problem myself, I understand it, I find out something new, I get to try lots of things. It's engaging and fun. If I tell you to go solve a problem, I can learn it afterwards but I miss out on the entire process.

Personally, I enjoy the process of solving problems. I do not enjoy wrangling unpredictable AI agents.

Yes howunfortunate probably also thinks AIs doing a student’s homework is just as good as the student doing the homework himself or herself.

I mean the only thing that matters is the answer right?

Homework is not usually something you get paid to do.

You get paid in exposure!

For a personal experience I 100% agree. Where I'm not sure where I land is when the problem solving is a job people are paid for. I wouldn't expect someone to be paid to enjoy the process of solving a problem, I'd pay them to solve it.

There are plenty of things I enjoy doing, but I try to do them as often as I can for the love of it rather than because someone is paying me to enjoy the process.

You never hired someone to find something useful to improve or fix? There a lot of people who are really good at that and really bad at just doing the things you tell them to do.

I've never hired anyone only to enjoy the process of trying to solve a problem. Imagine hiring a plumber that never solves your plumbing problem but had a hell of a time enjoying the process of trying to understand it. Would you want to pay them for that?

I would want to hire a plumber that does both, because his/her solution would be better and higher quality 100% of the times.

Into eh concept of the mathematics discussion, I wouldn't care to hire a plumber that could work through theoretical plumbing designs that have nothing to do with my house.

Having a plumber that can better solve problems during their work fixing a system is obviously a good thing. That simply isn't what is being discussed here, most mathematics research being raised are theoretical math that has no immediate practical use. That doesn't mean it shouldn't be worked on, but it isn't the same as solving a real world problem we have today.

This is pure math research we're talking about here. It's not exactly lucrative and people looking for commercially applicable results ASAP weren't funding it anyway.

It sounds like your argument is effectively that it isn't an economically viable pursuit.

People have been getting paid for it, and hopefully that can continue if they enjoy it, but why should we want them to be paid only to chase theoretical math if it has no valuable output, or if the value is in the pursuit rather than the output?

The ideal human society is not one where people are narrowly focused on creating widgets or increasing efficiency, narrowly construed. An ideal human society includes intellectual pursuits. Some of these pursuits do not suit dabblers, they take deep expertise that can only happen from a lifetime of directed effort. We are collectively better off when some value is spent in ways that isn't aimed at maximum efficient allocation.

It's funny, the justification for accelerationism is that people can be paid (UBI) to pursue their passions. On the other hand, we have those that are asking why anyone should be paid for work that isn't economically viable. I suspect we're being sold a load of bullshit.

I don't support a UBI, for what its worth. The idea is nonsensic from my vantage point, if there's a certain minimum level of good people should have access to it makes more sense to give it to them rather than to give them some level of cash that can on theory buy it.

More importantly, I'm curious how you define an ideal human society. How do you land on what ideal is, or what it would take to get there?

>More importantly, I'm curious how you define an ideal human society. How do you land on what ideal is, or what it would take to get there?

The question is in what context does the human psyche thrive? We find meaning in personal struggle and overcoming obstacles. We're happiest when we're striving for something out of reach but seemingly attainable. We're much less happy when we have all of our needs met but have no source of meaning or fulfilling struggle. Our evolutionary history is one of struggling against hardship and finding personal meaning in the process. This is a core feature of our psyche and it is to our detriment to eliminate it.

This isn't to say we should all be struggling for our next meal. Much like cats, our core drives can be exercised and satiated through a simulacrum. There are many ways it can be satisfied, but strive we must, against something with inherent meaning to us. The problem with AI fully realized is that it takes away most avenues for human achievement, thus the struggle loses all meaning.

My point is that this was already the case, i.e. math research was already not a "dollars go in, useful proofs come out" field. The people lamenting the future of mathematics are largely not focused on the economics, they're focused on the fact that anything they might apply their efforts to could get sniped by a frontier lab at any moment. That is obviously demotivating.

But reading the threads here on HN, in response to people saying "this sucks", AI boosters would rather redirect the conversation into economics and feign outrage that people are being paid to do mathematics at all.

Suddenly folks seem to be both in contempt of the idea of solving abstract puzzles without practical application, and certain that they want a higher efficiency of abstract puzzles solved per dollar (again, puzzles they probably don't care about).

Previously there was no way to pay someone to solve a problem without someone going through the process of solving it. I think what people are upset about is that any kind of problem solving is no longer a stable career path. Even the skills replacing the problem solving jobs are liable to disappear as the interfaces are refined and models improve.

A lot of people went into maths because they liked not only the results but the process of research and discovery. That has been taken from them. No matter how you feel about AI, I think we should all pause and at least think about this and validate those feelings.

Look at the most upvoted comment on that thread:

-----------

I feel like the point is still being missed, and it's very similar to the way software engineers are trying to cope. The argument you are making "Well yes now this part of math we will not need to do again, but now we can do this instead" however the issue with most people just don't want to do that....

Like who are we kidding, the type of nerds who were attracted to math and software were into it because we saw it as an art-form, it was a craft, it was being the only one in your city to be able to solve a complicated math problem, it was immortalizing yourself because you discovered a proof and added to the ever expanding human knowledge.

Imagine a leather workman who's life passion is making insanely high quality handbags, who takes joy in knowing everything he touches will last someone a lifetime and give them joy everytime they use it. And then not gradually, but almost overnight someone comes to his door and tells him we can make bags 50 times better than you at 1/tenth the price. But don't you worry, you can make more money overseeing the factory, or selling people on how good this bag is, and explaining that to them.

I mean, ok, that just is not what I wanted to do with my life. I never wanted to be a manager, I never wanted to be a salesman, I never wanted to be a writer. A craft I enjoy doing has been taken away from me, I should be allowed to mourn, I don't care that I can do something else since I never liked doing it in the first place. I enjoyed solving problems and writing code, I don't care if people say "well thats never what programming was about it was actually about becoming a manager all along" I never wanted to be a manager, I never wanted to manage, I never wanted to be a proof reader.

I just hate this existence.

I think it might be a result of shock to believe it’s been taken away - you have my sympathies.

Mathematicians got a new toy. It’s up to them to pick it up, play with it, and figure out what it can and cannot do.

While I cannot guarantee it will stay this way indefinitely, there is still plenty that AI cannot do that humans still can, and asking the right series of questions remains an art of its own. There is still plenty of original work to be done.

As Arnold Schoenberg stated in the 20th century, “there is still plenty of good music to be written in C major.” The search space is vast and today human judgement is still required to really navigate it usefully. No LLM has yet written anything like Shakespeare that has superseded Shakespeare in any culturally meaningful way. Although programming is supposedly just about solved, I expect to see numerous billion-dollar startups emerge over the coming decade, rather than all of the innovation running out at the speed of tokens.

There is no reason to believe AI won’t master those fields faster than you can become an expert or even useful contributor to them.

> Like who are we kidding, the type of nerds who were attracted to math and software were into it because we saw it as an art-form, it was a craft, it was being the only one in your city to be able to solve a complicated math problem, it was immortalizing yourself because you discovered a proof and added to the ever expanding human knowledge.

No, I think it's just super cool. One of the things I hate about it is that you can't really explain what you find cool about it; others just have to see for themselves (in some sense it's like a self-induced trip to sit there and work out analysis/topology proofs in your mind's eye, visualizing little nested blobs doing their things), which of course nearly no one you will ever meet has any interest in doing. I wish more people wanted to talk math/physics with me lol.

I just want to know more. There are infinite rabbit holes. Like in uni and for years after, I wanted to know why convolution should be so important. Was I disappointed that someone else had already figured that out (that it's what you get when you form the vector space over a group and define multiplication as group multiplication) long before I was born? No way! I was stoked to finally have a satisfying answer! I wish they'd find a way to stuff that into applied analysis for engineers because it's cool and engineers should get to see cool math.

But then I went into software (partly because it was a hobby of mine anyway, and partly because it pays well), and learned a long time ago to leave any notion of artisanship or nerd crap at home. Java programmers spent forever arguing against type inference, Python/Ruby programmers think static types are a hindrance, and Go programmers spent a decade saying generics make things more complicated. Metaprogramming is generally synonymous with "too clever." It's cool that the relationship C^(A+B) = C^A C^B (or generalizations) says that the way you handle an enum type is to pattern match/provide a handler for each constructor, but I'm not going to burden my coworkers with that nonsense.

AIs are currently reducing human knowledge and cognitive capabilities, replacing it with machine capabilities instead.

It’s going to destroy both academic funding for people wanting to learn more through research and salaries for people currently doing cognitive work in corporations and an irresistible crutch for students using AI to do their work for them.

It will probably reduce most people's cognitive capabilities, but most people aren't interested in learning. If you don't want that for yourself though, it's great. You now have your own personal professor available 24/7 to answer questions about whatever topic you're learning. Take a picture of a page with your phone and ask it something you're confused about, or to check your understanding. Get immediate feedback. It's awesome.

Similarly, at work, it's never been easier to have data to make decisions with. Or to just try stuff out. Really great. Gets rid of what would otherwise be massive amounts of tedious "thinking" that drains your brain but isn't actually challenging in any way.

It's early yet to see what effect it will have on research. Experimental science is full of interesting, cognitively engaging topics as well though. Or maybe they end up like me and do boring engineering work for pay, and read cool stuff that the AI has figured out in their free time. It's not all that bad.

You casually included “at work”.

But if the AIs replace all the jobs?

Then we must be living in a time of material abundance. Mission accomplished[0]. We can spend all day learning math with the AI if we'd like.

[0] https://xkcd.com/810/

Without a distribution system to make this wealth available to all humanity.

With our current systems, the abundance will only go to the holders of capital.

If that were the case, then people would have unmet needs, and so there would be work to do. You need to keep your proposed scenario internally consistent here.

> With our current systems, the abundance will only go to the holders of capital.

Then there will be jobs. I mean that is pretty simple concept.

Mathematics is more akin to art or a sport to many — philosophy, too. I don’t see that as a bad thing.

But there’s always a risk that someone in an adjacent domain makes a breakthrough that completely reshapes the research landscape overnight. It’s happened before AI and it will happen at some point again in years to come. Grief is understandable, but this isn’t the first time or the last time.

the scale is just incomparable though. especially when everyone has a phone in their pocket that can do it.

I wonder how many math professors think they were actively working on well-known unsolved problems. Is it just a small elite club, or is it every tenured / tenure-track professor in all R1 schools?

I am at an R1 school, I know at least 4 or 5 people personally (Profs and Postdocs) whose entire research programs were annihilated. Like they wrote grant proposals that are totally obsolete now.

If your primary purpose is learning, why would you be ecstatic?

Because there will be so much more to learn?

Do you really want to spend your career cleaning out the Augean stables instead of advancing the state of the art? Seems miserable.

AI wouldn't advance the state of the art? It promises to do it at an incredible rate.

What you are complaining about is not that the state of the art wouldn't be advanced, but that vanity would not be served. Vanity (as part of Pride) is one of the seven deadly sins for a reason, and Pride has been described as the root sin, the worst of the lot, since all others stem from it.

Cool. And I'm sure LeBron James would be thrilled that he could spend the rest of his career watching robots playing on TV.

This AI shit is boring as fuck. It's automating the fun things, so theres more time to do the miserable bits.

He is paid because people pay to watch him play. If people were as happy to watch robots play he'd be out of a job. Making him happy isn't the reason he's paid.

Yes, exactly -- and, as a result, we're doing this to all of humanity. People don't need to be happy, we just need to produce more.

So, the future sucks; we've worked hard to automate everything people find joy in, and left the miserable parts of the job for people to do, and asshats like you insist we should be happy about it.

What's the point?

> Do you really want to spend your career

I want to add here: why do you imagine the outcome here will be dictated by what I, or any other individuals, want? There's this conceit that we can design how society is going to be rather than have to deal with what society becomes. The bandwidth for "societal engineering" is low.

there was already far more to learn than any genuis could understand in a hundred lifetimes. There is no nobility in simply increasing the amount of things that can be learned

So, why are we funding math then?

Why do people care about art?

several reasons. For some, because we think it might lead to useful results. For some, because we think the human pursuit of knowledge is worthwhile. For some, because we want to discover truths about logic and the universe. For some, because we are playing a status game (not just the mathematicians themselves but countries, universities, companies etc). For some, because we get personal fulfillment in understanding, and there being experts at something who can help others to understand.

For most, all of the above in various measure. To act as though one is the only thing thats important is wrong. The crisis is because the balance between these that existed is being shifted.

I suggest listening to "Math Vs Machine" [1], which has a much more nuanced take. It clearly lays out two types of use of AI in math, one that helps humans have better understanding, and one just bulldozes problems without helping us get any insights. It also touches on the topic of "does it matter if the machine does things in ways humans cannot understand".

[1] https://radiolab.org/podcast/math-vs-machine

After it bulldozes the problem, can you not then use the LLM to help you understand the solution, bit by bit?

Not clear.

Mathematicians are saying the current papers are pretty inscrutable and use terminology unfamiliar in the math sub fields in which the models are generating proofs.

Cause it looks like it's mining one subfield for a pattern and applying it to another. (The take from the few math folks I know who have looked into items of their interest).

Computing has the same issue. If we swapped a PLC programer with your average SV software engineer for a week both of them would have a really bad time.

Good thing LLMs are really good at translation tasks?

> If your primary purpose is SOLVING the problem, you should be ecstatic! If your primary purpose was rent-seeking so you could play with puzzles*, you'd be very upset.

I'm not a mathematician but I find this framing to be rather non-pragmatic and frankly, pointed.

In the process of Leonhard Euler's "rent-seeking" so he could "play with" bridge crossings he invented a completely new branch of mathematics that is the basis for things like Google Maps today. The process of working with these problems is just as important if not more, than just solving them.

It seems like everyone presumes that the currently proofs which are difficult to parse will stay that way. LLMs are really good with language. There's no reason that the next wave of proofs won't be accompanied by very literate explanations that mathematicians can generate understanding from.

One real limitation is context size. 1M tokens is enough to do a lot, but the Lean graphs they are making are way too big to fit, so an LLM will never have the complete picture.

Would a human be able to see the entire picture?

Nope. That's why a lot of knowledge comes down to compressing large concepts into chunks we can understand from new ideas and concepts. LLM's don't tend to be very good and synthesizing such concepts.

No, and that's one of the reasons mathematicians dislike automated solutions. Sure, it's verifiable, but it's too complex and messy to actually learn anything useful. So it technically answers the question, but doesn't leave you with any deeper understanding.

Perhaps, but due to the slop nature of OpenAI proofs, the proofs remain unaccepted by mathematicians, which leads one to question how many are valid proofs and how many are nonsense. If we see that they are nonsense, then OpenAI has wasted a huge amount of effort in mathematics. Famously the ABC conjecture proof of 500 pages is still unaccepted despite having been written in 2012.

Already people are seeing that the lean proofs provided don’t match the paper and lean proofs have not been provided for all paper proofs.

Why should we be estatic that some signifigant math problem was solved by machine rather of a human being in a language only the machine understands? Don't you know that problem was solved by a space alien a million light-years away a long time ago in a galaxy far far away? Makes no difference from the meatbag perspective: both claims are untestifiable.

In fact you should be estatic that in a paralell universe all math problems have been solved, so there's no reason to pursue math at all (we did it reddit!).

When your job is automated and you're living in the streets, just remember that you should be estatic that the job is finally being done more efficiently by a robot. Like, we did it. We finally did the job right. The job was never about wealth distribution, self actualization, dignity or any of that crap it was always about getting some stupid task accomplished for an industrial system that exists for... what exactly? What is the end goal of all of this? Who does the system serve in an economy of no consumers? What is the point of solving niche mathematical problems if no living person can comprehend the solution?

> The job was never about wealth distribution, self actualization, dignity or any of that crap it was always about getting some stupid task accomplished for an industrial system

There are still a whole lot of people, the vast majority of people actually, who's job involves something completely unglamorous and practical like unclogging your sewers.

To these people, it sounds like a cruel joke that people get paid 3x their salary, and after AI can do their job we learn that apparently the only purpose of their was their own self-actualization.

I don't actually believe that about math, but that's what a lot of people in this thread sound like.

>There are still a whole lot of people, the vast majority of people actually, who's job involves something completely unglamorous and practical like unclogging your sewers.

I know, I have that job! And I enjoy it. But the robots are coming for me too.

I thought technology was supposed to liberate us from the fields, but it turns out that's what wealth is for, and the wealthy want us back in the fields (no more escape through special training or skill).

Why would the wealthy want you back in the fields?

You were useful in the fields to the degree that was necessary for food production (sustain and grow population) and for wars (using said population to expand and extract more resources).

Once machines automate material comforts and exertion of violence (already have, to a large degree), humans become a pure loss center. Why bother with "fields" lol.

Because fundamentally: certain humans desire power to rule over other humans. Even if the fields (metaphorical or literal) can be done more efficiently by robots, they desire that power to exert over others.

So they will keep some ready for those tasks simply to fuel that irrational desire. They will instead use the more efficient bots to enforce work on the fields rather than work the fields themselves. Or perhaps we go full Matrix and find uses for humans that robots can't properly replicate.

Sure, keeping a few humans around for some kind of futuristic degenerate mammalian social/power games I can get behind.

That's not "back in the fields" though (metaphorical or literal).

A bit sad other knowledge workers feel that. I know my job isn't anything trying to better humanity; I just make video games. But making those games (or rather, the tools to make those games) has an end result to have people enjoy themselves a bit in a decreasingly enjoyable world. So there's my fulfillment.

But I understand it from a blue collar perspective. I tinker at toys in a metaphorical basement and I live a cushier life than many who give their bodies to their duty. That doesn't feel fair at all. But I mostly wish that was motivation to band together and get blue collars paid better rather than cause this inter-class divide while the capitalists ransack all of society.

>Why should we be estatic that some signifigant math problem was solved by machine rather of a human being in a language only the machine understands?

Why should I be ecstatic that someone solved a problem using Hilbert Calculus when I can only understand Sequent Calculus? [0]

[0] This is a joke. No 'real' mathematicians do systematic proofs. What gets posted in math journals is the equivalent of architecture diagrams.

You shouldn't. Maybe you should learn Hilbert Calculus so you can appreciate it.

It's like asking if what someone wrote a beautiful poem but it's in japanese. Maybe hearing about it motivates me to learn japanese, or maybe it doesn't. But as a non-speaker it makes little impression on me.

If you're writing Japanese poetry instead of solving maths problems expect to get paid Japanese poetry wages.

True. And if you are you solving math problems you should expect prompt engineer wages

We’ll put IMO. This expresses well the way I’ve been thinking about “the mathpocalypse”.

I feel sad and even a bit forlorn when I think of jobs that provide purpose, meaning, motivation, and satisfaction (not to mention $$) to human beings being lost to servers in racks and soulless machines. I think many people feel similarly.

However, I do believe that when a couple problems get solved that massively benefit all of humanity — e.g. a massive cancer breakthrough, etc — a tipping point will be reached and public opinion will reverse and enthusiastically embrace AI, and will accept not only diminished personal meaning but outright technocratic rule. This would be a huge mistake, but I really believe it would happen.

And as we know, solving interesting math problems is a leading indicator of big practical results to come.

>However, I do believe that when a couple problems get solved that massively benefit all of humanity — e.g. a massive cancer breakthrough, etc — a tipping point will be reached and public opinion will reverse and enthusiastically embrace AI, and will accept not only diminished personal meaning but outright technocratic rule.

Is solving cancer worth ceding human meaning and human autonomy to the machines? I haven't seen anyone ask this question but it seems the central issue of this revolution. Personally, I don't think it is.

Perhaps machines will lead to a perfectly homogenous society completely absent of negative valence whatsoever. But if every experience is also devoid of any personal meaning, what's the point? The optimal human state is not one of peak hedonism, or wholly absent of suffering.

> Is solving cancer worth ceding human meaning and human autonomy to the machines? I haven't seen anyone ask this question but it seems the central issue of this revolution. Personally, I don't think it is.

Solving cancer alone? Perhaps not.. Unless you have cancer.. Solving all diseases and aging? Well... I would rather be alive and live like an AI's housecat than dead and free. And I suspect that many people who publicly disagree are just performative, and would actually make the same choice when push comes to shove, and they have to actually choose between "diminishing their autonomy to the machines" and imminent death.

The Christian influence on the world has been undeniably positive. Seeing death and suffering as the enemy and organizing society around minimizing it has been a boon to human progress. But now we come to the dark side of this view. A fear of death so complete that we are willing to sacrifice everything of value to prevent it. Our society has become so divorced from our natural state that death is seen less as an inevitable part of life, and more as a corporeal enemy that must be resisted at all costs. As it turns out, too much of a good thing, whatever it is, leads to absurdities and atrocities.

No, I do not think human autonomy should be sacrificed to defeat death. I personally do not fear death. It's as irrational to fear as it is to fear a deep sleep. I do fear dying painfully. Tragically, we as a society resist alleviating the pain associated with the process of dying (by speeding it up) for the same reasons. If only we could learn to take our principles in moderate doses.

> death and suffering as the enemy and organizing society around minimizing it

> A fear of death so complete that we are willing to sacrifice everything of value to prevent it.

> a corporeal enemy that must be resisted

I am afraid that you know nothing about Christianity. The beliefs and values you describe are antithetical to the Christian life and our worldview. If you've ever just examined the life of St. Teresa of Calcutta, you'd understand how absurd it would be for her to "fear death" or "minimize suffering".

We seek to follow, and imitate, Christ Jesus in his life of suffering, his death and resurrection. We do not resist, or minimize, or fear any of this. To do so, would be quite heretical to us as Christians.

Of all times of the year to bring this up. All Saints Day, celebrating the eternal life of those, named and unnamed, who have preceded us in death. All Souls Day, to pray for all the departed souls who suffer in Purgatory, after death but before their Heavenly reward.

I don't know what religion you are trying to describe, but to me it sounds like atheistic secularism. It is atheism that fears death, and utilitarianism that seeks to minimize suffering. Not Christians. Goodness, gracious.

To understand my point one must separate the metaphysics from the practical effects of the belief system. Christianity represented a step-change towards humanism. This must be considered in the in the era it was founded and compared to the competing ideologies at the time, i.e. paganism and its various death cults. Christianity institutionalized ideals like equality of men, the sanctity of life, charity, self sacrifice, etc. These ideals are the precursors to civilization.

The particular ideology of Christianity was super effective at laying the groundwork for modern civilization. Of course, these ideals have since evolved and have since become some kind of secular ideology. Granted, it was imprecise to attribute a fear of death to Christianity. But the sanctity of life is in practice a close cousin of a fear of death. Modern secularism having no metaphysical alternative has made this fear explicit.

> I suspect that many people who publicly disagree are just performative, and would actually make the same choice when push comes to shove, and they would have to actually choose between "diminishing their autonomy to the machines" and imminent death.

Exhibit A.

It is a very narrow mind that thinks everyone secretly thinks exactly as they do

Its easy to prove. Let hackinthebochs pledge his name and identity publicly to this statement. If he ever gets cancer later in life and decides to take a cure that was developed by AI, he was a liar. I argue he shouldn't even be allowed to take the cure unless he has changed his view, in order to maintain honesty and integrity.

The most straightforward method of eliminating all disease is to kill all life. This seems a much more likely outcome than the housecat scenario.

> in a language only the machine understands

I wouldn't even grant that. It's a very one-directional problem solving approach where it's unknown to what extent it can build on its own findings.

It’s math. Math is nothing but solving puzzles.

Mathematicians usually care nothing about application of their work. Working on interesting problems is their only motivation. Practical applications are almost always happy accidents.

This goes back to the hope that robots would do the laundry and the dishes and the cleaning up so we could write and play music, create art, and solve mathematical problems.

Instead the AIs are doing all of that leaving humans with only the dishes and the laundry and the cleaning up.

If math is nothing but solving puzzles for fun then I think a lot of people should be very pissed off that they are doing hard labor while being taxed to fund a puzzle hobby group.

Of course I don't believe that math is just fun puzzles. But if it were, then it would deserve to die as a career, AI or not.

If people weren't interested in solving puzzles for fun we'd still be banging sticks together in a cave somewhere.

Sure.

Those people will also be pissed that people get paid to make music or art or literature or poetry and all such frivolous things.

As of this comment you have 26 comments out of 206 total on this comment section, more than 10% basically all spreading FUD to try and make other people as miserable and pessimistic as you. I'm not sure what your motivations are but I'm glad we have people like Grant on the other side trying to keep a positive outlook on life and the future, and I hope all you eternal doomers who constantly try to bring others down with you find joy as well.

Your naivety is charming.

Whatever doesnt count as maths is just not maths. Its just carrying out instructions to get some "gain".

Other people usually care only about "gain", its their only motivation. Non "gain" results are just happy accidents.

And "gain" (once you have your survival covered) is just an invented abstraction with 0 real meaning. But people try to convince themselfs that it has meaning.

This goes back to the classic story for "kids" about the emperor that has no clothes.

If we play a game of chess and I move the pieces to the final position on the first move and declare victory you might feel that something was missing, even if I'm right.

This is not quite like that but the feeling I get from it is much the same. Mathematicians are first and foremost busy with understanding math, not with 'solving' math though they are solving individual problems within the domain of math. The journey towards that understanding requires specialization and often lots of studying.

To quote Douglas Adams: "If 'metal nose' here is going to give you God's phone number then the philosophical question of whether there is a God becomes meaningless."

It is the journey and the questions that matter as much or more than the answer does.

And with math being a branch of natural philosophy I can see why they would be a tad upset at this shortcut because it strips the collective efforts of a large number of people of their prestige and feeling of time well spent. Imagine your life's work reduced to a short string of bits, and worse, that short string of bits was created by a machine that effectively is still a toddler.

> It is the journey and the questions that matter as much or more than the answer does.

Selfishly, as someone who enjoys programming, I feel the same way about the journey. But let's face it: for everyone else, the outcome is what actually matters. Mathematicians argue that their journey may lead to novel insights, but are those insights really valuable? Are they going to help the LLMs solve more problems? And are we sure that the LLMs can't deliver those same insights?

I think that ties in with the 'who will train the juniors' angle: if the ladder consists of nothing but the top rung because the AI combine stripped away the rest of them then a lot of fields will be looking at zero new entrants. Nobody wants to compete with a machine for their living and sense of self value. I know I don't, and obviously I can't speak for anybody else but society has pretty much programmed people to tie a good chunk of their identity, success in life and general well being to their skills and ability to put bread on the table. You can't just toss that in the bin for 3/4 of the current crop of professionals (I'm seeing the mathematicians as simply the first (and probably not even the first) of many).

I don't know if you have kids or not but I have two kids in high school and keeping them motivated through the AI revolution is a serious challenge and some of their classmates have already all but given up. The next generation down the line is going to grow up with the same kind of attitude towards thinking that you might have towards the skill of map reading. And I think we'll all be poorer because of that, not richer.

they probably do deliver insights, just not in a human-readable form, so at some point, human progress stalls.

Exactly. As a software developer, AI has given me more time to tackle higher-order problems. The actual architecture, optimisation, and user experience.

Mathematicians could:

- Continue working on philosophical aspects of the solution and not bothered by whether the solution is known or not. It is not a movie that gets spoiled when the ending is known.

- Or better, demand from AI labs, how they would like to see AI helping them on philosophical aspects.

> Continue working on philosophical aspects…

…except the machine will be better at these aspects too :D

I find it funny when people suggest "just re-orient from knowledge work X to knowledge work Y, doh!". Not realizing all knowledge work is on the chopping blocks.

This misunderstands mathematics. There are entire branches of the subject that have no practical use. Some things also appeared to be useless for centuries before physicists discovered they actually have an application.

> It is the journey and the questions that matter as much or more than the answer does.

That only makes sense to me when its what someone chooses to spend their time doing. When they expect someone else to pay them for it, its the end result that matters.

Maybe its a fundamental flaw in capitalism or money itself, but we can't expect to be paid for the sheer love of the game. Others will only end up paying us if the expected output is worth it.

Well we have been paying people for the pure pursuit of knowledge for its own sake since the scientific revolution, which is kind of the material base for capitalism, so I don’t think your argument holds much water. Why knowledge and following curiosity facilities general prosperity is maybe an open question but that it does is inarguable.

Capitalism incentivises paying people to pursue more capital, not the putsuit of knowledge.

And to be clear I don't say that as a good thing, it may be a flaw in capitalism, but we don't psy people simply to chase knowledge for the sake of the chase.

> Capitalism incentivises[sic] paying people to pursue more capital

That only works as long as people earn a living wage. See also: Henry Ford.

The primary value of math has never been about producing "solved problems" (is there any practical value in "solving" NS in itself?). The primary value of mathematics has always been about "machinery for thought", i.e. the abstractiosn and methods that produced the solution.

I think there is a little too much pessimism of the "math is dead" sort. As long as there is a need for humans to think there will be value in doing math.

On one hand I agree. I’d also add that there will be no end of math problems to solve. That some were solved will only lead to new ones.

That said, I think what has mathematicians… upset is probably two things:

1. These are hard problems. Hard enough that solving one could take decades of work. And there’s tons of collaboration involved. Pivoting to another - and making progress - isn’t exactly something you wake up tomorrow and start doing.

2. I think motivations matter to some. And the AI companies doing this aren’t doing it for the betterment of math or even society. They are in an arms race to prove their product is superior and any careers that are damaged collaterally be dammed.

Turning hard problems into easier problems is a good thing.

“ if you're mad about your problem being solved, maybe you weren't in it for the right reasons”, politicians/financial advisors/military members/etc… would like a word with you.

Link about plagiarism by OpenAI on solving Navier Stokes's Theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navier%E2%80%93Stokes_priority...

Let's just say that The math problem that got solved, I was working on it for many years but some company people used my knowledge my prompts and "solved" it without giving me any credits or money. Firstly they plagiarised the books and research papers and then they plagiarised the prompts by the mathematicians. Yes AI can make art and has caused many artists finding work difficult but AI art is always souless and worthless, same thing will be for math it will become souless and worthless because when humans who are experts in their fields invest their ingenuity then art becomes alive but if ordinary people like me will just prompt into the machine then souless things will come out that will be very worthless and disposable.

the claims of plagiarism are not convincing, and gatekeeping knowledge is a bad look

  gatekeeping knowledge is a bad look

Unless a corporation does it?

> Unless a corporation does it?

Nope, in all cases it is a bad look.

But the AI companies didn't gatekeep knowledge. They released all their math results.

Unless you mean they're charging money for a product that contains knowledge. But that's not gatekeeping, just like selling a book isn't gatekeeping. Gatekeeping is when a group tries to prevent others from participating in a field or activity.

Selling a book quite literally is gatekeeping, since the idea is that you're prevented from engaging with the work without paying for it. Even with libraries it was society who paid for it in order for the commons to get access, but payment was nevertheless needed.

It just turns out that the Chesterton's gate is useful and people tend to think that people should be paid for their labour, since people kinda need a roof over their heads and food on their table.

It's not gatekeeping unless you're using your own esoteric definition that's different from how everyone else uses it. Words get their meaning from how they're used in the wild, and dictionaries are descriptivist, not prescriptivist. Anyone is allowed to buy the book, so it's not considered gatekeeping, even if some people may not be able to.

If you define any obstacle to an activity as gatekeeping, then literally everything can be considered gatekeeping and the term loses all meaning. Some people can't read, so offering the books for free would still exclude them. If you include an audio book, some people still can't understand the language. And both charging and not charging money for products would simultaneously be gatekeeping under that definition, since not charging places more financial burden on the producer. Not everyone can afford to print books and give them away for free.

Didn't you literally say

> Gatekeeping is when a group tries to prevent others from participating in a field or activity.

And I gave a way in which charging a price does that.

I am open to the idea of being incorrect in this case, in which I apologise for misunderstanding, and concede that I'm missing the nuance but in my defence, I'm not a native speaker.

That's why I said,

> Words get their meaning from how they're used in the wild, and dictionaries are descriptivist, not prescriptivist.

But I didn't explain that clearly. What I mean is that definitions are always imprecise because language is imprecise and dictionaries (or people) try to keep definitions reasonably short and simple. Dictionaries are trying to describe what the words really mean in the wild. They aren't the source of that meaning.

For example, if we look up Merriam-Webster's definition of "game (noun)", none of the definitions really work for a game like Solitaire without also including an activity like reading a book.

The two relevant definitions are

1. a physical or mental competition conducted according to rules with the participants in direct opposition to each other

2. activity engaged in for diversion or amusement

(there are a bunch of other definitions as well, like animals you hunt)

The second definition is too broad and the first clearly excludes Solitaire. If you were deciding what a game is based on the dictionary definitions, you'd either think watching TV is a game, or that Solitaire isn't. But that's not the case.

Charging money for products isn't considered gatekeeping. So from a descriptivist perspective, it isn't, even if it seems like it should be, because the word isn't used like that. Banning a group of people from an activity is gatekeeping. If mathematicians said only mathematicians can prove theorems and correct proofs from non-mathematicians won't be accepted, that would be gatekeeping. But they don't do that.

If you want to use a broad definition of gatekeeping that includes virtually all human activity, then the response to any accusation of gatekeeping could be "well, everything is gatekeeping". That road just leads to pointless and confusing conversations.

> But the AI companies didn't gatekeep knowledge. They released all their math results.

There are some important fields of math that were conspicuously missing. In particular, cryptography.

There are obviously good reasons for being more cautious when dealing with cryptography results in math, but I'm not going to believe they released everything.

> Unless you mean they're charging money for a product that contains knowledge.

They have internal models that the public cannot use (at least not yet).

Neither of those are gatekeeping.

Tom Leher had it down pat, they're just mad that computers are better at it than they are.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXlfXirQF3A

Non-mathematicians talking about this (especially in a cultural battleground like Wikipedia, yuck) will never be productive. Citing it here on HN does everyone a disservice. For those uninitiated, OpenAI used a fundamentally different method (without forcing in the Euler case) and the idea that the proof was plagiarized (other than the completely kosher strategy of using prior art, of course) is a complete fabrication.

In fact, the proof is such a mess, nobody really understands how it works. Which is becoming commomplace with these permutation machines where we can come up with something that passes some tests (e.g., a proof checker), but we have no idea wtf we did to get there, which doesn't really seem to do much to push human understanding forward.

It seems like such a dumb hill to die on, too. OpenAI literally stole the entire Internet (including copyrighted works), and we're arguing about a silly math puzzle.

The plagiarism and copyright stuff is just a smoke screen.

A lot of people are upset because they used to be special, their identities were tied to them being smarter, or having more niche domain knowledge than anyone else. Ai has changed that.

Now it's owners are special and will collect the world's productive economic output.

Whee. Very exciting.

I doubt that lasts for very long.

Regardless, we're all needing to learn that we weren't as special as we thought we were.

And if does last very long? What's the escape hatch from that?

Praying that it doesn't last very long isn't a strategy.

> we're all needing to learn that we weren't as special as we thought we were.

When will the altmans and the musks of the world learn that?

A lot of people are upset that people are praising garbage and outright stolen output, and any attempt to disagree with this praise labels them as a luddite who will be behind on the times and is against progress.

Such a take on "people don't feel special" feels borderline bad-faith. People of science tend to be some of the most humble people as their knowledge to seek the truth constantly leaves them with more answers than questions. It's instead this borderline cult of people praising output that is understandable to them that seems to be the ones with the hubris to try and claim that thinkers will be obsolete.

I used to be a paid professional scientist for a few years. I think your take is quite naive here.

Negativity bias means We'll mostly remember the smug person who wanted to advance their careers and not their field, as opposed to the hundreds of well meaning people who want to do their work. And sadly that smug person tends to be on leadershi. I've seen that pattern in several different industries, at least from the US perspective. I

see no reason to find this field different.

Nobody capable of a minute of honest introspection believes that. If you shuffled all the backend devs in the world and randomly assigned them a role elsewhere most will do perfectly fine. I began my own career in VFX, moved into compliance and am now working on automotive software - there's no moat around even the most niche domain knowledge, you just need to be prepared to spend time learning it. If I had to roll that into an identity it would be the learning I get to do at every turn in my career. That's what I enjoy but there's absolutely nothing unique or special about it.

Maybe the reason people are upset is simpler? Maybe people with a mortgage and kids to support don't like being told they'll absolutely 100% soon be out on their arse. Even if you don't believe that it's still tiring having to hear the same mindless taunts and vapid bullshit repeated on a daily basis.

> maybe people don’t like being told they are not special

is not really a rebuttal of what I was saying.

People are all trying to be John Henry here… common people

Silly math puzzle is reductionist. If it was considered a worthwhile life long pursuit how is it dumb to be upset that the rug was pulled on it

According to the article you linked, there is no evidence at all showing OpenAI plagiarized Buckmaster and Alpoge. Buckmaster just speculated that since they used OpenAI's product, it's possible OpenAI looked at their conversation. Which OpenAI flatly denies.

And then your article says:

> On 13 October 2026, Scientific American published an article surveying several mathematicians stating that "the resemblance between the two groups’ methods now seems merely skin-deep."

I’m seeing this perspective expressed a lot lately, but (so far) only online.

Understand that there’s more than one way to prove something, that there’s an art to making something understandable, and that humans tend to take the most understandable paths (to humans.)

Models often don’t do that. But in solving, or claiming to solve, important problems, they nevertheless remove a lot of the excitement and incentive towards working towards a solution humans would naturally find. Plus, a lot of these problems really don’t have any critical applications at the moment. They’re done for the love of the game.

Does that bother you? That your tax dollars pay people who do math out of curiosity?

But then you can start with a solution and try to make an understandable one.

> I find this characterization overly harsh, but if you're mad about your problem being solved, maybe you weren't in it for the right reasons

Then I'm in programming for the wrong reasons.

There is more to life than outcomes.

Would sports teams have as many fans who enjoy their games, if all the humans were replaced by robots? Your team may win, so I'm sure you'll be happy with the outcome, but maybe something got lost?

I for one have always felt inspired when reading about remarkable human achievements. To think that those might be coming to an end, replaced by AI, takes the humanity out of those stories.

How is your argument any different from the classic Luddite argument? Why is doing math different than making textiles? Why does math deserve special protections when other types of workers do not?

There will be human achievement no matter how much automation and robotics we have. There’s an entire universe to explore and colonize. Plus people still want to see other people do things like perform music or play sports.

no one wants to see anyone do math lol.

Well sure, but people do still want to watch videos like 3blue1brown in-depth explanations, and they do still want to learn math for its own sake. People can still do math and derive enjoyment from it.

I'm not against technological advancement. But AI is unlike previous innovations. Soon, every scientific and knowledge-based breakthrough could be made by AI. And we're losing something intangible when that happens.

Think of your average Veritasium video. They know how to tell a story about a scientific breakthrough. It always centers around the human inventors. Take the humans out the story and it's less interesting, relatable, or enjoyable. Also consider: why do HNers hate AI slop? If all that matters is the outcome (getting some point in writing), AI does that. I hate slop because it has lost its human touch. I appreciate a result more when its distilled from human effort, and I'm not alone.

I'm not a mathematician so I have no skin in this particular game. I'm a software engineer though, and we've already gone through this. I can simultaneously love how easy it is to build applications with AI, and miss the days when human talent was valued and celebrated in my field. My job gave me purpose. My work team had comaraderie. A future where we all report to AI managers and we exist just to sign off on what our AI agents do, is dystopian.

Yes, I suspect there will always be human sports teams, musicians, actors, etc. My point was to illustrate that everything is less appealing when you take the humans out of the picture and I don't see why science is different. If outcomes are the only thing that matter then when robots are better at sport than humans shouldn't we should all just watch robots compete?

P.S. Do you really believe humans are going to visit any object further than Mars, let alone actually colonize them? Things would've had to go very wrong on Earth for that to happen, and that future doesn't appeal to me one bit. Call me a luddite if you want. How many people would willingly say goodbye forever to the wonders of Earth so that they can start their family on an inhospitable planet where they'll be indoors for the rest of their life? And why even bother exploring those planets? We can get all the data we need from autonomous spacecraft. Isn't that the outcome that matters?

Many people don't seem to understand that pure mathematics is not a practical applied science, nor is it in the business of inventing things.

Pure maths is much closer to philosophy or art than practical problem solving. Yes, we're extremely lucky that mathematics also happens to be a fantastic formalism for solving practical and scientific problems, by the practical problems are not remotely the subject matter of pure math. Of course, many mathematicians did advance theory in order to solve specific practical problems, but the pursuit of theory for theory's sake is also an important human activity.

Historically, this freedom from practicality has been important. It allows mathematicians to explore purely theoretical issues that have no practical bearing today but that might well have relevance in the future. We don't know. Carving out dedicated resources in society for that activity, though, has proven very beneficial for other sciences.

You have no computer, you have no neural nets, you have no AI, without at least some results from pure maths. Maybe keep that in mind before you crap on mathematics for its lack of immediate practicality. Not all good things in life arise as solutions to concrete and immediate material problems.

Men have sex to cum. If I hand you a bucket of cum and you don't feel ecstatic, you might've been having sex for the wrong reasons.

Close, men have sex to orgasm, if i hand you a bunch of orgasms and you don't feel ecstatic you might have been having sex for the wrong reason.

> If your primary purpose was rent-seeking

Incredibly nasty stuff to serve on the rent-seeking forum. Doubly nasty to levy at people who actually like being alive, like mathematicians. If capitalists had their way we'd all be slitting our wrists on day two of existence

I really don't understand such takes. Extend this to every problem in every profession, which seems to be both the trend and the intent (if still far off), and you vaporise the meaning from a lot of people's lives. Sure, they can find other sources of meaning - assuming having their job automated doesn't leave them constantly scrambling to make a living. This would require major social restructuring that nobody's really talking about.

Many people pursue careers based on the intersection between their interests and what society considers valuable. Being upset when what they chose to spend their lives doing either loses value or changes so much it becomes a wholey different job is understandable, and calling it "rent seeking" is very unfair, in my view.

My purpose in life is solving problems in various domains. Having those problems solved for me would be a Champaign problem.

> and you vaporise the meaning from a lot of people's lives

If the meaning of your life is to obtain a solution to a given problem, then getting the solution would "vaporize the meaning of your life" in the same way as when someone that claims his meaning of life is to raise their children would "lose all meaning of life" when they finally move out and start to successfuly live on their own. Yes, there could be some nostalgia in both cases, but if you are psychologically well-adjusted, the pros would still far outweight the cons, the happiness would outweight the sadness.

I don't think that's the same. Would you let robots raise your kids if they provably did it better than you?

These people knew someone else could solve the problem. Presumably they figured there'd still be meaningful work for them to do - exploring ramifications, new frontiers opened by the solution. Other problems, at worst. Now it all seems far from guaranteed.

I agree about well-adjustedness, but what do you propose these people do to get paid if the number of researchers with grants reduces significantly? Reskill to something that pays less, they like less, and might be automated too? Can you frankly say this wouldn't be a moral blow to anyone, well-adjustedness and all?

The analogy with kids breaks the moment you introduce getting paid.

No one will pay me for raising my kids. I’d probably have to pay the robot.

So the question remains: is it about solving the problem for humanity? Solving the problem for yourself? Or getting paid?

I don't think you can so easily call for separating them when so many people grew up in an environment that ties economic value and a respectful place in society so strongly.

> So the question remains: is it about solving the problem for humanity? Solving the problem for yourself? Or getting paid?

Say it's a mix, which I think is most likely. They enjoy the problem-solving, like doing something that feels meaningful to humanity, and obviously need to get paid. Now what?

I personally think they’re enough problems left for humanity to solve.

Of course I am not denying the brutality for those who are right in the middle of finishing something.

I am optimistic for those who haven’t started, which the video is referring to.

I feel like we're arguing past each other. My point is, it's hard for me to see lack of empathy towards mathematicians (and other professionals) who stand to be displaced by these developments. I know I shouldn't take internet strangers too seriously but, when I read the comments here, I feel like some people have deep resentment for those mathematicians, portraying them as going into math in bad faith or something, and now fighting to keep their ill-gained positions.

> I personally think they’re enough problems left for humanity to solve.

For sure, whether those displaced will be able to get to work on them - and whether it will be as fulfilling as their previous work - is not at all guaranteed.

"The market doesn't owe you to do fulfilling work" Yes, but it costs you nothing to be sympathetic to the individual humans that have to undergo these changes, which can be all shades of scary and sad.

> Of course I am not denying the brutality for those who are right in the middle of finishing something.

And those who worked on a problem for 5 years, trying dozens of approaches, and weren't close to finishing something? People over-fixate on the specific problem. The big picture narrative here is, in the best case, "the way we're going to do math will be completely different", and in the worst case, "we'll need much fewer mathematicians".

> I am optimistic for those who haven’t started, which the video is referring to.

Perhaps. This comment chain is about the other side, the so-called rent seekers.

Ok I’m a stranger on the internet who tries to genuinely understand.

To that end I’ve read all your comments. I am not sure what you’re proposing or asking people to do?

Are you asking for empathy? I have a lot of respect and empathy for people who dedicated their life to solving complex problems.

At the same time I’m trying to be optimistic by saying not all is lost. Yes people will need to adjust. I’m arguing continual change and adaption have always been part of life.

I'm asking people not to be so unkind to other people grieving the (potential) loss of a significant part of their life. "If you cared so much about the problem, you'd be thrilled when a solution is found; since you're not thrilled you must be in it for selfish reasons and deserve to be displaced." You didn't write it, but the comment I replied to pretty much did.

I agree that there's room for optimism, but the conduct and messaging of the AI labs isn't very inspiring in that regard. The feeling I get from it is "we're going to push forward at any cost and make humane considerations only when we can afford to. Which isn't a lot because we've got to be the first to AGI or others will make it first and do it wrong." People then get pushed to the sidelines, many whose work contributed to the feasibility of LLM capabilities in the first place. Free market and such. But then they get criticized when they're upset about it?

Give them space to deal with it and help them find optimism, or at least, don't judge them.

>No one will pay me for raising my kids.

In the near future, this may very will be the case in order to address the population decline. But I digress.

The big assumption here is that "problems are being solved" in every field affected. Which they are not.

Just as the most basic example: software is not currently being made faster, nor performing better nor at a higher bar of quality. Maybe developers are able to report higher velocity, but this is not leading to faster shipping of software/features. In fact, people seemed to feel software is buggier than ever and companies are doubling down on it and simply adding placeholders of "AI can make mistakes". Unforgivable 10 years ago if we tried that with humans.

If anything, the rent seeking is with people reporting "being more productive than ever" and despite that less real world problems being solved than the previous decade.

Nobody goes into these fields only interested in the final result, they go into it interested both in the challenge and revelations of the process and the triumph and recognition of achieving the final result.

There's no joy to be derived from a completed crossword puzzle if you weren't the one solving it...

This analogy is only valid if you're confident that parents would not say meaning is vaporized if you turned their 8-year-olds into 18-year-olds overnight, and there was reason to believe this would frequently happen to families in the future, probability increasing. The exact problem is that the situation in mathematics is not akin to "finally moving out" but instead to "immediately moving out". I imagine few people would be OK with it.

Also I find the suggestion that the people unhappy with the AI-in-mathematics situation are psychologically unwell to be presumptuous, to put it mildly.

> This would require major social restructuring that nobody's really talking about.

There are few concrete proposals, but a lot of people are talking about the need for it.

The reality seems to be that this will extend "to every problem in every profession" within our lifetimes. The only scenario I see where that doesn't happen is global war or other catastrophe stopping progress by essentially destroying civilization as we know it. So we are going to need to figure it out.

Many people don’t even function off this “meaning” you’re talking about. They get it from family and friends and hobbies. It’s a contrived perspective, albeit a useful and good one. But this claim of the world’s problems existing as a means to providing value to someone’s life over actually being solved is kind of an insane perspective if you ask me.

Only those that aren't in a field and see its existence justified for purely instrumental reasons can think its value is merely in its practical output. Personal meaning and fulfillment come in many forms. For mathematicians, part of that value is through solving problems, but it's also partly about the struggle itself, gaining understanding, expanding the frontier of human achievement, being a part of a community that values these things, playing a valuable role in the progress of humankind and making a career out of it. Having all that swept away overnight will lead to an existential crisis for anyone who is on the wrong end of this process.

It's quite bizarre how many people feel so personally affronted at the existence of a rather exclusive intellectual community that they take glee in seeing it decimated overnight. But make no mistake, AI is coming for the things you value as well.

What? Why are we nullifying so many human factors in one stroke? Humans strive to contribute to their community and to be recognized for it. We aren't machines, we have social and financial needs, and enjoy competition. Math being solved would mean part of humanity losing these parts of their lives.

What, in your opinion, is the point in solving these problems if no human is there to witness it? This is like suggesting we have AI watch movies for us and read its summary afterwards. In fact, why do anything anymore?

Yes, much of pure mathematics is "playing with puzzles" to the end of the joy and beauty revealed by a human solving them.

I find it interesting how a mathematician enjoying theory-building or playing with ideas gets recast here as rent-seeking. It sounds much like certain right-wingers complaining that kids these days don't want to work, just stay in university studying useless things at the taxpayer's expense.

This is an awful and really ignorant take. The manner in which the problem is “solved” matters a lot, and these AI solutions are about as poorly-done as possible. That a solution exists closes the door on almost any sort of support for finding another, better one, which is the real problem. If this continues, we wind up with a field with no open problems, no practicing mathematicians, no future mathematicians, and no way to come up with new problems (this latter being much more important than solving existing ones, in the main).

I have trouble understanding how anybody could seriously believe this.

Mathematicians are ecstatic and delighted when major problems are solved by other mathematicians. If you've followed the discussions and read the reactions, you'd know why mathematicians feel differently in this case and why more than a few are upset and feel that they've lost the thing that gave them meaning and joy.

And to put it very simply, I don't want mathematicians to exist just because I want solutions to problems. I want mathematicians to exist because I want to live in a world that has mathematicians, philosophers, writers, painters, thinkers, etc. That is a better world that makes people better.

OpenAI's proofs do not make people better. They do not enrich our lives. And OpenAI was able to produce these proofs because countless generations of human beings sowed the fields of mathematics through countless hours of labor. OpenAI is clear-cutting and sowing them with salt. Nobody should he ecstatic. Everybody should be horrified and outraged.

I would argue that math indeed makes our lives better. Llms themselves are math invention! It doesn't matter much where this math comes from.

I think it's ok to care about math as an art or sport still.

Math will join the ranks of other useful works where human effort was once essential like

Long distance messaging/ running, painting, calligraphy, weight lifting and others.

I think we shouldn't have calculators anymore either. The world was better when we had to calculate everything by hand and a human by hand verified every single addition and subtraction.

Are we supposed to ignore the irony that you typed this on a computer that is millions of times more powerful than the calculators you propose to forfeit?

I'm not sure the world is better if everyone was forced to do TLS handshake math by hand.

The last couple decades of economic development (of the first world at least) was in a large part due to the efficiency gains by not having people do math by hand. The world will definitely not be better if you just blew up all the computing tech since calculators were invented.

I think the comment you answered was ironic/sarcastic.

I think we should be horrified/outraged that calculators exist and are clear cutting the once viable field of human calculation.

Yes, I am being sarcastic.

People enjoyed the process of solving a problem.

Your present a false dichotomy; that mathematicians care about the result, or are rent seeker that just wants to play about with puzzles.

Many people enjoyed the process of finding things out for it's own sake.

Huh?? Nobody enters mathematics because "We gotta get this Collatz conjecture solved already!", you enter it because you love the process of arriving at the solution.

It's like saying "If your goal is reaching the top of Everest, you should be ecstatic they built a train line that brings you right up to the peak!"

I find it overly harsh too. I think the reaction is much more about the devaluation of innate ability, and skills / knowledge built over a lifetime. If another mathematician had solved it then you can refocus on another problem and get another chance. Now that an LLM has done it it’s very unlikely you’ll ever solve another open problem.

> If your primary purpose was rent-seeking so you could play with puzzles

Yes, this is overly harsh. Some of us are interested in the craft, not the solution. Is that not the "right" reason?

Poor mathematicians. First a robot scoops them on hundreds of open problems. Then they get criticized for reacting to it like a human!

Shame on them for such weaknesses as:

* Desire to make memorable achievements in their field

* Missing the social elements of sharing and discussing problems with their colleagues

* Sense of self worth linked to ability to make a unique contribution to society

* Fear of losing status and income in a ruthlessly competitive economic system

* Anxiety over debts already accrued during years of studying

* Regret over choice of career path and roads not taken

Astra would never.

Meh it would be like if you were a mountain guide that took people up Everest. One day a helicopter operator started taking people and everyone lost interest in climbing. You should be happy, the problem of getting to the top is solved!

It was never just about the destination.

> Imagine waking up one morning to find that an alien technology has solved the problem you had dedicated your life to

But it could be another human that did that, and the impact would be no different.

As a software engineer this is part of my life, and always has been. I may have been working on a software product for the last 3 years, and suddenly one morning I find out that another company has released a similar product, and selling it cheaper, now the value of my work is slashed by 90%. I may even have to drop my project and find something else to work on. This is a normal part of life.

In research, there is always the same risk, that some adjacent field will completely change your field overnight due to some breakthrough.

Still, I have sympathy for the people who are grieving right now.

With the software industry, you kind of know what you’re signing up for, so you have some emotional preparation. However, this might be one of the very first truly disruptive innovations many mathematicians have ever seen in their fields in their lifetimes.

Should they have better prepared emotionally for a black swan event? I’d argue that the answer is no, but even if the answer were yes, the grief that many are experiencing is still worthy of sympathy.

I am confused why this is considered a black swan event. Does AI take the joy out of mathematics research? Yes. But universities are not laying off mathematicians just because OpenAI has released some proofs. The proofs were never the point of mathematics, it is the understanding behind the proofs, and applying that understanding to solve real world problems.

Now consider a computer science major in college who knows that he won't get a job when he graduates. Consider fresh graduates who thought they would have lucrative jobs but had to take up jobs as Uber drivers. To them AI is a black swan event. That's who I have sympathy for.

Black swan events aren’t necessarily negative.

For example, the original black swans who were found by the Dutch mariners neither attacked, injured, nor robbed those mariners.

it's just started in math, only a few months. it's been happening for years in CS. Give it time.

Yeah, mathematicians will totally be fine.

Right now mathematicians are freaking out because they think the AI will make them useless and they will have to go find real job with real usefulness.

But honestly mathematicians have been totally useless long before the first AI, so generally nothing have changed for them.

The entire cryptographic underpinning of the Internet is based on mathematics that, when I learned it as an undergraduate in the 1980's, was considered just an impractical curiosity. Non-Euclidean geometry became special relativity. Math underpins all science - "totally useless" phooey.

When I learned it as an undergraduate way later, entire cryptographic underpinning of the Internet were based on pretty trivial mathematics. Trivial to that extent, that if mathematicians wouldn't create those math, then it would be created by engineers designing cryptography along the way. So even there mathematicians were totally useless.

No matter what you choose to work on now, the AIs will get there first.

That’s the nature of exponential improvement, which humans are incapable of.

Your comments are grim. What's your estimate on self replication? Sustained energy? Trigger fingers?

Oh, nvm you made it clear 8m later: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50147638

Give me an argument for not having a grim outlook given current AI trajectories paired with a political apparatus incapable of action. At least in the US.

Putin's getting old. If he dies before we hit recursive self-improvement, there's a chance some maniac gets access to the nukes and saves 4 billion of us (global nuclear war only kills about half of humanity).

Oh thanks I feel better now!

> As a software engineer this is part of my life, and always has been. I may have been working on a software product for the last 3 years, and suddenly one morning I find out that another company has released a similar product, and selling it cheaper, now the value of my work is slashed by 90%. I may even have to drop my project and find something else to work on. This is a normal part of life.

The cause of what you're describing here, and the cause of the problems with AI are the same: it's capitalism, closed competition and businesses deciding what happens.

In an alternate society built around providing the best solutions for everyone, instead of being built around businesses making as much money for themselves as possible, your organisation would have been working alongside the other company to share insights into solving the same problem for everyone.

Same goes for AI: all the existential downsides of AI pretty much all depend on businesses being the main driver of who uses AI and when. If we only let individuals choose when to use AI, then they're not going to choose to automate themselves out of a job they need, or give up something they actually get personal value and joy from.

> AI has destroyed a major source of "life's meaning" for many people who pursued mathematics.

I studied mathematics and don't agree with this at all, for several reasons. For one the entire point of maths is that it describes a formal system in which one can 'shut up and calculate'. Mechanizing maths goes back to Leibniz and Hilbert. Nobody should surprised that the big formalism with explicit rules you invented is the first thing to yield to automation, that's why it exists.

Secondly research, including maths for a long time has been a collaboration of people, institutions, machines and processes, even maths does not consist of Faustian heroes in caves having revelations.

And thirdly just because a machine produces a 500 page proof doesn't mean your job is done. Science produces knowledge. Knowledge is information made legible to understanding by people. So there will be endless work for humans to go over machine proofs and turn it into something we understand. Just like chess computers ultimately expanded human chess.

> So there will be endless work for humans to go over machine proofs and turn it into something we understand

I'm not convinced humans will be better at this than LLMs. Frontier models are quite good at handling even deliberately lazy/ambiguous eli5 prompts on complex topics IME.

>I'm not convinced humans will be better at this than LLMs.

they don't need to be. Any scientist is already surrounded by tools that are better than they are at anything. A scientist from 200 years ago would have the same existential shock if they see how a modern scientists works.

But that's to misunderstand what science is for, which is to expand human knowledge. And a tool by definition can only ever change how you do this, not that you do it because you understanding it is the point. When people say learning to program is now useless, what they really mean is it might not make them any money, or using the AI is faster as an instrument. But if you care about programming itself, about you understanding programming, nothing has changed, it never can. And the smartest AI in the world can always assist you, but only that.

> But that's to misunderstand what science is for, which is to expand human knowledge

I agree ideologically and aspirationally but I don't believe it's the economic reality of how and why most science is actually funded (and I think you agree based on your comment about not making any money).

> But if you care about programming itself

I'm...not so sure I do any more? At least, not any more than I care about using Java over Python, or C++ over Java, or C over C++, or ASM over C, or machine code over ASM, or an abacus over machine code.

> nothing has changed, it never can

We now have programs that can write any program 100x faster and better than even the best humans and solve the hardest math problems known to humankind that have stumped the greatest minds the planet could produce for decades. That, to me, is a change with profound implications for understanding the nature of programming.

I don't get it. I have a research degree in physics, and if AI made major progress towards the big open questions (e.g. nature of dark matter) or managed to come up with a much cheaper way (or any way at all) to test a theory of quantum gravity, I'd be super happy. At the moment the research frontier in high energy physics looks pretty bleak in that it appears like the scale of construction and energies required are too high to reasonably achieve many more big breakthroughs in my lifetime. What makes mathematics so special that the entire field is distressed when their big open questions get resolved?

I think math is a craft unlike other areas of science.

Mathematics produces concepts and produces proofs of theorems. Up until now, the two things things fed into each other - you needed the concepts for the theorems and the theorems for the concepts. Now you can just prove theories without caring about the production of ideas.

Consider also, math produces the intellectual "tooling" for science in general. As I understand it, the important of grand unified comes because physics want an unified abstract conception of physical laws and thus a grand unified theory aims to be a unified mathematical understanding of the world.

I mean, as a though experiment, suppose a company produced a machine that simply predicted events in the future without giving any explanation of why. It didn't tell physicists whether any of their ideas were true or false, it simply answered question like "will this building fall down", "what will the spectrum of this star be", etc. It gave all the information of physics but discarded laws - physicists might find this a bit unsatisfying, especially if the machine was going to put them out of a job.

I'm sympathetic to the mathematicians and don't like what AI is doing. Every other profession that relies on knowledge or thinking should be watching the mathematics community as a portent of the storm to come. OpenAI has extensively thought about and planned their disruption and chose mathematics to start with for a reason - small community, verifiable to some extent, can be used to improve model training, not seen positively by many average people etc. The AI companies are going to come for every field one by one.

I as a non maths person am not sure what you mean. Isn't AI solving lots of problems advancing the field? I understand that that maybe demoralising, but otherwise what do you mean by "assault on mathmematics"?

Solving problems and advancing the field are two related but separate endeavors.

Nobody has solved the Riemann Hypothesis, but it has been highly fertile ground for new mathematics. Answering the question is of far less value than the question itself.

So there's an interesting question about what mathematics is that the AI solution space is driving a wedge into and cracking wide, where previously the cracks were visible but could be ignored.

When is a problem in mathematics "solved?"

There's an old joke in math and computer science about a huge leap of logic in a proof either being flagged as "left as an exercise for the reader" or "trivially shown." The problem being that things are only trivial if you have all the context to know why they're trivial.

We can claim a problem is solved if there is one paper explaining the solution with airtight logic that is understood by five people on the planet. And that is the kind of solution that LLMs can kick out (by basically, to hand wave a lot of details that I will admit to not fully understanding, doing a search across the whole problem domain with vastly more capacity than most human beings to do the symbolic manipulation that makes up the mechanics of mathematics). But what does that really mean? To have something "proven," but only to the comprehension of five people on the planet?

3blue1brown is making the interesting argument that perhaps mathematics practice shifts from a frontier that AI might actually be better at exploring than humans, to the process of digesting the output of that exploration and making it sensible and comprehensible to the billions of mines that could take advantage of that knowledge... If it were shaped in a way that could stick in their brains.

That's a kind of creativity that AI is not likely to be good at in the near future, because AI doesn't really "understand people."

Mostly no.

1. One view of the field treats Maths as directly solving real-world problems. Under that lens, yes, solving problems is directly advantageous for the field. Even so, it's not necessarily a good thing for the participants. Suppose the incentive structures require tackling hard, long problems, the field attracts people who enjoy that sort of thing, it's hard a-priori to tell a hard problem from an aggrandized brute-force proof search, etc. Even if directly producing proofs is the desired output for the field, a capricious machine occasionally solving 40% of the big problems the field is working on is still demoralizing. On a human level, if a society has organized around producing 100yr+ problems and bestowed on you the privilege of tackling a few of them having the last 40yrs of your work solved by a fancy calculator is never going to feel good. Sure, that means that in retrospect that was a problem we could have waited to devote human effort toward, but you couldn't possibly have known that at the time. You worked hard, made locally correct decisions, and later found out that the work was worthless. Beyond that, I haven't seen any model of "Maths 2.0" produced where that issue goes away. We still want people to devote their lives to hard problems. The machine will still advance and solve a moderate fraction of them at random, killing many of the field's life's work. What motivation do you have in that environment to pursue those challenges in the first place? Why not pursue adtech or fintech and make the world a worse place instead? Solving 40% of the problems isn't +40% throughput; it's -60% as the rest of the field leaves for greener pastures, -inf when nobody's around to construct the right problems in the future..

2. "Solving problems" isn't directly the point of most of the field. That's true both from the perspective of most problems requiring many intermediate results (solving one useful thing requires solving many less useful things) and from the perspective of building the machinery capable of solving problems being much more important than the solutions themselves (a properly presented proof leveraging clever, new techniques is infinitely more valuable than whichever thing it proved -- indeed, the Millennium Prize problems were chosen precisely because it was assumed they would create such techniques, and for the human-solved ones they did -- without new techniques, eventually the field caps out at whichever frontier of knowledge we're currently stuck at).

3. A third view of the field treats it more like art. A machine producing behind your back the painting you were envisioning, or at least a close enough simile to fool the masses, doesn't advance "art" in any meaningful sense. It's extremely demoralizing when flaky cast tools are passed off for proper forged variants (your work is better, and it's sad to see people choosing a wrench they'll later snap in half instead), and when at a creative level people are accepting mediocrity instead of something objectively better.

Only in the same way that having an AI complete your homework advances your education.

I've never quite understood this sense of meaning. The goal could never have been to see these problems solved or to further understand how the universe may work. The goal was the chase itself, or the sense of pride for being the one to crack the answer.

Also its worth noting this technology isn't alien. I don't personally want us to invent AI, AGI, ASI, etc but they aren't alien - humans are very much making the choice to invent these things here on earth.

That's not what people mean by alien. It means that we can't rely on human intuition to predict how they will behave. Their intelligence is not like ours.

That isn't alien though, IRA just different. I wouldn't consider my cows' intelligence as alien its just something I can't always intuit.

That's literally the 7.3k Upvoted top comment and I also think Grant didn't chew this one through appropriately. I was kinda offended at 17:10, where OpenAI paper dumping proofs "takes all the wind of [mathematicians] sails". But it's so much more than that.

He did go more into it at 30:00, where he accepts that something is lost here. Or as Terence Tao said, the "age of heroes" in mathematics is has come to an end. I think Grant's points on funding and maths having a strong future are true. But I still think the dehumanizing part wasn't properly honored. But then again, this is supposed to be positive push into the future, so dwelling on it is not something Grant wanted to do.

I find myself sometimes wondering if the folks on Star Trek would consider themselves laboratory assistants to an AI, seeing as how the ship computer kind of works like an LLM: interprets voice queries into actions and takes actions, queries the database for answers, can extrapolate when asked to depending on how the writers are feeling... That kind of thing.

> if the folks on Star Trek would consider themselves laboratory assistants to an AI

I think the word you are looking for is 'peripheral'.

It’s interesting that Star Trek AIs were far less advanced than what we’re seeing now.

They had warp drives, but only starting to get human level intelligence four centuries from now in the form of Data.

> math has destroyed a major source of “life’s meaning”

YOU ARE NOT YOUR WORK! My god people! The meaning you get from life shouldn’t be reduced entirely to the job you do. Mathematician, or programmer, or pilot, or ship captain, or janitor or otherwise.

I already had to learn this, but the sooner you decouple your professional life from “what makes you… you” the better.

Meaning in life comes from contributing to something larger than yourself. Work is one way but there are others. Just be careful when you dismiss work that you don't end up leading a meaningless life.

Who are you to define what meaning is, where it comes from, etc.?

There are many more ways to contribute to something larger thab yourself than work too

> Imagine waking up one morning to find that an alien technology has solved the problem you had dedicated your life to

That seems like a glass is half empty attitude.

For one, the problem is solved. You should be glad. That's what you wanted...

Typically every solved problem opens more doors than it shuts.

We're pretty far from knowing it all.

It's like someone saying the field of Math died when we got calculators and computers and spreadsheets to make it easier to do calculations.

Now you can use AI to help you.

Sure, if you refuse to use it, then you're screwed. That's a you choice. Not inevitable.

The only things in life that are certain is change and death.

Not any different than some Amish person being annoyed that s/he can't contribute to the field of Math because it's too hard to do all the calculations by hand on paper...

You can spend your whole life crying that one day we'll all die, or you can enjoy the time you have.

The glass is a whole lot less than half empty. The pessimistic attitude is a rational response to our environment.

The only way change this situation so that it comes out positive is to enjoy being a slave, but hey thats a you choice.

>Typically every solved problem opens more doors than it shuts. >We're pretty far from knowing it all.

Open doors to whom? AI or mankind? We have never been farther from knowing it all. The information knowable by people will become a sliver of the total relevant information in the world.

>It's like someone saying the field of Math died when we got calculators and computers and spreadsheets to make it easier to do calculations.

In that instance, the busywork was automated and challenging work remained. What we are talking about here is the reverse. It's the automation of all of the cerebral thinking.

Imagine that all of the cerebral and beautiful aspects of math were automated first, but for some reason humans were required to specialize into number crunching instead. Now open your eyes.

>Not any different than some Amish person being annoyed that s/he can't contribute to the field of Math because it's too hard to do all the calculations by hand on paper...

The thing about amish people is that they own their own land and grow their own food and are independent within a governmental system that respects their property rights. The rest of us renters and feeders operate within industrial society-work or die.

The disposition amish people have towards technology has been ahead of the curve.

>You can spend your whole life crying that one day we'll all die, or you can enjoy the time you have.

I would also encourage my peers to enjoy what little time they have left. What we are witnessing is the end of history, and I am honored to experience it. However I get the impression your nature is to go out with a wimper.

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>AI has destroyed a major source of "life's meaning"...

Ah, but that's precisely the beauty of life, that there is no meaning. Life just "is".

A lot of people derive their worth from something external. AI brings the emptiness of that worth into sharp relief, but it was always empty. It used to be easier to ignore, though.

The obvious retort is "that's cold comfort to people losing their livelihoods!" But that's not the discussion, and (at least at this point) we're not at risk of mathematicians going hungry. It is obvious that AI will have a profound impact on what mathematicians do. It is not obvious that we won't need them anymore.

So fucking true, man. hits bong

I'm not sure that's a fair summary of the situation though. If the machines understand math but humans don't, we're going to be in a bad bad bad spot.

We need humans to help guide all this, need to learn all we can.

I agree with Sanderson that the opportunity seems larger than in the past. The challenges are quite different, but if somebody loves math, loves learning about it, like I do, I see so much opportunity.

There's going to be so many more connections to evaluate, so much work needed for unification and simplification and pedagogy, and above all there's going to be intense demand for mathematical taste.

> If the machines understand math but humans don't, we're going to be in a bad bad bad spot.

With potentially plummeting value for human involvement in these skills, I think that’s precisely what many people are worried about.

Well that's the point, there's immense value for human involvement in these skills. More now than in the past. If you can do more with math, additional funding avenues open up.

Jane Street will be using tons of AI in math, but boy are they going to need a lot of humans to try to keep it all under control.

And we're all just supposed to suck up the fact that our chosen career morphed into "Babysit a machine" no matter what it is? What a swell timeline

It's exactly the opposite of babysitting, from my point of view.

No, they won’t.

The entire point of AI is to eliminate human involvement.

> If the machines understand math but humans don't, we're going to be in a bad bad bad spot.

To generalize beyond math... how many bits of working memory do you have? How about a transformer?

I'm not sure I understand the point of your question. Of course any recent LLM has memorized far more than I or another human could.

That is the point.

So what exactly are you going to offer beyond what near future LLMs will be able to do?

Agency and control, the most important. Even if LLMs could somehow assimilate all the knowledge that's not available in their training datasets that's essential to all aspects of our current economy, which they can't they don't know human desires.

Their training data contains nothing about human desires?

Even with the entire knowledge of human desires available on the training data, one must still construct a prompt.

Desires which were trained on are only partially relevant to what I need right now.

> Even with the entire knowledge of human desires available on the training data, one must still construct a prompt.

AI's are already constructing prompts.

Prompts to do what and meet what human desire?

Whatever the AI does, humans are still here, and "math" just without humans controlling the direction will have limited utility.

Unless we are talking about turning all control of our society and economy to AI, which I have assumed is not even on the table because that's the one way we face existential risk.

Human desires cannot be generalized. We're individuals.

Memorization is long-term memory. Working memory (WM) is short term memory.

How much you can hold in your head and work on, at a given moment.

WM is not the same thing as IQ, but IQ and WM are both necessary parts of effective intelligence.

For a transformer, the WM number has several more zeros at the end of it than it does for a human.

It's not a perfect comparison of course, because their "brains" are very different. (And it's not the same thing as the context window size, because of sparse attention.)

(It's not "guy shaped" but it does a reasonable job of emulating a guy.)

But fundamentally, their brains have the opposite shape of ours. Our brain is drinking through a tiny straw. The LLM drinks through a firehose.

How is that any different than another kind of automation?

AI will make mathematics so much more approachable, comprehensible, and applicable as more problems gets solved. If the costs is a handful of PhDs tenure track, so be it. Academics didn’t much to seem to mind when that happens to blue collar workers.

Nothing stopping anyone from studying mathematics here.

I keep hearing these “AI will make this” and “AI will become that”. Boosters are always making these claims for years now, but whenever AI becomes more powerful everything just sucks more.

I don’t buy these claims anymore, and haven‘t been for a long time. I think you [as in you boosters; not you specifically] are full of shit. I don‘t think you know what AI will become, you just dream up some scenario where everything becomes better by some magic, but it won’t. It will become worse. People loose their jobs, people loose their tenures, and instead we get just more and more slop, more and more span, energy becomes more expensive, our planet becomes more polluted, our internet becomes more polluted. Our servers become overrun by bot traffic, our gaming machines become too expensive, etc. etc.

I just want you to stop making things worse. I just want you to stop training more AI. It sucks, I hate it, and I want it gone.

AI has already made mathematics better in the sense that it has greatly advanced what we know to be true (theorems).

The only way that it hasn't made mathematics better is in the sense of human mathematicians' career prospects -- and in this respect, it is identical to other forms of automation that the world, and especially computer programmers like us, have participated in in the past without complaint.

So AI is only bad for HUMANS, which is exactly the point being made in the post you replied to.

It's "worse for humans" in exactly the same way that first the Industrial Revolution and later computer programming made things "worse for humans", but the post you're referring to only notices that it's "worse" when they are the victim.

It’s “worse for humans” in exactly the same way the Industrial Revolution was bad for all the horses that weren’t needed anymore.

I agree with this actually. All of these things were good for some and bad for some, and these groups overlapped. All were good for (most) humans-as-consumers, and bad for (some) humans-as-producers, and the IR was also bad for horses.

AI helps me learn math now, what are you talking about??

I don’t waste time on unfamiliar notation, it provides me with context, suggests things I wouldn’t have thought of. And connects it to fields I wouldn’t have thought of.

We have personal tutors with PhD level knowledge for basically free if you know the questions to ask.

There is no waiting, results are here.

No.

AIs will do all the math with zero human involvement whatsoever.

"Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while, a great wind carries me across the sky."

— Ojibwe proverb

This reminded me of a moment from Star Trek V: "I don't want my pain taken away. I need my pain!" ~Captain Kirk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ABLYnvpAso

Back when CAD programs were going mainstream in companies in the 70's and 80's, civil/elec/mech engineers were in an uproar because they thought that CAD was going to replace engineers.

What ended up happening was that draftmen became a profession.

Not saying that we stick our heads in the sand and say AI will just generate jobs, because the cost there will most likely outweigh the benefits in the grand scheme, but there is definitely a world where mathematicians hand down direction to grad students utilizing such tools for research or some other framework that just doesn't resemble what we think of today.

It is not the same comparison. CAD produces exact same drawings as handwritten ones. It purely makes engineers more effective. It just took the menial side of the work. You still had to care about every single detail and tolerance. You still followed the same way of manufacturing things. You still do the smallest parts of it. Just like word processing vs handwriting a book / letter. You still have to type every single letter. You still think every sentence.

AI is the complete opposite. It takes away the thinking part. When people use AI, they tend to offload a lot of thinking part to it as well. I use it because company policy. But if you care about every single if case and every single variable name, writing by hand is faster unlike CAD.

History repeats itself. Now it’s the moment of weaving machines. AI is the new weaving machine. It needs couple guys for the maintenance. The other 198 guys were freed from the hard work. It’s not the CAD moment.

Before the industrial revolution weavers worked from home in a relatively peaceful environment, set their own hours, and made a respectable living.

After the industrial revolution they worked 14 hour days in a thunderously loud textile mill, so full of airborne lint that you could hardly see. The pace of their work was set by machine, which frequently caused serious injuries, and their wages often weren't enough to live on.

At the time of Munich Olympics German workers did occasionally electronics assembly at home. Or some electromechanical components like switches, relays, cabling, you name it. Pay per piece, not hourly rate. Simple hardware in today’s terms with generous pay. Later it was automated and today completely outsourced. Cycle seen in so many industries.

I can repeat myself: history repeats often enough.

You'll be surprised to learn that the opposite is true today (as of 2015 when I last worked in a licensed engineer capacity). CAD has near eliminated draftsmen, similar to how automated testing has eliminated QA. Engineers are performing all of analysis, design and drafting today. Similar to how programmers are responsible for testing.

Doesn't bode well for all of us meatbags, actually. AI might now be better mathematicians (if that's even true for now). But if progress continues, it might be a better <your job here>, and even worse, wife, husband, parents. Black mirror territory.

Another pop culture reference: in the first book of the "The Three-Body Problem" trilogy by Liux Cixin, physicists get depressed by having their field of work blocked.

Pretty much the inverse situation, but also the same situation - having your field of expertise completely disrupted. Anyone would be troubled.

I fear the same thing will happen as what I see in software developement. The volume of proofs that can be generated by anyone will be so big that it will overwhelm the system. Currently I really don't have the time anymore to check if all the bright results in computing projects make any sense. And not only in software developement. In general, I see preprint servers getting overwhelmed by article submissions, AI generated articles. I don't recall a wave of CAD generation in the past.

> Imagine waking up one morning to find that an alien technology has solved the problem you had dedicated your life to (and many more to boot.)

I would be thrilled! My only worry would be how to sustain myself financially if my expertise is no longer needed - worries like this I can definitely understand. But the simple fact that the problems I care about are getting solved? Awesome, more of that please!

"My friends in cancer research are terrified they'll wake up one morning to find out that an AI cured cancer."

But more seriously, this was an inevitability for math, no? The brain has an upper limit on how many concepts it can recall, recombine, and synthesize. We're all finding out now what happens when every single concept in math can be perfectly held in memory.

AI solve my problem where I have to hand code all the time. I'm happier than ever. Math's analogy is they now get to find problems instead of solving them, then get LLM's to solve them or solve them together. I've been saying this, numbers go up, and LLM makes the amount of problems to solve go up, not less.

Right, I didn't get into this to make money, I got into this to make things. This stuff is amazing for that.

> AI has destroyed a major source of "life's meaning" for many people who pursued mathematics.

That captures how I feel, and I just don't know what do with that emotion. Mathematics is now like chess, gardening, crochetting, dancing, etc

We live in a time where there isn't enough focus on giving life meaning. Without meaning, it is too easy to become cynical. Some of the happiest people I know believe that the greatest source of meaning is serving others. Many of those at the forefront of research believe there work, while individual, serves all of humanity.

Wonder if this is how G.H. Hardy felt reading Ramanujan's "proofs". I figure the real work begins now, the fact that a machine "showed the way" may become irrelevant 10 years from now.

> Imagine waking up one morning to find that an alien technology has solved the problem you had dedicated your life to

I’d like to wake up and find out a 100 types of cancer have been cured.

That sounds more like a religion than science. Why not be happy that there is a new technology that helps solve (presumably) important problems that can have positive effects?

> Imagine waking up one morning to find that an alien technology has solved the problem you had dedicated your life to.

Pretty sure everyone on HN can relate to this.

If you don’t care about the solutions, maybe you never cared about the issues themselves?

Math has practical applications that hopefully will improve lives.

Yes, imagine when cancer becomes a solved problem, and oncologists react online by lamenting the end of their life's work. They'd be viciously scorned and ridiculed.

>Imagine waking up one morning to find that an alien technology has solved the problem you had dedicated your life to

I would be ecstatic.

You'd be ecstatic until you realise "oh damn, how will I get enough money to eat?"

Sure, there are probably some mathematicians that are sad that robots can do all the proofs and such for them, but it seems to me that most of them probably would be happy with the robots helping to solve problems if not for the little issues that mathematics is their profession and in the current state of things, they need to eat and have a place to live.

And that is the actual problem. Let's just remember, the Luddites were not anti-technology, they were against the technology being owned by a small elite that could use it to take away their livelihoods. They were against the capitalists essentially throwing them into the ditch to starve, and we're seeing echoes of that in the current AI discussion and the reactions of mathematicians, programmers, artists, etc. Back in the 1800s it was physical and artisan manufacturing labour in danger, and now it's mental labour.

I hope you understand that you're essentially conveying an image of a mathematician as a rent-seeker.

Maybe I am, but I'd argue that in that case I'm depicting literally all professions as rent-seeking, as people really want to protect their income and livelihoods from infringement that would endanger them. And at that point it's probably not useful to talk about it as rent-seeking.

If AI can do literally any job more efficiently than a human, then there's no need for human labour anymore and at least to me that seems that unless we get a radical transformation of our political economy, that will not be allowed to happen. You can't just put literally everyone out of a job, capitalism just wouldn't be able to cope with it and it'd implode, most probably because of the inevitable backlash that would occur for to no one being able to afford the basic necessities of life. It would be orders of magnitude bigger than either the French or Russian revolutions.

I'm no mathematician, but if being concerned about being able to keep my employment to be able to feed myself makes me a rent-seeker, then I will wear that on my sleeve proudly, crossing my heart, hoping to die. The misery of the alternative is too great to fathom.

"Rent-Seeking" is trying to capture eternally recurring payment for something you did or acquired one time.

Mathematicians acquired their skills over long hours of study, but weren't asking to be paid just to sit around passively being smart, but to keep working on new results. It is the lost opportunity to do work they are lamenting, not the lost opportunity to sit on their laurels. So no, it doesn't sound like rent-seeking.

The egos of these mathematicians is not what is important here, and they should get over themselves. The goals and values should be about advancing mathematics and, by proxy, humanity. It’s not about them.

That said, change is difficult for most. Let’s give them grace and have patience as they work through the stages of grief. Once they come to accept this new reality, let’s hope they can learn to embrace this new technology to continue the work of advancing the frontier.

How do you advance humanity by eliminating the humans?

Spot on!

Isn't it the same with software development? I kind of feel that way too.

> alien technology.

its not an alien technology, its a direct application of... maths.

You are right, it’s not alien technology. But this is how it feels like.

Software Engineers entire jobs have become being meat proxys to A.I.

We hear you.

What would the AI even use you for?

Recent And relevant: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/reactions

Sorry but this is ego.

Many people are working with machines and doing dull jobs. Are you special…?

I don’t have to imagine, I’m a software developer lol

Alien technology? What are you talking about.

" As a scientist, I don't want to end up as a laboratory assistant to an AI."

The idea is, that the AI is your assistant.

Apart from that, I would also say get over yourself. We all have to. Arcane computer knowledge I was proud of having, that made me feel special can now be replicated by anyone with access to a LLM.

I still know how to build things and that is what I am doing. Just faster than ever before.

If you find your source of meaning in slowing down understanding and knowledge, you were never it in for the mathematics and some questionable motives. Find the solution within.

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