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Comment by odyssey7 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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