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 No LLM has yet written anything like Shakespeare that has superseded Shakespeare in any culturally meaningful way.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.
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.
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.
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.
But if the AIs replace all the jobs?
With our current systems, the abundance will only go to the holders of capital.
Look at the most upvoted comment on that thread:
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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.