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.