But it's pretty clear you can chuck "human pursuits" in the garbage, in favor of what really matters: intensification of the market system and wealth accumulation for its own sake.

> In the pursuit of knowledge, what ultimately drives people is what they themselves can understand, and the meaning these understanding provides, both based on their own experience and people whose opinions they value.

It's pretty clear the message we're getting is "what [people] themselves can understand, and the meaning these understanding provides" doesn't matter, and if you care about that you're an sentimental piece of garbage.

As Marx wrote: "Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind."

And of course, that relationship is class war between the vast majority of the population and the owners of the productive forces.

Without the owners of the productive forces the productive forces wouldn't exist. Go to North Korea if you want to see what it looks like when nobody's allowed build their own business.

If you divide a product' cost into its "cost of availability" and the variable costs, none of this would even matter.

You could just ignore your noisy neighbors fighting over who gets to be the happy one, while you in your newfound freedom are simply happy.

If it wasn't clear, if you do not divide the two costs, then their fates are intertwined and so are the outcomes.

This topic has historically been reserved for those fortunate enough to be so leisurely with their time. Haven't you ever considered that you're seeing the beginning instead of the end? Why else would there be so much debate? It's a big change to the status quo.

I personally hardly have that impression, as in the days of the Romantics and of Werther's sufferings are now way past us.

The truth of the matter is somewhere else but if people were actually a bit better rounded philosophically and politically.

The different way is "I'm different, my reasons are better". We are but ego.

90% of the time I can't even find the fucking time an article was written or last updated easily on the web.

Tao has been pushing for AI and Lean for a long time and didn't like the way OpenAI handled the Oct. 6th release. He has now been pushing for AI owned by universities.

That is the public way he navigates the situation, who knows what his real game is.

He is one of the people that brought about this situation.

In any case: "reactionary"? Are we using Soviet language to single out perceived dissidents?

I've been reading the posts on his blog (and I should be clear, many posts are guest posts, so it is a collective cognitive behavior therapy session):

Also did you notice he never posted more than 10 posts per month until September? These are definitely posts trying to come to terms with the new reality and searching for value in a field where humans are not pre-eminent:

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/26/a-value-based-appr...

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/19/why-do-we-need-hum...

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/12/after-math/

I also see this post that that mathematics will be needed as interpreters of complex AI generated proofs as a form of denial in that this is just a current limitation of AI, and will likely be fixed soon:

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/18/if-math-is-more-th...

> In any case: "reactionary"? Are we using Soviet language to single out perceived dissidents?

When new technology is introduced that is disruptive a lot of people fall into "reactionary" stances.

The first definition of reactionary that I found was this:

"A reactionary is a person or policy that opposes political, social, or economic change and seeks to reverse progress to restore an earlier, idealized state of society."

I think that fits with my usage.

All of which was provided and encouraged by a small group like Tao, Gowers, Tsimerman, Avigad, Schmitt etc. It isn't just "an algorithm".

Yeah, sure... What the hell are you talking about? Do you think that if not Tao we would not have the Oct. 6th release? That's totally insane.

What his "game" is? I've been following Tao for years... I can't think of someone I'd be less likely to accuse of having some nefarious "game".

> He is one of the people that brought about this situation.

A baseless accusation. Tao has no power over the progress happening at the frontier labs.

The reaction was from the strip mining of pending human discovery, mathematicians were already using LLMs from frontier labs who then published suspiciously similar solutions or found connections that were just waiting to be discovered.

So folks are using AI to help them cope about AI. LLMs "stole" pending results is just another cope. Im sure quasi riemann was about to be proved if it wasnt for those pesky AI models. Jeez.

Yikes. I fear for what mathematics will become if that becomes the majority viewpoint.

https://proofsandprompts.com/2026/10/31/lean-me-softly-a-sat...

That is literally what some tenured people are pushing for.

For now unfortunately we're doomed to an endless retread of "AI boosters vs AI haters" with very little humility and thought on either side.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funding_by_lottery

However, people with ego end up being praised more, in front of bosses or others, because people want to be on their good side. And that makes them look better, they end up promoted and seen as higher performers.

I finished a math PhD before I decided to get out of academia and into startups. Since then, the older I get the more of a Platonist I become, especially now that I've taught my daughters a bunch of math (I'm their homeschool math+science teacher). And the more of a Platonist I become, the less I care about who made a particular discovery. Who cares?! It seems obvious (and quite beautiful) to me now that the same discoveries must be getting repeated again and again across the universe by alien mathematicians, and eventually by their AIs.

Or did I misunderstand?

I guess I replied to the parent OP to break into a tangent about Plato solely.

Whether or not 99% of people actually use those skills in life for anything other than to pat themselves on the back that they're "good at math" is another story. People are often proud if they can calculate a 20% tip in their head these days.

This egoless attitude and the call for a broad humility may find itself in conflict with a supremacist humanism. There are people who will only ever want things that originated from a human. I see this attitude mostly in creative fields like art, music, film and games.

I therefore think we need to have different attitudes towards AI adoption depending on the field. In the case of math, some seem to want to excise any human emotion or physical need and create a pure refined space to explore propositional Truth. But extending this to all human activities doesn't seem to follow.

I guess what I'm saying is, there is probably still a place for human ego, even if that place is not math.

Now I think I kind of have an answer. Maybe the level of diagnostic refers to the LLM effort level. Great. So then what are all the people on the Enterprise actually doing? My guess is they're all just being people and doing people stuff like exploring the galaxy and smugfacing the Romulans. It would be easier to just create a race of Datas to do it safer. The Datas could probably be Bluetoothed to the Ship's Computer for even more optimization.

I think some of the struggle is that as we summit each subsequent hill of challenge, the sunset (or is it a sunrise?) is becoming inescapably bright. We're faced with that big ol' "what's the point of all this?" question. What's the point of studying math? What's the point of exploring the galaxy? What's the point of standing under a stack of blue barrels?

I'm not a math guy. I dunno if a Fields medal comes with free Taco Bell for life or something else that would truly move me. But I love that I get to read books and learn cool things and feel that spark of joy when my understanding expands, even if the ending is right there with nothing stopping me from skipping to it.

> Now I think I kind of have an answer. Maybe the level of diagnostic refers to the LLM effort level....

The real answer is that it was gibberish. IIRC, the writers would insert "[tech]" in the scripts, to be later fleshed out into technobabble.

What you say is ret-con at best. A more realistic contemporary interpretation of the "level 3 diagnostic" technobabble, would have been a particular pre-programmed diagnostic procedure (like "run the POST memory checks" on a PC).

I thought the ship's systems were just instrumented with self-diagnostic hardware and the "levels" of diagnostic indicated varying levels of time/effort.

Consider modern hard disks and SSDs, which are fitted with SMART self-diagnostic tools. You can run a short test, which checks the various electrical and mechanical (for HDDs) components, environmental sensors, etc. and ensures those are operational at a high level. Or you can run a long test, which checks the platter surface/flash memory sector by sector and can take several hours to complete, but which will flag up more problems earlier. Presumably a warp nacelle, being a much more complex and dangerous system, might have many more diagnostic procedures that can take varying lengths of time, from basic integrity checks of the plasma conduits to the warp core to ensuring the power flux coming from each coil is within tolerances.

Obviously, yeah, it's fiction and it's just bullshit. But one of the nice things about TNG is that its premise pretty much confines actually intelligent machines to Data and his relatives, with a handful of exceptions such as Moriarty, which the Holodeck generated specifically to challenge Data. Thus, it's designed around the idea that there's always something for the biological crew to do. Hence, "level 3 diagnostics" or any diagnostic are automated data gathering operations similar to SMART tests, allowing the engineering crew to perform analysis on what the data mean. Star Trek is fundamentally humanist; its fictional universe is constructed to celebrate the greatness and achievements of humans and other living beings, without going to the extremes that Dune went to by banning computers altogether.

I want to believe, but research has been tightrope walking with no safety net for awhile.

So, either researchers get SF salaries? or? (first one is not gonna happen)

Isn't it strange how the AI disclaimer is at the end of the writing instead of the start. Almost as if they are trying to hide it.

I'm thinking maths are kinda fucked rn.

Holy. This is the closest thing I've seen one of these AI guys get to accepting it as the machine god. "Dear god, we gratefully accept this divine gift of sustenance that we are about to consume."

That might be a good time to consider what the fuck is going on.

Marketing for OpenAI. When it comes from one of the best-known mathematicians, it must be quite efficient.

btw,

> This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI.

Why even mention this? And you don't really need an LLM to convert between file formats, there are dedicated tools that work well for this. Especially for a text that's essentially unformatted, a copy paste and a few searches & replaces will probably be faster.

Acknowledgement: a few fingers were used to type this comment. Possibly a couple of organic neurons. No AI whatsoever, except maybe in cited text.

You're doing exactly what you accuse others of doing.

Cue the confusion when Tao writes a post on his own blog and everybody will be wondering where the attribution is...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egoless_programming

Why some of us work more and earn less starts to be a little harder to answer though...

   1. What you like doing
   2. What you are good at doing
   3. What people will pay you to do

I think the "egoless" path is taking a 50,000-foot view of mathematics that ignores the above lens. Sure, mathematics will survive and even prosper with AI, but what about the mathematicians?

In time, the profession of mathematics will evolve so a new task is at the center of the diagram--maybe it will be explaining math results to humans or teaching math to future mathematicians. I don't know. But it's easy to see that not everyone is going to be happy with the transition, and many will be left behind.

For software engineering, it depends on what your center is. If you like "writing code", then #3 is under attack. But for those whose goal is, "make something work", all three are still viable and even better than before (or at least faster).

That's why we see so much disagreement on HN about whether AI is good or bad for software engineering.

I'm sure lots of other people have made this observation before.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikigai#Diagram

But I've seldom been in a situation where multiple jobs fit the three circles equally and I need to use a fourth circle ("What the world needs") to decide.

I also think a core tenet of Western culture is that the power to choose your own path (individualism) comes with the responsibility to benefit others (service). E.g., selling cigarettes to kids doesn't fit in the center of the three circles because one shouldn't enjoy that, even if one is good at it and can get paid for it.

Instead of asking, "What does society want me to do," we ask, "How can I make the world better."

It's not a given that mathematics will survive without mathematicians. It's not even likely. The proofs OpenAI threw over the wall are unpublishable garbage, top to bottom. A big reason mathematicians are so upset is that they feel like they've been drafted into the role of unpaid editor for OpenAI.

Make no mistake about it, the mathematical profession is under attack. The biggest incentive for becoming a mathematician (as opposed to a hired gun quant) is the challenge of solving the proofs. Take that away and the most talented problem solvers go with it.

In time, the profession of mathematics will evolve so a new task is at the center of the diagram--maybe it will be explaining math results to humans or teaching math to future mathematicians.

That is the centre of mathematics. It's what schools pay mathematicians to do. All the research stuff, the problem solving, the "thrill of the hunt" for elusive proofs, and the prestige of being the first? That's the carrot the schools dangle in front of mathematicians' noses to get them to work. Without that, you don't get exceptional mathematicians teaching classes and supervising grad students (and attracting the world's top students to your school); you get adjuncts and only adjuncts.

Example: "Basically the paper is so horribly written that it’s impossible to read it without AI help. I asked Astra for reasonable completeness and soundness claims of the noise gadget and it gave them by combining claims from all over the paper."

Without AI help? Impossible. With AI help? Comprehensible.

That is consistent with the assertion that mathematics might outlast human mathematicians.

(Feels related to models evolving forms of human-incomprehensible shorthand when communicating among themselves.)

Without making a value judgement of whether that's good or bad for the field in the long term, it is an interesting point to note the similarity with the human-incomprehensible communication among AI agents. When there are no humans in the loop, it's no longer necessary to translate or "lower" the representation for our benefit. Since it's still early days, we can only imagine and extrapolate how far it might go in that direction, what might evolve out of it in the future.

Incomprehensible pure mathematics has no value to anyone.

It'd be pathetic if the silicon does better science than us and our crabbucket mentality -- highly likely in my view...

I'm much more sympathetic to the views of this anonymous postdoc here: https://proofsandprompts.com/2026/10/22/the-rules-cannot-cha... (unfortunately also in LLM-"polished" English). Quote: "A field that fails to attract and support its next generation cannot preserve itself through inspiring statements alone."

(*If you extrapolate a little, for now you can also substitute with 'math departments' there.)

https://proofsandprompts.com/2026/10/20/who-will-become-the-...

I'm a mathematician, but have been for 30 years outside of academics. I like this view. Peter Scholze commented and added a small non-depressive nuance.

We need other voices from the mathematical community, dissenting opinions, so-called Luddites and supremacist humanists.

Framing it as the "AI Era" is so 2020's. The term is already obsolete before it even began. We need to look a step or two ahead, and plan for how to prevent the downfall of society and collective cognitive competence.

If you vomited out a bunch of AI slop that nobody read, history shouldn't care.

The first person to package it up for human consumption and get everyone to agree it is correct should get all the credit now. If you can't get up in front of a seminar and have pretty much everyone walk out understanding what you meant... then too bad, history forgets who you were...

Because AGI! And see moat! And stock price go up!