This may be the first academic profession to see its work taken over by AI | Hacker News Reader

This may be the first academic profession to see its work taken over by AI

washingtonpost.com

5 pointssonabinu5 comments

The views of Terrance Tao on this is a great read https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.16753

Paywalled, but I did see that it looks like Mathematics is the predicted profession to be taken over (I could be wrong).

It seems to me something like history might be more at risk. In mathematics a wrong result can be checked. With something like history checking answers is not always so easy.

>It seems to me something like history might be more at risk. In mathematics a wrong result can be checked. With something like history checking answers is not always so easy.

Isn't that exactly why we need historians? How do you fact check an interpretation of evidence or of history? I would never trust a chatbot for its take on history, and that's partly due to the fact that we've seen how political it can get. In the worst case, the communication of history can be used to misrepresent cultures and limit freedoms. How we interpret history informs our present day policies. There's no way we'll ever leave that to a computer.

If I need a mathematical solution to my problem (my fusion reactor is not working) it is not quite good enough to know that some theorem is correct. I need to know how it applies.

If I want to use some argument about history (US Civil War fought for human rights, states right, protect interests of wealth) there may not be a simple/single correct answer. I could ask an expert historian to help me build my argument (whatever it might be) or maybe a chatbot. Would it matter, I am still getting the answer I want? Maybe law is field that is in the most danger. We have always had lawyers arguing every side of every case, often pointing to the same laws to justify their argument.

The field of math (and other hard sciences) might stand to benefit from AI. It might be a powerful new tool. Tractors did not destroy agriculture.

Art, political science, history, others, do not have right answers to all questions. I am not saying AI replacing these fields would be a good thing. I think it could easily be a disastrous thing. Just saying if a field is going to disappear it might be because there are no right ways to do it and many may just opt for the easy and cheap answers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com