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Comment by boron1006 | Hacker News Reader

> Nothing is stopping these folks from continuing to study the problems

My understanding is they are? And literally everything in this world is based around incentives. If you say “well you can continue to work on understanding, but your kids are going to starve” that’s not nothing.

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It boggles my mind. Why cure cancer? The cancer researchers will be out of a job and their kids are going to starve!

The point isn't what happens after something is solved. Where is the motivation for humans to study/find a potential solution if your kids are going to starve while you do it? These things can brute force problems that have a clearly and feasibly searchable answer, but they can't make creative leaps. It will be a severe dark ages for mathematics if humans stop contributing.

Maybe an analogy of "why not solve all medical problems at once" is closer.

We absolutely want to, of course. But you extinguish an industry and the systems of training that supply it. It's hard to know if letting it go that way is right.

methinks mathematicians may have a warped perception of their own importance.

You have misunderstood.

I have a the cure for cancer. Simply kill the host. Does it work? Yes. Have you learned anything from it? No.

Why not cure cancer and take care of the researchers’ kids?

Why not indeed?

AI should be the commons.

A lot of this would be public funding. If AI is reducing the need for mathematicians in an area it makes sense to fund it less and fund something else that isn't solved.

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