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Comment by 40four | Hacker News Reader

I don’t see why the two are mutually exclusive to be honest. I’m not a mathematician, but I’m a software engineer and whether I like it or not, AI has changed my field dramatically forever. I understand the distaste for the way AI might be affecting the field of mathematics, but the genie is out of the bottle, and it will never be the same. It just took a little longer for it to hit the math community. Software engineers have been debating and coming to terms with the new reality for a few years now.

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Soon AI mathematics will be 10x or 100x or 1000x more productive than humans in the proofing theorems business. Mathematics of old style is dead, they should develop ideas how to deal with that as a math community.

If a human doesn't understand the proof, it might be useful for certain kinds of engineering, but not really that useful for mathematics except as an existence test.

I don't known, can't we just also indirectly observe the wide platonic landscape of mathematics through observing AI results which humanity could not produce in a 1,000,000 years.

I imagine this will become one kind of branch of mathematics.

> But solving problems is only a tool and proxy for achieving the primary goal of conceptual understanding and insight. Forgetting this in the world of AI may turn the tool against the primary goal.

No one is paying mathematicians to develop a conceptual understanding. If the signal for who is “winning” math in academia disappears mathematicians will have a big problem

This is true. There can still be some funding for recreational aesthetic mathematics, like you can get some funding for various art projects or philisophy, literature, poetry, general humanities and community-building projects or sports funding or things like that. But currently many mathematicians are funded by the public purse with the understanding that this contributes to science and engineering and technological development at some point. I'm not saying that intellectual pursuits for the sake of human mental satisfaction is not worth funding in a society. The question is the amount of people needed. Tax payers pay for it. You have to tell them why, and why so many people need to be funded to do that. Many people have various hobbies they enjoy. But generally they don't get government money for doing it as the general rule. Maybe in a post-scarcity world.

The difference is that most software engineers don't care about bringing up a new generation to keep their field alive when they retire. Software engineers usually don't give a flying fuck for other software engineers, young or old, nor for software engineering itself. Mathematicians apparently care deeply for their subject, their field, and its future.

Mathematicians are not idiots! They’ve been living on the same planet as you for the last few years and everyone in any thinking profession has been debating and coming to terms with reality over the same period. People who aren’t involved in mathematics might see a big headline and come to the conclusion that mathematicians haven’t seen this coming, but that’s a completely ignorant position.

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