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Comment by singularity2001 | Hacker News Reader

singularity2001

The job of a mathematician just shifts from proving to inventing new theories and finding new conjectures with the help of AI, which should be even more fun.

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In my experience it's the opposite. AI tends to make interesting things boring. You spend less time building a deep understanding by doing the hard but rewarding work yourself, and you focus more on developing a more superficial understanding by studying someone else's work. There are some productivity gains, depending how well defined the tasks are and how well the ability to produce more translates to creating more value. But at the same time, an increasingly large part of the work feels like bureaucracy with no inherent value.

"AI tends to make interesting things boring"

If a conjecture can be one-shotted by OpenAI Astra, I have a hard time believing it is interesting.

And what do you find interesting right now?

Use AI to deepen my understanding and learning some interesting math. I studied a lot of combinatorics in high school, but my understand at that time was very adhoc (that most of combinatorics problems are just a bunch of elementary tricks applying here and there). With AI, I could categorize the bag of tricks into systematic topics, and discover formal concepts.

For example, here are two topics that came up during my time solving combinatorics problems in the past:

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

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012365X0...

> proving to inventing new theories and finding new conjectures with the help of AI

This is exactly the activity Tao and others worry will be hollowed out by instant "true/false" responses to novel questions.

inventing new theories is the interesting part.

finding new conjectures is the second interesting part

"instant "true/false" responses to novel questions."

Fair enough. Then we can add ordering and analyzing theorems with the help of AI as a third activity, admittedly the least interesting one.

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