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Comment by zozbot234 | Hacker News Reader

Needless to say, I disagree that what Prof. Mantova is planning to do (digesting the proof and making it human-understandable) represents the "end of [mathematicians'] career". Systematizing has always been a key part of human mathematical work, and tidying up a raw proof can be viewed as a kind of systematizing.

My hope is also that Mantova and very possibly L'Innocente will get a substantial share of credit for their role in the resolution of this conjecture by Conway: the AI would not have embarked on this were it not for their prior work. So even human mathematicians with an inclination for more exploratory "problem solving" will have plenty to do in the future. (The story is actually not that different for the recent Navier-Stokes forced blowup result, which also built on key conceptual work from 2023 by Córdoba and Martinez-Zoroa.)

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Luckily for these guys the problem is famous enough that giving some kind of credit for its resolution even makes sense at all. The vast majority of published work is not like this. There’s not going to be any credit divvied up to the thousands of people who’s work was probably involved in the recent formalization of FLT, which involved formalizing 300 thousand theorems.

Kevin Buzzard has reportedly been working on a more systematized (i.e. leveraging a more modern approach) and human-targeted formalization of FLT. I certainly hope that his work continues and he gets the deserved credit. Of course there is also some possibility that it won't, and that would mean you have a point after all.

You’re just mentioning established and famous people. What about the average people who are just going to get fucked for spending their lives trying to promote humanity, just to be rewarded with the risk of economic ruin and no job prospects?

If Mantova and L'Innocente (as well as Córdoba and Martinez-Zoroa) count as "famous people" now, I would say that their fame is quite deserved! Would you disagree that AI played a significant part in surfacing their work? Aside from that, I'm not really sure what to make of your comment. I do sympathize for the researchers who are at risk of having their ongoing work "scooped" by AI (and for all we know, this may even include Mantova and L'Innocente) but the way to address that is to still have "divying up" of relevant human credit.

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I'm not working on some famous conjecture, just following my curiosity, and I think I found something (minor and specific) that should reignite a young mathematician's interest for work she did almost a decade ago, for a phd she never used (she left academia). I'm going to have flowers delivered to her, with a brief note explaining what I think I found and encouragement to resume her academic career and reach out to a her former co-authors.

Keep doing things that people want to pay for. If this becomes impossible, the world will face a much broader political crisis than "mathematics careers". How concerned were you when manufacturing industries died in certain regions and jobs got wiped out? Or it only matters when it's academics?

Yes I was concerned. That kind of projection is only possible in people who lack empathy.

The math career is going to killed off 2-3 years before law and medicine and Wall Street banker. How does this make me more secure in any way?

It shows that the issue is much broader and myopically focusing on how math PhD students will be evaluated etc. entirely misses the forest for the trees, it's just not even close in proportionality.

This is indeed also coming for law, medicine, and banking, though licensed professions will hold out for longer because you need someone to put in jail when things go wrong. The problem is that all this is extremely over politicized and nobody is able to think clearly. They want to simultaneously say all this is just hype and a bubble and will go away like NFTs did, and also are starting to worry about economic replacement. Some more coherent political narrative will have to be formed.

I’ll state this again. How does my economic redundancy get mitigated in anyway by being the first on the chopping block by several years? Do you think being jobless for 3 years is just missing the forest for the trees?

Since it will be coming for everyone, the solution will be major social upheaval with some consequence for all of humanity, hopefully a good one where we somehow manage to keep on living some kind of good life.

Regarding being jobless for the 3 intervening years, it is certainly a personal concern but in this temporary phase there are still some other jobs for smart people. Once there aren't any, we are entering the part that I was talking about where you will be far from alone and you can join together to exert some kind of political pressure but it will not be about math PhDs, but employment as a whole. And it may not be very effective if AI is on the other side, not on yours. Yeah, it sounds like scifi, and people want to dismiss scifi concerns and instead focus just one inch ahead of their toes, instead of seeing the writing on the wall.

For some reason you think I’m opposed to the use of AI in mathematics. This is not the case. If this guy sat down to actually learn the math and then did actual work to disseminate the knowledge in a positive sustainable way it would be a different story. His actions are just here to inspire more people to use this tool in counterproductive ways.

What's this obsession with credit. From elsewhere in the thread:

> people spending their lives trying to promote humanity

What does this even mean? Become a monk? They are credited with helping humanity.

You have no idea how mathematics has progressed for thousands of years. How about having some humility and understanding the culture you’re cheering on the death of? It’s a goddamn credit based system.

> the culture you’re cheering on the death of

Ahaha. Flowers are the way to go.

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