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Comment by adrianN | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how we could formalize the notion of „interesting“ problems in a way that would allow us to automatically generate new interesting questions from the existing corpus of mathematics.

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For me this path means that our role as humans is just the understanding of intelligence?

Everything else is secondary (or the last of our priorities) and would be better automated?

This is a hard pill to swallow

We should think about rejecting this AI future.

A simple way is to just measure how long it takes to solve. If it takes more than 5 minutes then we don't have a good understanding of that area and its worth potentially investing into.

Or maybe we should not let pure mathematicians decide which problems are interesting, but reward the practical applications instead.

If you only judge by practical applications you eliminate vast swaths of human endeavor.

Human endeavor and achievement does not make number go up for next quarter’s earnings

This is wildly shortsighted view of mathematics. Historically many of the subfields of math which are presently most valuable were considered useless for decades or centuries. Number theory, non-Euclidean geometry, group theory, and Boolean algebra, to name a few.

This is false dichotomy. Many mathematical achievements were produced while looking at practical problems: Fourier is a good one. For every mathematician that accidentally made a practical contribution, there are many more that produced nothing of value, and would have with a better tuned reward function.

I guess this AI wave will divide the population more between people that think that only economic value exists, and people that dont.

Thats one of the timeless human debates.

We are now living in the perfect combo of low morality and general human automation. So i expect the next few decades dominated by people who think (and have a "proof") that doing something without an expected economic gain is useless.

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