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Comment by mikestylz | Hacker News Reader

Just about anyone who has played a sport has heard that they have to target where the ball is moving to, not where the ball is right now. In this regard I am consistently disappointed with the commentary that mathematicians have been producing lately.

As a student, I am actively making decisions which will shape my career for the next forty or so years. At a minimum a discussion like this should acknowledge the possibility that the current rate of AI progress continues apace. I understand the desire to be encouraging, but the best preparation for students involves the consideration of possibilities that current mathematicians negligently paper over.

Of course it will get better at exposition than humans. And it will prompt itself in due time.

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Do you care to share then? Because anyone I know with any sense right now is aware that "planning for the next forty or so years" is genuinely impossible at this point, especially in mathematics, and the right approach is to remain on your toes, ride the waves, and diversify as much as possible. Heck, even planning for the next five years seems absurd. This is a time of immense uncertainty, and to think otherwise is foolish.

A few years ago I was in a pure math degree, but I switched and graduated with a combined degree in math and computer science. Once I finish my masters degree I intend to work on industry applications of formal methods, which I anticipate will be a high-growth area for the next few years. The idea is to take advantage of the growing ability to generate proofs/code and work on keeping the messy human side of the equation up to speed. So I plan on addressing the social and operational aspects which come with delegating more work to AI. I'll work on integrating these gains into the industry, on building trust in the work that AI produces, and I'll work on the interface that lets us ensure that this trust is deserved.

But nothing is certain. I am trying to avoid overspecialization and remain flexible, just as you advise. If this path fails I might become a paramedic or physiotherapist.

No one succeeds in making accurate predictions of the future over a 40 year time scale. Look back at the 20th century, and see the range of range of events, and the kind of technological change, that could occur in a span that long.

Go into things expecting you might have to change careers.

> No one succeeds in making accurate predictions of the future over a 40 year time scale.

The sports analogy holds; the future location of the ball may be uncertain, but that is the student's target, and not overcommitting to the present location of the ball. The commenter is expressing disappointment that the commentary seems to be reacting to the present too much.

> accurate predictions of the future over a 40 year time scale

I think the problem is the reverse. We no longer can make good predictions for four years ahead, certainly not eight.

And yet, people have to make choices - so they need advice and some kind of hope of a guess.

> you might have to change careers.

I hope this is some dust dry humor!

I remember talking to an admissions tutor at Cambridge and he said even there most applicants had no idea what they wanted to do for a career. They just drifted into whatever came up.

In the UK only about 30-40% of students end up working in an area related to their degree.

The people who have a realistic plan that works out for them are a minority.

Science was quite stable in terms of how it works over the last 100 years.

Sure you wouldn’t predict what you would work on exactly. And there were better tools, better communication and so on sure, but no disruptive innovations or seismic shifts really.

Freeman Dyson said no scientific (or, I think, technological) project should last more than about five years, because the context under which it was conceived changes too much in that time.

It's not a good analogy because the ball is constrained inside a court with fixed rules about how it can travel. No one can predict accurately how AI is going to change things. Look at all the predictions so far. We have the whole spectrum from "the end of humanity" to "utopia".

We might not be able to precisely predict where the ball will move, but I think GP is implicitly saying "don't assume the ball doesn't move", which IMHO is kind of baseline, but seems to be over the head for some people that are now complaining.

Some of those complaining today are the ones who keep saying "LLMs are just stochastic parrots predicting the next word", "how can AI do math if they can't even count the number of 'r's in strawberry?", etc.

It doesn't take a genius to realize AI will start getting better and possibly become a "threat" even before all this mathocalypse stuff happened.

If it gets better and better for the next 40 or so years, will your career exist?

If AI continues to improve at the current rate for 40 years then there is unlikely to be such a thing as a career.

Manual labor and trades is likely to be one of the last things to go, so the whole "dropout of school and go into trades" crowd may have been more correct than ever, though their original reasoning was not.

Don't you think a robot can fix your toilet as well?

Why are meta glasses such a big deal? Because they need training data for manual labor.

The challenge is not will robots fix toilets but will the economics support it if we end up with most of the world unemployed and without careers. Yes of course we can hand wave basic income and government intervention but reading the room (e.g. last 70+ years of US labor and capital trends) it’s not the most likely outcome, even if it is the most game theory optimal for all.

Realistically the outcome of highly capable advanced AI is an economic dark age more than anything else.

I read The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler a couple years back. In it AIs were running ocean fishing fleets. They figured out that robots were too expensive and prone to malfunction at sea, so they would have the robots kidnap people on shore, drug them and then have them wake up on the ships too far out in the ocean to be able to escape and thenm tell them they could get back home if they work.

Humans were doing a hundred years ago in reality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghaiing

The AI overlords will eventually consider the majority of human lives to be worthless. Let's face it, one day we will need to fight for mere survival.

It's hilarious to read stuff like this.

Robots automating everything and humans not needing to work was the stuff paradise fantasies were made of.

Sure, it would be the end of capitalism (which, I guess you could describe as "economic dark age"), but people these days have so little imagination what life outside of capitalism looks like that ideal societies sound like a horror story.

Yeah it surely is lack of imagination - not the fact that humans have evolved hundreds of thousands of years to survive in resource constrained environments.

I know, right?

Communism was a horror for multiple reasons, but two big ones were: the planners didn't have the data or ability to actually plan (the interactions in a market economy did that much better), and not doing the work you were assigned was a crime (that is, slavery).

AGI and AGLabor solves both these problems. If you don't need workers, you don't need to coerce them into work. And planning and massive data collection (and management in general) sounds like something AGI would work very well at. The conceit that the lower classes are disempowered before the capitalists never struck me as well founded.

It's ironic you talk about communism, because fundamentally this is a problem of "owning the means of production", i.e. who controls the AI and the robots.

If it's you and me, then hey, we can all live happily ever after pursuing hobbies and art, provided for by our mechanical friends, within the limits of resource availability.

If it's an AI trillionaire, things aren't so rosy. If they don't need workers, why would they even bother allocating outputs from the robots to keep us alive?

I don't doubt at all that some group or another will enjoy the fruits of artificial labour. The question is how we are going to get there, and whether that group is most people who are live today and their descendants, or just the families and friends of trillionaires.

My hope is that all wealth becomes concentrated in the hand of one person, thereby becoming worthless.

I guess one could make the argument that with enough control, a trillionaire could amass a private robot army. But I think regular humans still win (after an epic battle of course).

We will always have jobs that require humans, they just don’t pay enough right now. Teachers, therapists, childcare, doctors, and whatnot.

And jobs that require humans’ responsibility.

People can do people stuff, machines can do machine stuff. And market will react accordingly.

Unlike code, with a toilet it can be very unpleasant and/or expensive if AI gets it wrong three times before fixing it correctly.

Why would you pay for a robot to do it when you could just hire one of the 20 million new plumbers (ex-developers, high school graduates, etc.) who just retrained and entered the field?

> Why are meta glasses such a big deal? Because they need training data for manual labor.

Meta glasses are a terrible example for the case you're making a point about: 90+% of whatever video they'll capture will be trash data.

It'd be much more efficient to set up dedicated sites just for producing the very same training data you're claiming they harvest.

> Manual labor and trades is likely to be one of the last things to go

Yes, this is likely true. Plumber & Electrician on existing construction will likely take a long time (relatively speaking) to automate. And even if we end up being able to do it, it could be that humans will be the cheapest option when it comes to a lot of manual jobs especially given that there will be a large supply of unemployed humans in many scenarios.

I wouldn't bet a single dime on that, especially with the advancements in robotics (have you seen the Chinese robots?)

Especially if the timeline is 40 years (as opposed to, say... 4.) I have no doubt AI-assisted robotics development would have solved the plumber and electrician jobs in a decade or two.

I’d say if we have robots that can install AC in any old european building, then we have reached both AGI and AGLabour.

But I’m not sure it will take 40 years. I’m quite sure Astra could figure it out, it’s just too slow and robots are too weak. The speed will improve, and robots may lag shortly thereafter but by not much. I give it 1-2 years for AI, and 5-10 years for robots tops (perhaps even quicker).

This may well be offset by the flood of people entering those trades. Likely the days of tradespeople earning high salaries will be over as well.

Better to train on our own adaptability, which to an extend includes an advanced understanding of personal mental health

Yes, all we know is that things will change, but we don't know exactly how. So - increase your tolerance to sudden life swifts and learn to enjoy uncertainty.

If it crashes, there will still be trades jobs but they won't pay enough to eat. What can you charge for electrical work when everyone is either broke or an electrician?

All a career is is an exchange of value between people. They'll certainly exist but what is valued will shift, as they have been for centuries. Basically you can't just look at what LLMs will do, but you have to also consider how that will affect the broader economy and what our response to such will be. So what happens when LLMs start to bring the value of most digital cognitive work down to something approaching $0? It will just create a large vacuum in the economy that will ultimately get filled by other things. The obvious things that will probably increase in value will be stuff done/created in the real world, creative work, and so on.

It's also quite likely that the next big era for humanity will be the space era. And that stands to create the biggest labor boom in human history. It could also happen far faster than many might expect, even moreso as there will be competition between countries, especially as those left with only terrestrial claims will see their influence relatively wane. Space jobs and industry can also, in some ways, act as a more productive Works Progress Administration [1] to compensate for any temporary economic instability that LLMs might bring along.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration

Will any careers exist? How do you even plan for that

>How do you even plan for that

The honest answer is via politics not education, but this debate is often had in "apolitical" circles that try their best to ignore this.

Hacker News is largely libertarian/conservative and believes the free hand of the market will fix all.

I don't know, a lot of SWEs are suddenly discovering the value of class consciousness now it's our jobs in the crosshairs. I've heard more talk of unionisation in the last year or so than in my entire career so far for example.

Universal Basic Income from all the Ai abundance. Is what Musk touts and since 2016, adding working will be optional.

A dark side of this is that a lot of unethical, deplorable, and amoral people who were otherwise occupied by jobs might suddenly have a lot more free time to make trouble instead of spending 1/3 of their day working for rent and food to survive.

Not needing to work is a neat future that might be ahead of us. But it could unlock some new negatives as well as positives.

That's a rather strange concern to have.

Yeah especially when the Terminator(s) are keeping us in check ... sounds crazy today but the world is quickly changing.

Give me one reason why Musk would honour this.

Looks like he and the other Ai overlords have Trump on this train too.

https://youtube.com/shorts/CaJd88zh1h0?feature=shared

Free money and universal healthcare thanks to the abundance of Ai is where "they," say we are headed. Thanks to Ai ravaging our civil society we are use to.

Since AI abundance is taken for granted, why not just just offer every single person in the world full health insurance?

yes with UBI they say they would be offered too. I am only pointing out what the Ai overlords are saying.

UBI is not going to happen. You're talking about ballooning the federal budget by trillions of dollars a year.

I'm not talking about it as fan, rather just pointing out Elon Musk, Sam Altman and etc have been for decades and still are.

I believe Sam Altman no longer supports UBI. But that doesn't matter because nothing he says can be trusted.

This got downvoted but i wasnt saying i am for it, rather pointing out what the Ai overlords have said. Ones whom we are allowing to run amok and ravage our civil society with moving in new neighbors (Ai Data Centers) that eat us alive from the inside.

Some careers that will undoubtedly exist are the 'human manipulation' trades: politicians, salespeople, con artists, religious leaders, basically anyone who convinces people to feed them.

They most certainly will, for at least two reasons. First, jobs aren't just about raw productivity, they're also about responsibility / liability diffusion. A CEO managing an army of agents is possibly on the hook if anything goes wrong - for example, if one of the agents does tax fraud or hacks a competitor. A CEO paying an army of employees, even if the employees are there just there to supervise agents, usually has little to worry about.

The second reason is that we often prefer humans to do it even if a machine can do it faster / cheaper. Sometimes, it's a status thing. For example, some people will buy Ikea furniture, some will have it custom made by a local craftsman. In fact, it's sort of the hallmark of the upper middle class that you can spend more for that human touch. Cupcakes from an artisanal bakery, private banker, etc.

Now, I don't think there's enough people who want to pay extra for human-made software. From the current trends in the industry, my impression is that we don't value our craft, so it would be surprising if others did. For mathematicians, I don't know; it's a bit painful to watch.

> A CEO managing an army of agents is possibly on the hook if anything goes wrong - for example, if one of the agents does tax fraud or hacks a competitor

This is correct under present day thinking.

But imagine the accounting AI of twenty years hence. If it can reliably do the books, reduce and prevent fraud, significantly better than any human ever could, why would you still need the human in that loop?

In the present day it's a legal requirement, not to mention a practical requirement given present AI capabilities. That doesn't mean it still will be in the future.

To put it another way, if the human is on the hook for the agent, but the agent is proven by a decade+ of statistical evidence to be way less mistake/fraud prone than the human, what's the point of the human there?

I'm hearing "better" and "less" but not zero and none. The more interesting question is what happens when that rouge/hallucinating agent does commit that statistically unlikely fraud. Who is responsible then? Or is it now no low we just consider it an "accident", pay a small penalty, and move on?

I'll give you that the capabilities of LLMs are improving rapidly. Their safety, however, seems to be stuck in mid-2023. They're still easy to dupe and prone to cheating to solve problems. Prompt injection is still a thing, and it's still something we need to paper over with input and output classifiers and other hacks external to the LLM.

What we're seeing so far is consistent with the training data being the upper bound for capabilities. They get better at recall / synthesis / reasoning over the corpus, but they don't, for example, acquire trans-human ethics; they're at best as ethical as we are, except not grounded by the fear of consequences. A perfectly-behaved, perfectly-moral LLM is not a given in 20 years, not unless your position is that there's room for unbounded, exponential self-improvement without any loss of fidelity. In that case, we'll probably have problems more pressing than the outlook for accounting jobs.

UBI is politically dead on arrival in the U.S.

A lot of people put a lot of their self-worth into their work and that’s a good thing that won’t change.

UBI is investing in dividend ETFs.

> At a minimum a discussion like this should acknowledge the possibility that the current rate of AI progress continues apace.

But the post does do this: "[...] even if their capacity becomes far superior, there will always be a need for mathematicians at all levels to guide research in paths that make sense for humans to walk (not run)."

> Of course it will get better at exposition than humans.

I'm not so sure about this, because I don't know how one would train towards better exposition as it's not easy to check for good or bad exposition at scale.

> Just about anyone who has played a sport has heard that they have to target where the ball is moving to, not where the ball is right now.

But the ball is flying out of the court and into the abyss.

We need to be working on upgrades. For us. Advice for everyone: Whatever happens, take care of your health. One of the few things that is probably not a mistake.

Don't go classically into that qubit night.

What specific direct advice would you give then if you could talk to someone who is currently studying math?

Do you know where “the ball” is going? Do these math students? Do the professors? It’s easy to say a vague nothing platitude like “target where the ball is going to” but such empty vague platitudes do not help anyone and just waste time.

I would probably tell them to not study math.

Then what? math, the kind LLMs are making "obsolete" is a pursuit unlike any other. What other field would tickle the kind of mind attracted by math the same way? I doubt they went into it for the money.

> I doubt they went into it for the money.

I assumed the student ultimately wants a career that is financially viable.

> Then what?

Literally anything else?

Literally what else? Either you believe the future is AI + Humans, in which case most professions are open to you or you don’t in which case almost none are.

Ironically, this very attitude could lead to AI creating one of the biggest slowdowns in progress in history.

> in which case almost none are

It's this one, but different careers will diminish at different rates. Mathematics was already not financially well rewarded, and current AI is basically better than everyone in the field.

> this very attitude could lead to AI creating one of the biggest slowdowns in progress in history

I think there are enough young people with pre-AI experience that we'll probably develop superintelligence before they retire, so I don't really think a near-term lack of fresh talent will result in any significant slowdown.

> Mathematics was already not financially well rewarded,

Then why are frontier labs ploughing millions into racing human math researchers when they're already cash-strapped? What's the ROI for that?

It’s good marketing because people perceive mathematicians as the smartest of the smart.

What would you study? Current AI is basically better than everyone in every field. Have you tried the latest models?

> we'll probably develop superintelligence before they retire.

That ship has sailed:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/09/inau...

It's like asking a budding pro basketball player to.. go study machine learning

Worked for budding pro football player John Urschel

Robot monks aren't replacing humans yet, even if their traditional crafts (brewing etc.) could be automated.

Human-crafted religious items and artwork may be more appealing than machine-crafted replicas.

I was recently trying to work out what advice I should be giving my 15 year old son, I asked various AI for their recommendations given "possible" AI time frame and it seemed pretty much study whatever you want but always add " and business". Investing in things that AI will just make better. However, in the case of AI improves robotics to the point it's better than humans... who knows. But all that may not pan out as reality. For me, AI is still making a lot of the same mistakes it was making last year, it's very marginally improved in some aspects (not quite sure how to categorize what its failing at, but its like an over eager worker who really doesn't understand what they are working on but super keen to do stuff). It's gotten a lot better at doing more from single prompts. But it feels like, for LLMs at least, they are bumping into limits. But it can be hard to see because at the same time they are actually doing more. More and more I feel like what I'm doing is getting more ambitious in what I'm asking and then a big cycle of correcting.

Chess has always been "just a game". Sure, it teaches valuable life lessons, and it is fun to defeat your opponents through superior training and strategy, but it is "just a game".

Mathematics was historically "just a hobby". Much theoretical work is still "just a hobby". But, for the past few hundred years, humans that better understood the theory could find very profitable applications.

That is no longer true. Computers have solved mathematics, like they did chess two decades ago. A human will never find a better application than a computer, just like they will never find a better chess move. Yet people still play chess, and people still make money tutoring chess.

That is the future of humans in mathematics. Mathematics will become mathematics competitions. It will be just another intellectual sport. Sure, a sport that teaches valuable life lessons, but still "just a game". If you are going into mathematics today, your future career is as a competition mathematics coach.

What do you think mathematics is? "Just a hobby"? Developments in mathematics made possible the industrial revolution, the information age, everything! Do you think the world will be the same when math is "solved"?

Maybe don't take words out of my mouth. I studied math when I was younger, and got to the top 0.001% in mathematics competitions. Why did I study so hard? In order:

1. I recognized that understanding math had incredibly profitable applications.

2. It was a sport.

3. It was a hobby.

Do I think the world will look the same when math is "solved"? Absolutely not! And we're seeing it transform right before our eyes. I routinely ask Claude, "here's the general idea for a math/cs/ai problem I'm working on, can you help me figure out the maths? oh and then implement it too."

Could I figure this out myself? Of course. Having the idea is halfway to formalizing it in math. But I remember even last year working on GPU kernels by hand and having a bunch of little arithmetic or indexing errors burn me, because I'm just slower and less perfect at doing the math correctly. Now I basically just tell Claude, "go optimize a GPU kernel for this problem". I still have to tell it what to look out for (architectural, algorithmic, memory improvements), but I'm sure the next model won't even need that.

I think that's a really unfair characterization of GP's post. They didn't talk about "target where the ball is going" as am empty platitude - they specifically pointed out that they need to plan for a career that will last ~40 years, and on the contrary a lot of these posts by math luminaries seem to be filled with a lot of "hopium" and platitudes that won't help pay the bills if it turns out the world needs a ton fewer mathematicians.

> What specific direct advice would you give then if you could talk to someone who is currently studying math?

Do it for personal satisfaction, but find another way to pay the bills.

FWIW, I did like that the article at least acknowledged that the fundamental question is whether LLM-based approaches will eventually "max out", i.e. will they be limited to the "convex hull of ideas outlined in literature" as the article out it.

If LLMs do eventually hit a wall, then great, humans will still have a role to play. If not, though, we're all completely fucked - none of this nonsense about "humans managing agents" or providing "unique human insight" and what not, as agents will be more than capable of managing themselves and providing superior insight.

My advice would be: don't do just math. Pick some practical hands-on skills, concentrate on things that are widely applicable in the real world and are valued by people outside of your own field, and be ready to shift sideways.

Do programming, electrical engineering, control systems, robotics, ML, statistics, etc.

Eg, we're probably very far off from having factories or new devices be entirely designed and built by robots. Somebody's going to need to get their hands dirty for quite a while still.

Yes, looking at mathematicians, It's remarkable how such smart people can behave so stupidly. Looks like intelligence is overrated.

The trajectory of a ball can be predicted. The trajectory of the job market for mathematicians is far too uncertain at this point to make reasonable predictions. This is not a matter of intelligence.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it”

> In this regard I am consistently disappointed with the commentary that mathematicians have been producing lately.

For all the arrogance the hard sciences have, in the end they are just as human as their humanities counterparts. They just thought they were above becoming worthless because science was elevated above the softer sciences.

You could being playing best jai alai player always knowing where the ball goes. Problem is, nobody cares.

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