> we urgently need to come up with good ways of explaining the value of having a large pool of human mathematical experts, even if it is no longer part of their role to find new proofs of theorems.
This is the main issue, and while I fully agree with that value sentiment, the Fields medallists’ letter failed to provide convincing arguments for why mathematicians should widely receive funding for merely understanding things, and how competition for postdoc and tenure positions would work under these circumstances.
I think they'll end up more like scientists. Landau famously advised his students to be proficient in math so that when they're working on a problem it's the scientific understanding that's the rate limiting step, not the math. Now mathematicians will be freed of some of the burden of proving things and their challenge will instead be to find interesting new things worth proving.
Yes - but then we may well wind up with a hoard of hungry AI labs that are just waiting for interesting problems to show up so that they can devour it before any human mathematician gets a chance to solve it.
layer8 · · focus · HN ↗
This is the main issue, and while I fully agree with that value sentiment, the Fields medallists’ letter failed to provide convincing arguments for why mathematicians should widely receive funding for merely understanding things, and how competition for postdoc and tenure positions would work under these circumstances.
efavdb · · focus · HN ↗
2sk21 · · focus · HN ↗