Thread

1. youoy · 1789812208 · focus · HN ↗

   Part of the controversy here is that now the skill advantage that some Field Medalist had is much narrower. The fact that fields medals have an age limit implies that it favors brain power over understanding. And that was the guiding light award of the community. So i find it "funny" (and natural) when they are offended by AI. That is the main "crisis" of mathematics.

   In my opinion there has never been a better time to be a mathematitian, and there has never been a better time to be a software builder.

   But there has never been a worst time to have the need to prove your economic value as a mathematitian or software developer alone. Because "understanding" is not something you can prove in one afternoon, its something that you prove with a life.

   1. sweezyjeezy · 1789813173 · focus · HN ↗

      > In my opinion there has never been a better time to be a mathemetician...

      As an ex-mathematician I assure you this is very wrong, and every working mathematician I know right now is completely miserable, and/or trying to flee the field as fast as possible. It's like telling a chair-maker during the industrial revolution that there had never been a better time for them, since now they could operate chair-making machines instead of toiling away at the wood themselves. It assumes that they were purely in it for their passion for mass-producing chairs. The majority of mathematicians get into the field because they love problem solving, and the gauntlet thrown down by challenging math tasks.

      Many parts of this will never be useful for society on a grander scale - but this is reflected in the finances - pure math is closer in funding-terms to a humanity than to hard science. Now even this is _massively_ under threat, and Tao and co need to pivot quickly to stop this from becoming a bloodbath.

      1. calf · 1789818465 · focus · HN ↗

         But these are not very good arguments, because it makes it about the fall of institutions (the funding) and people being miserable for personal reasons rather than prosocial reasons. Tao here clearly suggests that math is not reducible to "problem solving" or "proofs", the valuable part is much more than that framing.

         The concerning argument about the status of math would be an outline that it will get destroyed by a process of societal atrophy and there is no turning back, and the AI powers are not a good substitute or replacement for it. If an entire society becomes reliant on these oracle machines then it would be analogous to children never learning arithmetic because they were handed calculators. How could the human race still flourish? We would anthropologically regress. We'd be little better than animals, like the Borg zombies.

         That is a much more profound threat than people worrying about their own careers or faculties disappearing like the humanities. This is a serious anthropological reckoning.

         If math experts are that freaked out already then basically all of science is soon to follow, decade by decade. "Singularity" comes to mind.

         1. sweezyjeezy · 1789819173 · focus · HN ↗

            Broadly I agree with this, but I was refuting the statement "there has never been a better time to be a mathematician". You are changing the question to something different here, and using it to say my argument is bad.

            I think math is a microcosm for "thought-work" in general. We have been in a symbiotic relationship with capitalism for decades now, where the hope of a well-paid white collar career encourages people to spend time and money to enrich themselves through education. The proliferation of AI cheating at college already signals that employment is the primary goal over intellectual growth, so one imagines this governs what happens next if labor demand disappears.

            It's hard to say where this all leads, but I have very low optimism for higher-level math understanding being something that humans value in the same way in the coming decades.

         2. bonoboTP · 1789827880 · focus · HN ↗

            The post is not by Tao but by Grant Sanderson, maker of the 3blue1brown YouTube channel.

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