Comment by gobdovan

Chess has set rules and is a closed world with a set objective. In maths, you make up the rules. For every clearly defined problem that everybody cares about and is not yet proven, there's someone who first who recognised the importance of that given problem and managed to define it clearly enough for it to be recognised as such.

There's also the separate, less glamorous issue that people don't want to talk about, which is proof reliability. [0] If you have systems to help you formalise the problems and leave an algorithm or AI or whatever solve it in a verifiable way, that's a win for both the mathematicians and the rest of the world.

The deeper question is whether AI can replace the human role in deciding what mathematics should be done and what concepts matter. If that's automated, then yeah, we're screwed.

[0] https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/tla/proof-statistics.html