Comment by auntienomen

A crucial caveat: basic research investment runs on the same logic as venture capital investment. We know that most mathematical efforts will be worthless. Our experience has lead us to expect that a very small number of such efforts -- some of them very far removed from applications -- will have payoffs so large that they change the shape of our society.

_We do not know in advance which efforts are going to pay off_. Abstract efforts in topology put us on the road to nuclear energy. Silly number puzzles enabled internet commerce. Non-euclidean geometry gave us synchronized universal GPS.

We should not let our inability to conceive of applications of weird abstract stuff prevent us from making these investments. If our ancestors had fallen in to that trap, we'd be far poorer as a society.

What we can do is ask that people trying new stuff attempt to fail quickly. And that's basically where we are with academia today. Most people who do mathematical work will not have a career in math. They try something new, work for a little while on it, and go do something else when the results turn out to be of modest interest. This leaves behind a messy undigested literature, which is unfortunate. But maybe AI can help us sift that for treasures we missed.