Comment by joe_the_user
2 hours ago
The only "fields" where a genie appearing and doing all your work for you are fields (jobs) where you only about the money at the end. There are some fields where a serious practitioner might be happy to have a genie do all the "grunt work" (though what people that is varies - I'm not sure what "discovery work" means here but it doesn't matter since present AI promises to do everything in the future if not now).
And this analogy breaks down further given that both the real now genie and the hypothetically more powerful genie of the future would each work for your (ex) employer.
Wouldn't it be great if we had a cure for cancer, working fusion energy or at least a proof for P vs NP even if no human had a joy of discovering it?
Yes, yes, maybe (see OP’s blog post).
To my knowledge, none of the negative sentiment regarding AI has ever been directed at its medical applications. Maybe the AI companies should instead focus on those things.
Are we not expecting any practical benefits from mathematical discoveries any more? Not even as a means to help other sciences?
OK,
I should have put have put things as "when you are primarily interested in some benefit outside of the task at hand". Some of those benefits might be great, sure. But it's still not necessarily going to improve the enjoyment of the professional.
Edit: Also, not all of the things on your list are the same. I would note that P!=NP would be a theorem whose proof would offer no practical benefits except for the potential mathematical machinery created to achieve the proof rather than what it tells us about practical algorithm time (the theory is about worst case, not average case, an algorithm that's O(n^100) is as effectively intractable as an algorithm that's O(2^n), etc).