Comment by vouaobrasil
12 hours ago
Actually there will because if you've actually ever spent time doing math, you only really get to that level of truly understanding and appreciating the stories if you've actually done the hard work yourself, which in turn will be economically infeasible due to AI. The analogy is interesting but incomplete and misleading.
I've actually spent time doing math and literally everyone I know who knows math learnt it by reproving things that people proved before them. I don't see why AI proving things makes this form of learning any more economically infeasible than the field of mathematics already is - and since it was apparently economically feasible before AI I expect it to stay that way.
There are two stages to learning research level math. First you learn to reprove other people work. This is relatively easy because the language, notion and prior explanations have already been optimized to help prove the next thing, and you know a solution exists. Then in your PhD you try to solve problems you don't really know a solution exists, and if it does, how long and complicated it is, what techniques will be used, etc.
You need to solve the second to get a PhD. For good reason. The second is way harder than the first. And now AI is making second way obsolete. It's not the end of the world, but it is the end of how things have been done for centuries.
you only really get to that level of truly understanding and appreciating the stories if you've actually done the hard work yourself, which in turn will be economically infeasible due to AI
The thing is, nobody has time for that. Look at Mochizuki's work. It takes years of hard labor by high-level mathematicians to come up with stuff like that, and years of hard labor on the part of other mathematicians to validate it. The low-hanging fruit in math has all been picked, AI or no AI, and Tao doesn't seem to acknowledge that.
The mathematics community needs better tools or they're out of business anyway. Now they're getting those tools... and bickering and complaining about it?
I agree that the low-hanging fruit has largely been picked. But then I think we should acknowledge that and stop innovating, or just work less on new solutions and more on clarifying old ones, and start to work on degrowth rather than useless problem solving. Because I really don't feel that any of this is really necessary or beneficial for the human race in the long-term.