Comment by augment_me
14 hours ago
Well maybe its time to pivot from mathematics, and science as whole from personal attribution to being about progress of the field? Maybe your contribution to humanity as a mathematician is to find the right meaningful question to ask, and not to stamp your name on some fact?
This is the direction of experimental particle physics and observational astronomy, where the budgetary scale at which progress occurs means we now fund these efforts at a societal level. These fields have graduated beyond "tabletop science".
For 3000 years mathematics has only been a "tabletop science". Even big programs like the classification of finite simple groups have been comprised of small teams chipping away at different (publishable) parts of an overall program.
This latest Navier-Stokes advance cost something like $22m in tokens, already well beyond what a mathematician's research grant can fund. As the easy open problems get mined, the cost of frontier progress will continue to climb. Some part of mathematics as a field will need to transition from tabletop science to big science: Coordinated top-down programs addressing high-priority objectives.
TBD is what the role of individual mathematicians will look like in a "big science" paradigm, but we could look to experimental high energy physics for ideas. For all practical purposes, AI converts math from a theoretical field into an experimental/observational one.
Yes. But this is hard for mathematicians to stomach, because like everyone else, deep down in a place where they don't like to talk about at parties, they have egos and a sense of purpose based in part on demonstrating mastery of a technically difficult field, as well as social connections based on their participation in it, and taking all that away from them probably feels like a kind of death.
The situation is not that different from John Henry competing against the machine. The question is really: Do people deserve to be allowed to continue doing what they have always done, when doing it is no longer necessary to advance the greater good?
I totally understand and agree, I just feel like with the progress that we have in automating informational work, you are going to have an exponential amount of these "deaths" as new fields where humans can provide any kind of value get more and more short-lived.
At some point in my suggestion the machine will ask better questions than you, and that will be pointless as well, and you keep doing what you like doing, or you move on to something new. But if you keep tying your value to outcome and recognition instead of process you are going to have some incredibly depressing years ahead, and every time will just be as hard to stomach because of your ego.
At some point from your description there will be no need for human workers at all. The real question is what happens as we continue to advance in that direction and we eliminate mathematicians, and then more broadly scientists and engineers, tech workers, and all knowledge workers. People can’t “doing what you like doing” if it doesn’t support them being able to make a living.
It sounds like it could be a pretty horrible world for the majority of people, especially if the AI overlords are only concerned about themselves (be it a small number of people who control the AIs, or the AIs themselves becoming independent entities that prioritize their own lives).