Comment by Art9681
11 hours ago
Nothing is stopping these folks from continuing to study the problems and arriving at their own solutions so they can continue having whatever insights along the way.
Well, one thing is stopping them. There will be no more adoration for their genius.
If you truly do it for understanding and not the attention, carry on. AI should change nothing about your motivations.
> Nothing is stopping these folks from continuing to study the problems
My understanding is they are? And literally everything in this world is based around incentives. If you say “well you can continue to work on understanding, but your kids are going to starve” that’s not nothing.
It boggles my mind. Why cure cancer? The cancer researchers will be out of a job and their kids are going to starve!
Maybe an analogy of "why not solve all medical problems at once" is closer.
We absolutely want to, of course. But you extinguish an industry and the systems of training that supply it. It's hard to know if letting it go that way is right.
1 reply →
Why not cure cancer and take care of the researchers’ kids?
The point isn't what happens after something is solved. Where is the motivation for humans to study/find a potential solution if your kids are going to starve while you do it? These things can brute force problems that have a clearly and feasibly searchable answer, but they can't make creative leaps. It will be a severe dark ages for mathematics if humans stop contributing.
You have misunderstood.
I have a the cure for cancer. Simply kill the host. Does it work? Yes. Have you learned anything from it? No.
A lot of this would be public funding. If AI is reducing the need for mathematicians in an area it makes sense to fund it less and fund something else that isn't solved.
Your comment perfectly illustrates why most are missing the point. Many people, including you, deeply believe that most mathematicians are chasing adoration of their genius, otherwise why would anyone care about such abstract work?
People like Grigori Perelman would baffle you, a mathematician who solved the Poincaré Conjecture, refused the monetary prize, field medal and continues to live a life of total recluse.
For most mathematicians their primary drive is chasing the unknown, not for anyone’s adoration, but to pursue their desire to see what lies in the beyond.