Comment by joe_the_user

To me it doesn't seem like what AI has destroyed is the ability for mathematicians to develop understanding and share it with each other, but rather it's destroyed the yardstick (solving open problems) that has traditionally been used to measure how much they have contributed to that understanding.

It's more than the yardstick for individual contributions. It's also the yardstick for the contribution of ideas. And that kind of yardstick is very important.

Math has a challenge that's only occasionally acknowledged imo, that's it's possible to just go up the ladder of abstraction, formulate ideas but have those ideas actually not be useful or interesting. The ideas that math has developed, that mathematicians consider important, are those that have helped people solve hard problems.