Comment by calf
1 day ago
But these are not very good arguments, because it makes it about the fall of institutions (the funding) and people being miserable for personal reasons rather than prosocial reasons. Tao here clearly suggests that math is not reducible to "problem solving" or "proofs", the valuable part is much more than that framing.
The concerning argument about the status of math would be an outline that it will get destroyed by a process of societal atrophy and there is no turning back, and the AI powers are not a good substitute or replacement for it. If an entire society becomes reliant on these oracle machines then it would be analogous to children never learning arithmetic because they were handed calculators. How could the human race still flourish? We would anthropologically regress. We'd be little better than animals, like the Borg zombies.
That is a much more profound threat than people worrying about their own careers or faculties disappearing like the humanities. This is a serious anthropological reckoning.
If math experts are that freaked out already then basically all of science is soon to follow, decade by decade. "Singularity" comes to mind.
Broadly I agree with this, but I was refuting the statement "there has never been a better time to be a mathematician". You are changing the question to something different here, and using it to say my argument is bad.
I think math is a microcosm for "thought-work" in general. We have been in a symbiotic relationship with capitalism for decades now, where the hope of a well-paid white collar career encourages people to spend time and money to enrich themselves through education. The proliferation of AI cheating at college already signals that employment is the primary goal over intellectual growth, so one imagines this governs what happens next if labor demand disappears.
It's hard to say where this all leads, but I have very low optimism for higher-level math understanding being something that humans value in the same way in the coming decades.
The post is not by Tao but by Grant Sanderson, maker of the 3blue1brown YouTube channel.