Comment by daxfohl

I find myself less worried about it than at first. I think what we'll see are that some things are low-hanging fruit and can be solved just by tireless search. Maybe half the millennium and other such high-visibility problems will fall this way.

Others, I think, will be beyond both human and AI. And so what then? Mathematicians just throw in the towel and say it's not worth trying? Of course not. We will continue that pursuit, and as we do, new ideas will arise and new problems will need to be solved. It's math. There is no end.

It's easy to look at the current landscape and see AI ticking off solutions to problems and imagine that soon there will be nothing left. Machines replaced the need for much manual labor, but they also established a basis for an economy that provides the opportunity for more labor. This is the situation with math now. It will take some getting used to. There will be little-to-none pencil-to-paper working out of problems anymore, but there will always be work to do, things to solve, curiosities to unravel. And it will still be professional mathematicians who are the ones most capable of directing that effort. Because, if nothing else, they're the ones whose curiosity is piqued by the problems. Which, let's face it, has been 99% of the motivation for graduate-level math in the first place.

There's the the old question: is math invented or discovered? I think it's both: the problems are invented, and the solutions are discovered. In the age of AI, the discovery part will be greatly affected, but the invention part will remain firmly in the human domain.