Comment by charcircuit
2 hours ago
It's disappointing to see the author having such a low view of AI native mathematicians. The excitement from solving these problems should be considered a good thing. More people engaging and having fun with math is positive.
>Some view the future of mathematics as a dystopian...
>I believe Erdős would have found this future grim indeed
If you describe something as dystopian that is going to majorly bias someone's opinion towards being grim. That doesn't mean that dystopian description is reality.
AI doing the math for us means that we are not doing the math. To people who like doing math, this is depressing.
I’m baffled every time I see people who just don’t get that.
Not to argue off of authority or anecdote, but the vision of mathematics described is disparaging to anyone who already is or is on the path of being a mathematician. In particular, I think your view is only amenable to armchair/recreational mathematicians, and I really do not see the world being described as being one that is mathematically elegant or “better”.
I found that this article was supportive of recreational mathematicians. See the closing passage.
>Find a question that is meaningful to you, find other humans who are interested in it, and talk about it. Be confused, be stuck, be inspired. Find a messy proof, then find a better one. Get tired, get hungry, get into a flow state. Argue, laugh, give up, drink some coffee, and attack it again.
You clipped a lot of incredibly relevant context to make his point sound far more inflammatory than it is.
> Some view the future of mathematics as a dystopian arcade of button-pressing, staring at a screen waiting for AI to do the thinking for us, with the main human involvement limited to asking the initial question and offering sporadic words of encouragement. Each new proof is then thrown into a repository, to only ever be read by other AIs, and the human presses the next button.
Is that your view of all AI native mathematicians? It's not mine, but it seems apparent to me that many people think that this is our future, or even should be our future. Same with building software (which is my field, unlike math).
I would find that personally, to use his word, grim.
It doesn't matter what he wrote there. If he had wrote
>Some view the future of mathematics as a dystopian where the terminator hunts down any person who tries to publish a new math proof so he can maintain a monopoly on proofs
People would find that as grim. Even if the chance of that future being realized was 0%.
> AI-native mathematicians
What a world we live in...