Comment by hawk_

We have people who want to fill those positions because there are enough people who find it rewarding enough. Take away reasons why they would find it rewarding and you will have fewer theories and results that will advance our civilisation.

And yes, fun counts. Nobody said this had to be only a hardship.

I think you are missing the point of the main criticism. It is not about not wanting results in terms of proofs.

New theories and insights are typically created while working out proofs. If proofs now suddenly fall out of the sky (cause LLMs create them) then that work is not done which means the substrate on which new theories and questions and conjectures used to be grown disappears. It's in that sense that the math community (and thereby society as a whole) will lose something.

It's similar to how software engineering will need to find a solution to train their next generation. Current generations have all been through manual steps of designing things from scratch and writing them by hand. That's what allows your 10x engineers to understand whether what their LLM tools are doing is good and how to massage those tools to do the right thing. A junior engineer who has only ever used LLMs to write code and create architectures does not just not have that experience but also won't acquire it. You can't just say "we don't pay them to have fun and learn, we pay them to produce results". In the short term that is the case, but in the long term you as a company and we as a community will lose out.

I'm not saying don't use AI tooling. I'm saying that this is a hard problem which we yet to have to find solutions and approaches to. As a software community as well as as society in general.

I think the crosswords framing is a little silly, but I have to wonder what comes when we use our technology to optimize the fun and interesting parts out of every job. There's only so many years of my life I can dedicate to back-and-forths with a chatbot. What if we advance our glorious civilization but our jobs just get more and more thoughtless and miserable?

We're going to have a very different perspective on purpose going forward with these results. This has crossed a rubicon where human output itself is going to be completely outclassed by machines and we will have to find meaning elsewhere in life.

Then you don't understand the process at all. You will get something back, you will get an immense amount back. But (almost always) not directly. A mathematician will not suddenly solve a theorem that will enable a cure for cancer or better solar panels or whatever. But working in mathematics will build the gradual understanding that will enable those practical breakthroughs to take place. It's also the most important part of how the people that create those technical breakthroughs will be trained.

If your only measure of advancing is getting an answer, but not building the capability to understand it, then civilization has advanced.

It’s not a human focused civilization, which is where the issue comes up.

As an example: A constant issue I am seeing with AI productivity is that the most productive use of AI is when it is paired with more experienced users, while AI also does more work for entry level workers, if not replacing them entirely. It has become a question where will the future buffer of experienced seniors come from.

This is an example of where simply chopping down trees for today, doesn’t make civilization better off tomorrow.

AI is producing more content than ever before, but our ability to understand and verify it is not keeping pace.

We don’t know if these are unsolvable problems at this stage. Society could come up with workarounds and solutions to these issues in several years.

The request to stop, is part of the process by which the issues are debated and solutions found. It doesn’t mean their position is weird or moot.

Here's a fun quote:

https://proofsandprompts.com/2026/09/10/open-letter-about-th...

>Participation in an event so closely associated with Anthropic and OpenAI could plausibly negatively impact the future reputations of participants.

Given how much power advisors etc have over students in academia, interpret it as you wish.

> Professional mathematicians are ultimately being paid to solve the problems for a (hopefully) practical reason.

They are paid for the same reasons the NEA pays artists: out of a sense of obligation to demonstrate elite culture. The track record of practicality of pure math after WWII is essentially 0.

"They will just need to re-evaluate where the value their provide is."

That is fine to say when it is not your field. I guarantee you feel different when it is the thing you care about, that gives you joy, that defines your status. Think about how many sheldon-equivalents insist on being called Dr. (non medical)

It is part of what people use to define themselves. Its going to hurt. There may even be a Bulterian Jihad

No, you dislike maths to the point you prefer paying others to do it. Actual mathematicians are largely doing it for fun, but are now effectively saying "stop destroying our fun or we'll stop doing maths", and you will have to do the maths yourself.

reddit comment

This is maybe the lowest-quality comment on a thread full of them. Do better.

Here's a fun quote:

https://proofsandprompts.com/2026/09/10/open-letter-about-th...

>Participation in an event so closely associated with Anthropic and OpenAI could plausibly negatively impact the future reputations of participants.

Given how much power advisors etc have over students in academia, interpret it as you wish.

> So what is mathematics then? A fun hobby akin to chess or sudoku?

Some of it, yes. Much like physics. Both have a track record of producing technological breakthroughs every now and then, but it's not why people are doing it.

> Are we gonna get the same pushback from medical researchers if the models cure xyz diseases?

For better or worse, yes. We already are. In my country, there's a big spat between radiologists and cardiologists right now, that boils down to the progress of technology allowing the former to answer questions that, before, involved a procedure that was a big money-maker for the latter.

What you say reminds me of medical schools in Tunisia.

The general body of research points that more doctors lowers all cause mortality ( with diminishing returns) but Tunisia is still far lower than the Eu average.

Yet Doctors and med Student unions do lobby very heavily against expanding admission to the public uni or allowing private unis.

So we have the weird situation where people go and study in Romania ( making Tunisia lose hard currency that it really needs).

These doctors have taken an oath and the direct consequence of their lobbying is literally more deaths.

>but mathematics doesn't exist for their pleasure, it exists to provide tools to solve humanitie's problems.

The risk here is that this does do fundamental long-term damage to mathematics as a viable field.

Virtually no one is going to want to take on the risk of PhD-level math work, studying a narrow problem for four years or so to arrive at an impressive incremental result, when there's a sword of damocles hanging over their head every day that an internal system held by an oracle they don't have access to may scoop their results and turn those four years into dust.

To some extent, that sword of damocles always existed in a de minimus sense in the form of other mathematicians. But everyone was playing the same game, coming to the game with the same arsenal limited by human cognition.

If the game board becomes irrevocably tilted, new entrants have no incentive to play except as a hobby. But few hobbyists can devote years of work to understanding and pushing the frontier. It could well mean existential damage to mathematics as a field.

Whether that might undermine math's ability to solve humanity's problems in the long term is almost an economics problem, not unlike the question of whether and when the existence of monopolies ultimately restricts long-term economic growth. Much probably depends on whether intellectual monopolies or oligopolies are being created that will supplant the existing mathematics "economy".

> Are we gonna get the same pushback from medical researchers if the models cure xyz diseases?

Lol. As long as the process aka trials is respected not many would complain.

The feedback loop required to make progress is very different in medicine compared to math.

> mathematics doesn't exist for their pleasure, it exists to provide tools to solve humanitie's problems

Who decreed that? Mathematics predates capitalism and publish-or-perish by a couple of millennia. Euclid’s Elements were not written to benefit the weapons or medical industry.

"AI will do politics"

If only.

They certainly can't do them worse than humans.