Comment by prplfsh
4 days ago
I'm wondering if mathematicians are sort of going through what programmers have been going through recently, really questioning whether their craft can continue. But now it feels like, in the software world, at least from my seat, people can handle much larger scope and work on much more complex problems. If anything, my job has gotten a lot _more_ interesting.
So I wonder if mathematics will go through that too? A period of chaos and doubt, but finding new and more effective ways of working.
Development is more interesting, I agree, but also more burnout inducing, and the not yet understood implications create unreasonable expectations on developers. It will take some time to find the new normal. Right now me and every colleague are working harder than ever and drowning in tasks. Far from being redundant.
Yeah, for sure, but at least to me, it feels like we will figure that out. We're in a transitionary phase. But it also seems to me like, to your point, we're busier than ever, and in a lot of ways, the problems we're working on are harder than ever.
People need to separate out the alien intelligence vs human intelligence.
Its easy to demonstrate this: The math hysteria passes Lean but no human can make sense of it at present. This is akin to bots telling humans where to dig. Thats fine but lets be clear about whats going on.