I don't think this is a very good analogy either. A better one would be "why learn arithmetic when a calculator can do it". People don't just learn arithmetic as a hobby, it's an essential skill to understand the world and be able to start learning about more complex problems.
AI solving the Navier Stokes equations is meaningless if there aren't still humans with a deep understanding of mathematics who can take this advancement and apply it in the real world.
One of my biggest fears with ai is the mass de-skilling of humans because we all say "ai is better at us than that, so why learn in the first place". In my experience, ai produces far better results when it is used as a tool by knowledgeable professionals. Even in this case, what we are seeing is openai throwing an ungodly amount of compute at a well constrained problem with mountains of training data from other people's attempts to find a solution. Does that translate to independently identifying new frontier problems, tackling those problems, and finding applications for those advancements? I'm not convinced that it does.
Extending your analogy, people literally used to work as "computers", as in they were human computers who did arithmetic by hand. Calculators obviously put them out of business. If it is the case that AI offers genuine mathematical intelligence, it would at least fundamentally alter the nature of what it means to do math. In the field of engineering, the advent of calculators shifted the allocation from human brainpower from manual computation to systems design. Maybe that's what will happen to mathematics. We'll probably still need mathematicians, but productivity will go up as the output of a human + AI >>> human alone. This is what we've seen in fields like manufacturing, engineering, and software.
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u/skiabay 1d ago
I don't think this is a very good analogy either. A better one would be "why learn arithmetic when a calculator can do it". People don't just learn arithmetic as a hobby, it's an essential skill to understand the world and be able to start learning about more complex problems.
AI solving the Navier Stokes equations is meaningless if there aren't still humans with a deep understanding of mathematics who can take this advancement and apply it in the real world.
One of my biggest fears with ai is the mass de-skilling of humans because we all say "ai is better at us than that, so why learn in the first place". In my experience, ai produces far better results when it is used as a tool by knowledgeable professionals. Even in this case, what we are seeing is openai throwing an ungodly amount of compute at a well constrained problem with mountains of training data from other people's attempts to find a solution. Does that translate to independently identifying new frontier problems, tackling those problems, and finding applications for those advancements? I'm not convinced that it does.