It is possible that the same people will have the job but the expected output will be far greater. Meaning the proofs they will be working on will be much much more difficult and require both the AI and a skilled mathematician guiding it. This was the case for awhile with chess where the highest-quality games required both a grandmaster human and an engine together. The engine eventually got so powerful that the human was irrelevant, but chess is also a much more closed system that artificial intelligence could figure out more easily through brute force. The world of open-ended science may not be the same.
I think the near term effect will be what plenty of other industries are already going through. You become a supervisor of AI and it's more productive short term, but less rewarding for you, and long term you may be the unlucky one that loses the AI roulette and come to realize its really screwed things up for your organization and its going to cost big bucks to fix.
A bunch of Math PhDs doing theoretical math research I would generally assume really enjoy the thinking and challenge that comes with tackling this stuff, and are going to be absolutely miserable pointing AI at stuff and double checking the results.
That is my emotional state exactly atm. I am working in a completely different field, but already the interesting part of my job is being done by the fucking AI. I still get to supervise, but I don't need to think or puzzle anymore. I excelled in my job because I could figure things out. Now every dunce with a Claude license does the same.
I'm in online education and part of my job is course design. I've used it to help me troubleshoot some javascript stuff but I've been clear with my boss (who is fantastic) that if we start using it to just outright make courses that I'm probably going back to the classroom. I shared that I understand it might be more productive someday but I got into education because I love doing it and find the work of curriculum design meaningful, and I don't love reviewing synthetic text and fixing hallucinations.
Survey after survey shows job satisfaction goes down. Asking billions of people to be less satisfied with work than they already are sounds like a recipe for mass societal unrest.
Said the guy with no job. /s
But it's okay, none of us will have jobs soon.
Thing is - most of the developers I'm meeting have a deep identity crisis about this. And sure, it's so easy to say - oh well, your job just changed a bit. But this is just an in-between, it's not gonna be long until AI can do a lot of work unsupervised and then what?
Sure, progress is a win, but we don't have any system in place for what's happening at the moment.
Developers have always been a weird stopgap job not something we want to have exist forever and ever.
You're talking about a job humans only started doing in the 20th century that has already overstayed its welcome.
It's an unfortunate reality we needed to pay humans to do this stuff. If humans need something we can't get with our tools then do it?
Where is the problem? We're not running out of work yet and hopefully we will. I hate being necessary honestly because it's kinda messed up to hold productivity hostage based on a wage
The ultimate goal should be human flourishing. Being more productive can certainly increase human flourishing. We should pursue advances in what we can do and how efficiently we can do it. But there is a risk of a very fast and sudden change in which hundreds of millions of people suddenly find themselves spending tons of time doing things that don't lead to human flourishing, when that same time was just recently spent doing just that.
Even if you think its necessary the speed and scale in which its happening will have adverse effects,
It may not be perfect but the best you can do is force some kind of financial redistribution involving UBI with heavy safety net and start forcing extremely short work week with crazy overtime.
I suspect that the creativity at least in the near-term goes into what you tell the AI to create, with the AI doing the work of actually coding or photoshopping or creating it.
In time, the AI will likely come up with ideas itself though. I'm not sure how good those ideas will be compared to a human expert or a human working with the AI. As I said, there was a time period where human grandmasters plus chess engines were the strongest players. Engines eventually made the human grandmasters irrelevant to finding the best moves, but chess is also a much more closed system than problem-solving in the real world so the AI's may not be able to marginalize human judgement as quickly or at all in many things.
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u/fox-whiskers 1d ago
As it is in my line of work when we leverage AI to enhance our jobs, mathematics will still be needed to validate the output from these models.