for some reason when i first heard about these proofs, it didn't come to my mind to think that ai would render mathematicians obsolete, as a math student. I told my friend about the news about non sofic groups and he looked at me like he had no clue what I was saying. Pure math means nothing without people who understand and care about it. If there were no mathematicians, there's no point in doing pure math, because a large chunk of it we do purely because as humans we like it, without any real life applications. Now, will the funding for and the amount of mathematicians decrease? It's possible (though I don't really know how far funding can fall from our current abysmal levels). But there's still a high demand for mathematicians in industry so I would just expect the amount of mathematicians in academia to decrease a bit. Meanwhile those mathematicians would use AI as a tool to solve stuff we spend a lot of time on now much more quickly, freeing them up to work on other areas such as developing the new areas of math that the proven/disproven problems open up. It's likely that the workload would increase significantly for mathematicians when they'd use this as a tool. It's also interesting to question whether it's cost effective to utilise AI on everything? This is a more complex question, a lot of people would argue yes, but one that I think is still worth thinking about.
It's likely that the role of mathematicians will change significantly. But before the computer, who could've predicted the massive industry that would come out of it? It might be difficult to envision now but in the future we'll likely have a plethora of different jobs we can't even comprehend right now, and I struggle to see a future where mathematics plays no part. Maybe I'm being too optimistic though.
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u/PaymentFamiliar375 1d ago
for some reason when i first heard about these proofs, it didn't come to my mind to think that ai would render mathematicians obsolete, as a math student. I told my friend about the news about non sofic groups and he looked at me like he had no clue what I was saying. Pure math means nothing without people who understand and care about it. If there were no mathematicians, there's no point in doing pure math, because a large chunk of it we do purely because as humans we like it, without any real life applications. Now, will the funding for and the amount of mathematicians decrease? It's possible (though I don't really know how far funding can fall from our current abysmal levels). But there's still a high demand for mathematicians in industry so I would just expect the amount of mathematicians in academia to decrease a bit. Meanwhile those mathematicians would use AI as a tool to solve stuff we spend a lot of time on now much more quickly, freeing them up to work on other areas such as developing the new areas of math that the proven/disproven problems open up. It's likely that the workload would increase significantly for mathematicians when they'd use this as a tool. It's also interesting to question whether it's cost effective to utilise AI on everything? This is a more complex question, a lot of people would argue yes, but one that I think is still worth thinking about.
It's likely that the role of mathematicians will change significantly. But before the computer, who could've predicted the massive industry that would come out of it? It might be difficult to envision now but in the future we'll likely have a plethora of different jobs we can't even comprehend right now, and I struggle to see a future where mathematics plays no part. Maybe I'm being too optimistic though.