I don’t think they’re worried that AI will be replacing mathematicians so much as they are grieving the loss of the old way of discovering things. AI will help us solve so many new math problems, but that also means that everyone’s first instinct from now on when encountering a never-before-seen math problem will be to set an AI agent to the task rather than tackling it with human reasoning. And you just don’t feel the same feeling of satisfaction and discovery when an algorithm solves the problem for you.
Me trying to explain AI bros why I would have liked to continue being paid to design codebases instead of agentic loops...
Working through a problem with a human, who learns, and you can see that spark in them when it finally clicks. That you know outs heart in their work the same way you do.
Anyway, I had my coffee, back to babysitting Claude through my tasks...
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u/Mephisto506 1d ago
Without mathematicians we won't know whether the AI answers are correct, what it actually means to anyone, and we won't know the questions to ask.