I know why the mathematicians weep

bananaflag

As a mathematician, I will never understand how my colleagues had never foreseen this. Okay, maybe you can believe in a plateau but at least accept as a possibility that there won't be one. This applies to every other human endeavour. I am also sad, but my sadness is, in a way, priced in.

sdcfgy

I weep because the money was bad.

SiempreViernes

Even if this was overly long and mostly things I've seen before, I'm just very thankful that it wasn't yet another claude piece.

zeroonetwothree

As a programmer I’ve been ‘weeping’ for a few years now.

omnicognate

I happen to be (re)reading Strogatz' book "Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos" right now. It's beautiful thing, and nothing in the "age of AI" threatens to equal it or in any way diminish my enjoyment of it.

HPsquared

"I know now why you cry." - Terminator

izzydata

I still think mathematicians are going to be as important as ever. The LLMs are only finding what was technically possible given our current breadth of knowledge after brute force solving problems. Eventually it will run out of things that it can do with its training and the only way to get it to do more will be training it on new human found knowledge. Finding that new knowledge may be exponentially more difficult, but it will be much more valuable.

kryogen1c

> Think about a world where non-mathematicians leapfrog the field after a few AI prompts. It would be a world with more knowledge. But it might be a world with less understanding. This seems like a good summary of the article, and I think the answer here is obvious. So what? News flash folks: we do not have the knowledge to survive on our own. If a solar flare deletes the electric grid, the first thing that happens is 8 billion people die in the next year. We survive on abstractions others have built, and we have a global dependency web. AI abstracting knowledge is neither new or dangerous; if it is dangerous, this certainly isnt the argument to prove it.

qarl

> “They have annihilated my field of research.” I think they might find comfort in knowing it's not just mathematicians - this is coming for all of us. Computers putting us out of work has been coming for a long long time.... and now it's here.

ehhthing

I'm convinced the people who do not see what Mathematicians see simply have not considered that their jobs are just as vulnerable. The day when OpenAI replaces their own AI researchers with GPT will be upon us, and the response from the Mathematicians will be "First time?"

bowsamic

I have little sympathy, since I think it is a result of many decades of complacency when it comes to thinking about why want to people do what they do and instead just enjoying being the ones with the results and money. People who love the process and see the human as inherently valuable won't have a problem. I'm more shocked that there are so many brilliant people who are so results-oriented and don't even have a concept of value outside of that. I'm kind of disgusted by the tears actually

flowerlad

As a software engineer it is hard for me to feel sorry for these mathematicians. Software engineers are getting laid off because of advancements made by AI. Math researchers are employed at universities, and universities aren't laying off mathematicians now that OpenAI has solved some of their puzzles. Mathematicians can still feed their families, software engineers displaced by AI can't. Yet I see far more of these blogs about the plight of mathematicians, not enough about the plight of software engineers.

cgearhart

I still remain hopeful that this is a step change in capability and capacity that we can adopt and adapt towards our own purposes. What was taking decades for us to do has been reduced to days and dollars. So while we’re witnessing a forest fire consuming entire fields of open problems in math, the best upside would be finding new problems that come from learning how to work with the new tools. This is what it seems like so far for software. The speed limit has changed. It’s interesting to explore what that means. Extending the analogy, long ago you could be a race car driver part time; that would be pretty laughable for an F1 driver. It’s a very specialized skill and the optimal athlete is quite different for driving a car than for running, for example. That feels like what I’m seeing in software. The most effective folks are much faster and better with these tools than average. It’s a different skill set. I think that formal verification makes Math much closer to code than many other fields. But I’m eager to see the first mathematicians that are dramatically more proficient with the new tools than average.

euthymiclabs

I love that we have new ways to solve problems. And it's been hard to accept that my own unique intelligence—which I've spent decades cultivating—just isn't as important as it used to be. I am developing new ways of thinking to better adapt to an AI-enhanced world, but I'm not done with the mourning process. We're all finding our way through this.

vatsachak

Hacker News is so depressing these days. One doomer post per day to keep the valuations up. Nothing has changed in math. Math is not solved nor has the human been kicked out of the loop. Same with programming. *I said nothing really changed because LLMs becoming superhuman at deduction was priced in with o3 and neither the peer review, training nor publishing methods will get a revamp beyond what could already be done with SQLite and a website.

RGS1811

This piece circles, without naming it, around the concept of “deontic scorekeeping” central to the work of Robert Brandom on semantics. The idea that our ability to create and sustain conceptual systems depends on the give and take of reasons within a social setting. Brandom has been front of mind for me lately because elements of his theory both explain why LLMs should work in principle, and where they are bound to be radically deficient. An LLM encodes the normative regularities of our linguistic/conceptual games into its weights, but it cannot be a real participant in our games because it is incapable of staking durable commitments or changing its dispositions over time. Worth reading: Robert Brandom, “Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment”

curt15

When anyone can push a button on a machine and out comes a math result, it still doesn't become theirs or anyone else's until they can internalize it and make it part of their thinking.

simianwords

I strongly feel most angst is because Mathematics has become yet another capital intensive game to play. Rather than a noble, purely intellectual practice.

Kalendermann

Getting those fields wiped just shows how unnecessary those fields where in the first place. I'm a programmer. I am the adapter between a stakeholder and a machine. I am just needed because the stakeholder lacks the knowledge to tell the machine what he wants. If he can use this new fancy adapter called Agentic AI now I happily quit my job and go on finding something that makes more sense in the first place. The same goes for math. Let's find some things that bring value other than just the price of a stock.