Is mathematics about to enter the conservatory?

turtleyacht

AI could keep on generating an "observable universe," and mathematicians discover things by way of validating results. This doesn't seem much dissimilar to astronomy.

dofm

> Our society does not support classical musicians in the same way that we support ‘popular’ musicians. It really really does. Popular/rock/folk/classical musicians all earn much the same way now: a blend of teaching, occasional performance fees, functions performances like weddings and galas, music-related side-gigs (composition, arrangement and recording for commercial music), and non-music-related side gigs — teaching non-musical things, gardening, painting and decorating, bar work, office temp work, even full time jobs (doctors and lawyers, accountants). I know a couple of classical musicians whose actual money-making music is playing other instruments in funk/rock functions bands. Even the "best" or most famous musicians, popular or classical, have side gigs. Approximately nobody makes their money only from performing or from recordings; that ended twenty-five or thirty years ago. Elite soloists, maybe — but that is actually a pretty expensive life to live. I would be surprised if many of them risked a life where they had no other job. The idea that a "conservatory" system exists that meaningfully supports classical musicians is nonsense almost anywhere in the world, I would think. Even the first-chair musicians and conductors have side gigs. (ETA: I can't believe this is a workable model for mathematicians, either. Maybe for a couple of dozen the world over. But there is no performance, no regionality, little in the way of public dissemination, little in the way of reflected glory for benefactors. No, the "conservatory" will perhaps be the intelligence agencies, as it was before.)

Havoc

Presumably it’s just a matter of timing till most knowledge work heads that way. From what I can tell discussions on what to do about it haven’t really advanced much if at all. Still the same mix of new jobs will appear, jobs will change and perhaps some talk of UBI.

marcus_holmes

It's a good question. Pure maths has foreshadowed a lot of physics, and a lot of Computer Science. We should probably keep doing it. Does the current model (of highly-talented academics at Universities mostly arguing with each other) change because of AI? Does it invalidate human effort, or does it allow humans to push the boundaries further? Is there no point in training or paying for mathematicians because AI will take over the whole role? Or, as we're finding with so many other areas, does AI do its best work when guided by someone who knows the area and subject well?

gpm

I like the framing in the headline - really more than the article itself. I think underappreciated in discourse like this is that of course we will still have "mathematicians" - people whose work is mathematics. The job might change, but at the very least someone has to choose where to spend the compute and the dollars, decide what theorems are worth investing in, what definitions matter. Someone still has to serve as the ambassador reminding people at the relevant points to look over at the field for productivity and correctness reasons, presenting fun riddles for entertainment and education, advocating to political bodies for funding. Metalworking looks a lot different than it used to, but the end of a man with a hammer and leather bellows bashing out a nail didn't end the career of metal working either. The work sure looks a lot different though, and there are many fewer of them.

madrox

We are largely having a reckoning with whether a discipline is the process or the outcome. Music didn't enter the conservatory so much as the relative interest in various styles have changed over time. I get that the author was implying that by talking about pop music, but what was music doing before Mozart came around? Every field is having this existential crisis right now, from art to math. Especially in art, the anti-AI hate mostly reduces to arguing that art is the process not the outcome. The need for research-level math isn't changing (if anything, it may accelerate), but how we do it is. The languages, systems, and process I used to write code has changed a lot since I wrote my first line of BASIC in 1994. Mathematicians, I expect, have not encountered nearly the same amount of disruption in academia. I feel for them.

djmips

They didn't mention coders but my idea is to have Silicon habitats of programmers recreating nineties professional programming on Pentium PCs in dimly lit cubicles. Tourists shuffle by watching live coding like watching a blacksmith at a Colonial Williamsburg.

pianopatrick

Well, I think one good thing we can conclude from the music world is that there are people out there who want to pay for humans to do things even when the computer could do it better. I.e. when you go to Vegas and go to a bar, you want to have a guy playing piano and singing, and are willing to pay a bit more for that. You don't want just a jukebox, even if the jukebox can play "Don't Stop Believing" better than the dude with the piano. All that to say, there will be certain jobs that people will want to pay humans to do even if the robots can do those things "better".

a2ff6eeb0

> To be clear, I haven’t fully verified the proof; I worked through it with Claude Fable and it passes the sniff test, but fully digesting it will take a bit more energy than I have right now. As predicted, we no longer need mathematicians for math; the math is being both generated and read by models. We're in for some exciting times, when the pace of mathematical advance can run faster than the constraints of human brains.

rtpg

> Classical music has been institutionalized, sent to the conservatory as a relic. A small segment of society has decided the ability to perform it is worth preserving, and devotes a sliver of capital to that end: training young people, and paying a few of the best players in the biggest cities to do it professionally. I had a whole discussion with a German friend whose husband works in opera (this was after Chalomet's "opera as a dead art" comments) and their view was mostly that this view of the world does not hold for at least chunks of Europe. To their mind, there is still both active input into this space, support in this space, and there's societal support to some degree or another. I don't know the realities on the ground, but that annecdote did make me wonder if I simply assumed that the world of classical music wasn't as dire if you leave the States, at least in terms of job stability. The comparison to popular music is kinda funy too... plenty of pop musicians that don't live off of their music, right? Maybe we're not generating "Taylor Swifts of Oboe"s but I feel like the measure is more about the median (or even the 90th/95th percentile?) when it comes to art, rather than the top of the top.

SubiculumCode

Does math have an end? Or is it an infinite self-construction?

esafak

Conservatories are not going to support the entirety of the white collar market, so something is going to give. Not to mention the blue collar market, as robots take off.

nadermx

I haven't done math since college. Now the things I struggled with I was able to grasp. So much so that I was able to prove a conjecture, small one, but nothing in my life I thought I would of, its even getting peer reviewed. Its drudgery to prove these things. But man it feels cool when you do. I now have a better understanding of the entire physical mechanics of life around me, to a gravitational sort of understanding. Simply because I thought I had a conceptual understanding of p vs np. And after weeks I was able to prove myself wrong. People seem to worry that AI is going to take away everything. But my experience is that I feel more able to create even ideas before I would never imagine. It feels more like in HG Wells where he's in the far future talking to the AI about his equations and the AI says "oh your talking about time travel, thats impossible" It feels like that reality is now more likely than any other, anyone can invent anything now and have the math to back it up. You can speak physics into existance. I'm excited for the future

sankhao

>Mathematics, especially pure mathematics, has always been about communicating stories that help us understand reality more deeply. I'm pretty sure pure mathematics is the part of math which is not about reality.