The thing about math is we don't usually know what is pure fancy and what is civilization altering until far after the discovery. Once in a while it's a real targeted crack at something practical but most often it's collecting things which seem trial until you use them together and suddenly you have computers running LLMs.

If it were really just about funding people who like math to have fun then it's easy to do forever: just don't have them look at the results and keep paying.

Isn't the pursuit of knowledge alone good enough?

That’s the problem, the coupling of work with the right to survive

The job of a mathematician is to study mathematics, not to create proofs.

An automatic proof solver doesn't make mathematicians obsolete any more than the excel sheet made accountants obsolete.

or get those bright minds out of academia daycare and back to more actionable needs such as steering agents

This will keep happening until we stop people from doing it.