alt Hacker NewsI'm surprised nobody has stated the obvious: a hard math problem that has been open for ten years (because many serious people have given it serious thought and been unable to make significant progress) is, in fact, nonrenewable.
The only way to renew it is to make a new problem that is so hard systems and humans will be unable to solve it for the next ten years. And, in the spirit of trees, the best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago, the next best is today: we do need to start posing some hard math problems and deciding if they are interesting merely because there are challenging or because of something else (eg busy beaver problems are arbitrarily hard, but does solving them imply anything other than "another busy beaver problem was solved"?)
Eh, if AI quickly solves most of our mathematics problems that are solvable then it might be time for us to hang up our hat as our little monkey brains aren't very good at this stuff.
Now, I think AI will solve some, but we'll find out that some are just either unsolvable or wildly huge that nothing is solving them any time soon.
And a whole lot of these problems have been around quite some time, when even knowing how to do advanced math meant you were a landed gentry or someone of high wealth. If those problems fall, they fall. They aren't pets we keep around forever. And new problems will crop up over time for both AI and men to scratch their brains over.