This is really a microcosm of one particular problem that AI presents to the world: what do people do when their labour is not required any longer?

Here the worry is the social structures of mathematics are eroded such that fewer humans become able to do the work and less well, similarly to how juniors are being recruited less in software engineering, breaking the ladder and leading to fewer seniors in the years to come.

The answer to this really depends strongly on what AI can actually accomplish, but I’ll assume the maximal case and say that AI can do everything economically necessary, and further even those things just desired, such that human labour isn’t required to anything that anyone wants in a practical sense.

Here, we don’t need a human understanding of mathematics to give people a perfect standard of living. We also don’t need humans involved with anything else.

Everything therefore becomes a hobby or a game. People do things because they enjoy them for their own sake, or because they are endeavours used as vehicles to socialise and enjoy others’ company, or because a shared social belief exists and is cultivated such that doing such and such a thing confers social status.

And I think that’s more or less it. I predict we may see some fairly strange sorts of things, such as games where the team structure looks like the descendant of a company org and they compete in an artificial economy. Likewise we may see gamified versions of universities and academia. All of these would be “tamed” such that the rougher parts of the experiences were sanded off.

Sort of like how we evolved in an ancestral environment, and we have certain drives and expectations driven by that environment even though they no longer matter for survival. Our social structures may be derived similarly from those of today, even after they have ceased to serve a real purpose, but changed and repurposed to give meaning and community.