alt Hacker NewsI've heard the human understanding line a whole bunch.
But it begs the question. What is the value to the rest of humanity that a small group of people possesses something that can be called human understanding? Particularly when that group of people is historically terrible at communication (as is routinely demonstrated in Calculus classes), and most humans are not capable of learning that understanding (though more are capable than think they are capable - that is another story).
I am speaking as someone who nearly finished a PhD in mathematics. I understand why mathematicians would wish to continue in the age of AI. But, barring something like universal basic income, it isn't obvious why the rest of humanity would support them in this endeavor.
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The idea that the rest of humanity needs to support them is absurd. A couple billion in private trust funds could fund mathematics researchers in perpetuity.
>What is the value to the rest of humanity that a small group of people possesses something that can be called human understanding?
If you're going to ask that then you need to ask the same thing about essentially every non-STEM department.
I think the central problem with that line of reasoning is that it supposes we are already living with AGI. Even the latest PR from Anthropic admits that we are not [0] there yet. If we don't have AGI capable of integrating and employing the mathematical results produced by an artificially superintelligent theorem prover so that they become useful to the rest of science and engineering, we will need humans to do at least some of the work in mathematics. Moreover if we freeze current AI capabilities today, "digestion" probably doesn't scale, so mathematical research will probably end up AI-assisted in ways not far off from what we're already seeing in the sciences.
[0] https://www.anthropic.com/research/claude-shaped-science