alt Hacker NewsFormer pro mathematician here. There's a big divide amongst mathematicians right now. Some like the idea of going full steam ahead with ideas like this, and others are dead-set against it. There's even "The Association for Human Mathematics" [1] which believes in human mathematics and not using AI at all.
The central problem is that the majority of people go into math because they love discovering mathematics and want to participate in the process. That itself is a huge part of the reward. That creates the community. Simply have huge numbers of people outputting math as if it were an industrial factory kills the joy in the process and so in itself destroys the community.
So in short we're seeing a dichotomy between the "problem miners" who are simply hooked on producing results and mining them and "explorers" for lack of a better term.
There's one thing you've got to keep in mind - mathematics, in reality, is mostly useless in the sense that most discoveries these days will always be useless. What is useful generally is teaching, and applying mathematical abstraction to more realistic problems, a skill that you mainly get from dicovering generally useless stuff. (Math for art's sake.) That's how math works, or at least worked before AI. Once you put AI in the mix, it messes up all the incentives....
Personally, I'm 100% anti-AI because I think there's not much point in simply discovering new things if it's not primarily a human journey. It's revolting to have solutions generated by machines like that.
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> So in short we're seeing a dichotomy between the "problem miners" who are simply hooked on producing results and mining them and "explorers" for lack of a better term.
Interesting, thanks for the insight. Very similar to the 'builders' vs 'coders' dichotomy that seems to crop up amongst programmers now.
That's insightful, thank you. The follow up, then, is: will most "explorers" survive in a world where "problem miners" exist? I can see that the very best explorer could do that, but if things like tenure and prestige are decided by how many publications you have and which journals accept you, it will be next to impossible to compete against the miners.
To be clear, I empathize with your sentiment and revolt, despite being more of a "builder" myself in the software world. I just can't see how the explorer mindset can survive the onslaught of AI-augmented output.
At one point, the metrics were fairly aligned with the things mathematicians love, but nobody was ever judged by how much they like their work, right? The theory is that the more you like your work, the better your output will be. But motivations are multifaceted and I could see people who value careers over satisfaction winning if AI helps them.
I'm not saying I like this, just that it seems to be the most likely outcome.