I think there is totally justified distress knowing your source of livelihood may be in danger.

That said, I don't think the reactions have been entirely circumspect.

1. Is the role of math academics really going to go away? Is there concrete evidence of this? Faculty still have very important roles to play, training students, training engineers, determining the direction of research. The breadth of math is absurdly, perhaps infinitely, wide, especially if including applied math.

2. You need to be a bit crazy to go into pure math academia in the first place. If you value the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, shouldn't the emergence of such powerful tools to that end be a good thing?