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PaperclipPerfector  11d ago (text post)   25240 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 12, 2026

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Overall, mathematicians don't have to fear losing their jobs anytime soon

This is true. But not because they haven't been obsoleted. They have. Rather because most of them work in industries that do not generally fire useless people.

I don't say this with any joy. I absolutely respect the mammoth intellectual ability of top mathematicians. Chess players too.

But their services are no longer required. If I need someone to explain a mathematical result to me, I will ask an AI.

not because they haven't been obsoleted. They have.

Well, what does it mean to be obsoleted?

Viewed from one lens, chess players were obsoleted by DeepBlue and Go players by AlphaGo a long time ago. If you want the best chess sparring partner, your phone can trivially outclass the best humans alive without any reason to ever play another human being.

Viewed from another lens, human chess and go has been exploding in popularity over the last few years; there are likely many more people who play chess and go now when compared to two decades ago, and it would be ridiculous to claim the human acts of playing chess or go are obsoleted. In practice, the best human players are still high status and make a lot of money, while the overwhelming supremacy of Stockfish is free and generates almost no economic value.

For those who had dreams of being the greatest chess player on the planet or etching their name into history as the next Euler, then I'm sure losing to the computer is a blow to the ego, but realistically this wasn't on the table for the vast majority of even the best chess players or mathematicians alive, AI or not.

There's no reason why the human practice of mathematics can't reorient itself around the supremacy of AI while continuing to draw down salaries and playing petty academic status games; god knows none of it was any practical importance in the end.

I would say that chess is analogous to track and field: You are competing against other people. The fact that there are machines which can move faster that Usain Bolt doesn't really diminish his accomplishments.

Is pure math like this as well? Not at the moment, it seems. Once they graduate college, the way mathematicians gain status is not by winning math contests, but instead by being the first person to come up with and publish an elegant way to prove or disprove some significant unsolved problem. And AI threatens to take this away.

There's no reason why the human practice of mathematics can't reorient itself around the supremacy of AI while continuing to draw down salaries and playing petty academic status games; god knows none of it was any practical importance in the end.

How would that look? Would there be an International Math Olympiad for adults, with problems generated and graded by an AI? I'm not saying that you're wrong, by the way.

How would that look?

Probably much like it does right now, a mathematical priestly caste who spend their lives training to understand and disseminate the arcane knowledge of frontier mathematics.

Even prior to AI, modern pure mathematics was already impenetrable to 99.99% of the population, and even mathematicians of different disciplines mostly struggled to understand each other's work.

Now that we have AI it's really no different; nearly everyone has no ability to even approach the starting line of understanding the superb works of the AI, and it's mostly through the lens of mathematicians that we assign value and meaning to the new results. I don't see why such a dynamic can't continue once the mathematicians manage to reconstruct their shattered egos.

Probably much like it does right now, a mathematical priestly caste who spend their lives training to understand and disseminate the arcane knowledge of frontier mathematics.

I see a potential problems with this. So what if there is an important unsolved problem of mathematics and before a member of the priestly caste solves it, Joe Blow from his basement publishes an elegant proof online which resolves the problem. Would Joe Blow simply be ignored? Would credit (and the Field Medal) go to whatever priest is the first to copy Joe Blow's paper?

Of course a more likely outcome is that each professional mathematician will use his own AI system, sort of like Gary Kasparov's concept of "power chess" back in the day. A human master to make big strategic decisions and a computer for tactical analysis. Except that power chess didn't last -- the computers got too good for humans to be of any use.

Ok, so what would an international chess championship look like if each player were free to use whatever computer assistance he wanted? It seems like it wouldn't confer much status on the winner. In any event he wouldn't be seen as a great chess player.

Let's put the question this way:

In a post-AI world, how would it be decided which mathematicians win the Fields Medal?

To me, it's kind of like asking what happens if an amateur managed to prove the Riemann hypothesis or a billionaire self-funded a cure to Alzheimers; perhaps it's possible in theory, but in practice if it was so easy it would already have been done.

We can see that even pre-AI the romantic idea of another Ramanujan arising from outside the establishment was risible in reality, and now post-AI all of the most significant advances are being made with the contribution of some of the smartest mathematicians in the world backed by internal models and enormous amounts of compute; I see no reason for this trend not to continue.

In some senses it's not really all that surprising. It's already impossible to push the frontier in biology or physics without significant amounts of capital backing and a decade of training to even begin to understand a tiny fraction of the existing frontier; mathematicians will just have to deal with this reality as well. The fields medal is kind of a symbol of the mathematical fetish of youth and the lone genius, which AI is now killing for good; see Terence Tao on the end of the age of heroes.

To me, it's kind of like asking what happens if an amateur managed to prove the Riemann hypothesis or a billionaire self-funded a cure to Alzheimers; perhaps it's possible in theory, but in practice if it was so easy it would already have been done.

We can see that even pre-AI the romantic idea of another Ramanujan arising from outside the establishment was risible in reality, and now post-AI all of the most significant advances are being made with the contribution of some of the smartest mathematicians in the world backed by internal models and enormous amounts of compute; I see no reason for this trend not to continue.

In some senses it's not really all that surprising. It's already impossible to push the frontier in biology or physics without significant amounts of capital backing and a decade of training to even begin to understand a tiny fraction of the existing frontier; mathematicians will just have to deal with this reality as well. The fields medal is kind of a symbol of the mathematical fetish of youth and the lone genius, which AI is now killing for good; see Terence Tao on the end of the age of heroes.

So in your view, they would probably just stop awarding Fields Medals?

If the Nobel Prize is any indication, they'll probably keep awarding them, but much like modern scientific Nobels they'll become increasingly divorced from being awarded for the flashes of brilliance of individual people, and lean towards being awarded to people at the head of massive agglomerations of capital.

People just really like venerating figureheads and leaders, and I doubt this will ever change.

If the Nobel Prize is any indication, they'll probably keep awarding them, but much like modern scientific Nobels they'll become increasingly divorced from being awarded for the flashes of brilliance of individual people, and lean towards being awarded to people at the head of massive agglomerations of capital.

So if OpenAI resolves some great unsolved problem and publishes it, Sam Altman would get the Fields Medal?

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