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The job of a mathematician just shifts from proving to inventing new theories and finding new conjectures with the help of AI, which should be even more fun.

by singularity2001 17d ago

piker 17d ago
> proving to inventing new theories and finding new conjectures with the help of AI This is exactly the activity Tao and others worry will be hollowed out by instant "true/false" responses to novel questions.
- singularity2001 17d ago
  inventing new theories is the interesting part. finding new conjectures is the second interesting part "instant "true/false" responses to novel questions." Fair enough. Then we can add ordering and analyzing theorems with the help of AI as a third activity, admittedly the least interesting one.
jltsiren 17d ago
In my experience it's the opposite. AI tends to make interesting things boring. You spend less time building a deep understanding by doing the hard but rewarding work yourself, and you focus more on developing a more superficial understanding by studying someone else's work. There are some productivity gains, depending how well defined the tasks are and how well the ability to produce more translates to creating more value. But at the same time, an increasingly large part of the work feels like bureaucracy with no inherent value.
- linhvn 17d ago
  "AI tends to make interesting things boring" If a conjecture can be one-shotted by OpenAI Astra, I have a hard time believing it is interesting.
  - rubikscube09 16d ago
    And what do you find interesting right now?
    - linhvn 15d ago
      Use AI to deepen my understanding and learning some interesting math. I studied a lot of combinatorics in high school, but my understand at that time was very adhoc (that most of combinatorics problems are just a bunch of elementary tricks applying here and there). With AI, I could categorize the bag of tricks into systematic topics, and discover formal concepts. For example, here are two topics that came up during my time solving combinatorics problems in the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parking_function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parking_function https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012365X07009806 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012365X0...

The job of a mathematician just shifts from proving to inventing new theories and finding new conjectures with the help of AI, which should be even more fun.

piker 17d ago

> proving to inventing new theories and finding new conjectures with the help of AI This is exactly the activity Tao and others worry will be hollowed out by instant "true/false" responses to novel questions.

singularity2001 17d ago
inventing new theories is the interesting part. finding new conjectures is the second interesting part "instant "true/false" responses to novel questions." Fair enough. Then we can add ordering and analyzing theorems with the help of AI as a third activity, admittedly the least interesting one.

jltsiren 17d ago

In my experience it's the opposite. AI tends to make interesting things boring. You spend less time building a deep understanding by doing the hard but rewarding work yourself, and you focus more on developing a more superficial understanding by studying someone else's work. There are some productivity gains, depending how well defined the tasks are and how well the ability to produce more translates to creating more value. But at the same time, an increasingly large part of the work feels like bureaucracy with no inherent value.

linhvn 17d ago
"AI tends to make interesting things boring" If a conjecture can be one-shotted by OpenAI Astra, I have a hard time believing it is interesting.
- rubikscube09 16d ago
  And what do you find interesting right now?
  - linhvn 15d ago
    Use AI to deepen my understanding and learning some interesting math. I studied a lot of combinatorics in high school, but my understand at that time was very adhoc (that most of combinatorics problems are just a bunch of elementary tricks applying here and there). With AI, I could categorize the bag of tricks into systematic topics, and discover formal concepts. For example, here are two topics that came up during my time solving combinatorics problems in the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parking_function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parking_function https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012365X07009806 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012365X0...