Extreme claims on posts like these also, rightfully, trigger people’s skepticism. I don’t think it’s wrong to question claims that math is dead as a field. But then it leads people to miss the overall trendline.

People argue whether we are at y-5, y, or y+5, meanwhile we seem to be on a y=2^x exponential that keeps leading to crazier and crazier results. The much more interesting question to me is what will be consumed by the exponential like math seems to be, and what won’t. Writing has been much more stubborn, but I’ve noticed Fable to be quite a big step up there as well. How about politics? Will we develop new ways to let people express their own values in democracies, or will we get much better at manipulation?

And then there’s questions like, even if AI can answer increasingly complicated math questions, will we still need mathematicians to translate results to the real world, verify them, or decide where to push the frontier?