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I don't get the argument.

I get that there is a cultural benefit to keeping it alive. Just like we ideally want the languages represented at the universities.

But keeping humans in the loop does not appear to be necessary in order to call it science, and certainly not in order to have progress or dessiminate that progress.

I don't have a problem with people doing math. As long that we don't idiomatically hold on to that way of doing things.

I do, however, find it hard to belive that individual humans will play a big role from here and forward, in any scientific desciplines.

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The goal is indeed to have progress or disseminate that progress.

The point of Tao is that people see LLM providing "proofs" and are concluding that this is all that is needed to "have progress or disseminate that progress". That is the same mistake of thinking that "generating food" is all that is needed to "have people not dying of hunger".

The hard part of "have progress or disseminate that progress" is the human network. A fundamental point of this human network is that it generate trust, accountability and reliability. Generating "useful new theorem" is useless unless the society also built the trust around the theorem to distinguish it from a fake theorem.

Maybe in the future, we will have AI doing some part of it, but this is a totally different AI animal than the one we are able to have now, and people who think the current AI that we see now is able to do that have no understanding how it works. This is demonstrated by the facts in math: current AI is able to provide math proofs, and yet, a lot of human work is still needed to get progress out of current AI.

I would not bet that individual humans will still play a role as big as today in the future. Maybe AI will be different in the future, but the reality is that we don't have any indication if this is even possible.

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Why is there a cultural benefit to keeping it alive, or to having universities? It seems like education is toil that could be automated for those that don't have fun with it.

Humans soon won't need it.

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