It just so happens that even bizarrely esoteric math can later turn out to have some extremely useful and economically valuable applications. And even more useful to have mathematicians available who already understand that specific math.
The random engineer looking at a funny problem 10 years later now has the literal author of the math to talk to about it and implement it.
I have never even spoken to a world class mathematician and now I can have them design with me?
How is this not better in almost everyway?
If said human is kicked to the street with thousands of other homeless people that can't get jobs because AI then robots replaced them, then those fast math problems sound like a pretty bad trade off.
Now, if there's some future where AI leads to abundance and we can all live off UBI, well, probably a worthwhile trade.
The biggest issue I see is the more controversial people leading the AI race at the moment are not the kind of people I'd hand kids safety scissors much less the future of the human race.
Most modern mathematical problems are sufficiently abstract that their proofs or disproofs have no direct application. There's no problem you can fix or invention you can build based solely on OpenAI's construction, because analytic solutions to the Navier-Stokes equations are not used for practical purposes in fluid dynamics. The problems and their proofs are only interesting to the degree that they help us better understand how the math works.
IIUC the Navier-Stokes proof is understandable by human beings, but if it weren't it would be no more useful than a proof that 3 dimensional florg-complete entry seams have no durdle-nodes.
Unless your argument is that mathematicians are effectively useless?
I am assuming that's not your point though.
It's always been a bit bizarre that this isn't the case. Mathematicians are almost always working on problems that there is no good reason to expect to have utility in the real world... problems they selected because of their elegance or whatever... yet there is a strong historical trend of their work having huge importance after the fact. Sometimes in fields that weren't even invented yet at the time of the work.
There's something to be said for the idea that disrupting a system that is working well for no apparent reason is a bad idea.
If AI can perfectly replicate their work but faster and better then what?
SWE have nobody crying for them as they've been massively disrupted.
1. Proving theorems - what AI can apparently replicate faster and better.
2. Creating definitions and new theorems from those definitions to prove, selecting which of the possible statements to work on. I.e. developing the "language" of mathematics. So far there is no evidence that LLM can do this at all well. And there's some reason to think that mathematicians won't be as good at this if they aren't also doing the first part.
The value to society only comes when they do both "well", and it's 2 which is really the black magic where we don't understand why they've been so useful to us.
So I totally agree if AI also cannot do the second part better than a person.
Honestly though, I wouldn't want to take that bet. I never thought that the first thing AI would become super human AGI like is math.
You ask me 10years ago and I'd think the opposite. I think we all would have said we'd have super human HR employees before a super human mathematician.
But here we are.
During the process of optimising and understanding the programmer might learn something new or have some kind of "aha" moment of insight that might lead them down a new path of study where fantastic new technologies and capabilities can be realised
Fast forward to 2026
Most web pages take several seconds to load
Applications crash often for no apparent reason
A vast majority of programmers have no idea what their applications are actually really even doing anymore, so they stack bloat on top of bloat and if something breaks, well I guess that's someone elses problem cos I have no idea what's going on anymore
There's something to be said about levels of abstraction being useful, but abstracting away understanding of the task itself is not the path to generating useful knowledge or applications for humanity
We might be gaining the "what" but we are losing the "why" and the "how" and these are generally fundamentally more important
The answer is 42 but what is the question?
The gatekeeping in math academia is extremely unfair, or should I say objectively fair but personally unfair. I won’t cry crocodile tears.
Because there's lots and lots of money in that and there's not in funding pure math. It sounds like your problem is with the people holding the purse strings.
(I suppose it's possible that in some distant AI future there might be no value in people understanding theoretical math, but I'm pretty skeptical of that; to me it seems like the same error as thinking nobody needs to understand multiplication because you can ask the computer to solve any multiplication problem.)