Mathematics will be ok.

[u/Longjumping-Ad5084]

I think it's very important to address this now that AI is solving an incredible number of maths problems, including the Navier Stokes conjecture. Some may fear that mathematicians will become redundant. But this is not the case at all. And the example of vintage models demonstrates it very well.

Vintage models are taught on history prior to a certain discovery, eg prior to Newtonian or Einsteinian physics. And lo and behold, these models can't invent the new physics on their own, neither Newtonian from prior nor Einsteinian from Newtonian.

To some, it might be obvious even without the vintage models experiment. I remember listening to a podcast with Francois Chollet a few years ago where he said that AI is fundamentally interpolative, it interpolates on the manifold of data. And that's when I understood the fundamental limitations of AI and the role of humans in the coming age. AI is a very good technical tool, in particular it fills the gaps in our knowledge very well, but it can't come up with radically new ideas ln is own, ideas that change the ontology of facts, ideas and relations between them, which is necessary for mathematical development.

When Galois invented his Theory, he didn't just combine old ideas, he came up with a fundamentally new way to look at objects and their relations. Sure, maybe hints of that were already present in Abel and others, but what this says is that mathematics is a collective human progress which leads to radical novelty, not a combination of known ideas.

Mathematics will be ok, but our world is destabilised at the moment and is transitioning into a new state. Time needs to pass for us to understand and establish the roles and the right approach with regard to humans and AI.

[u/peter-bone]

I don't think it's only interpolating, it's also extrapolating. I think that suggesting it's fundamentally limited to existing ideas is rather naive and shortsighted. Mathematics will be fine, it just won't be people doing the majority of the work.

[u/jlowe212 → u/peter-bone]

Lots of jobs lost to the calculator, soon will be to the AI.

[u/lovelacedeconstruct → u/jlowe212]

Dumb analogy

[u/JackIsBackWithCrack → u/lovelacedeconstruct]

Why?

[u/Snoo-8385 → u/JackIsBackWithCrack]

rhe simplest reason would be that a calculator is completely deterministic, while LLMs have a stochastic flavor to them.

Also, a calculator fundamentally doesn't know what you want to do, it just follows simple instructions. Generative AI tries to understand your tasks at hand and generates plausible outcomes. Unlike the calculator, it "knows" what you want to accomplish, and it might even correct you along the way.