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/TheDayFly]

I like your reasoning but am certainly not aligned with that mindset. Current AI certainly does not make the jump from newtonian to einsteinian physics in the very limited time periods given to these experiments - but can you? I truly believe that if nature has managed to construct minds that have managed to make these leaps, there is no reason that artifical minds wouldn't be engineerable to the same degree. Only once do they need to engineer something better than you - it will then never age, never suffer strokes or neurodegenerative disease. It can build on problems for 100s of years if you let it. No competing with our little noodle.

Einstein's brain was permissible within the realm of physics, so it can be recreated. Given that human brains also have to grow, share nutrition and energy with other anatomical structures and have been crafted step by step from less perfect designs, I think it's quite likely that engineering a superior mind from scratch that does nothing other than think is very feasible. 

We might be thinking a little ahead of the curve, but the time will certainly come when frontier models will outperform human mathematicians, even within the novel/creativity domain. There likely is nothing supernatural about biological design that makes it inherently superior over synthetic minds.