I don't know why anyone should care about understanding the results if the AI is better at math than us. It'd be like demanding that human mathematicians are banned from publishing until their cats understand the theorems.

If Amazon uses AI math to come up with better routing, the cats can benefit from cheaper delivery fees just as much as humans can. No understanding needed.

The human brain is being obsoleted, soon thinking is going to be a recreational activity like weightlifting. If you want to think as a hobby, that's fine, but most people will be free of that toil of unwanted brain labor.

The essay On Proof and Progress in Mathematics by a Field's medalist is worth reading:

https://arxiv.org/abs/math/9404236

He wrote it in 1994.

He writes about how he almost "destroyed" a subdiscipline in mathematics by becoming so good at it that he outclassed everyone. PhD students were advised to stay away from the whole field.

When he discovered this, he realized his error was that he was focusing on producing results, and not focusing on explaining his thought process. It's that thought process that is valuable in advancing the frontier - results alone won't do it. It didn't matter how many theorems he proved, if he was the only one who had the mental framework in mind on how to think about the whole field.

I'm sure we've come across abstruse books where every theorem has a rabbit being pulled out of a hat, whereas other readers find it intuitive. It's because the latter has developed a mental model for the discipline, and you haven't.

So he set about slowing down, and focusing on holding lots of seminars where he worked with other mathematicians to explain the thought process. Eventually others started publishing proofs of key theorems.

When people publish in a journal, they are not merely doing it to show the result. They are having a conversation with other mathematicians. If they cannot explain their own proof, they're not having a conversation.

This is why even decades after the Four Color Theorem was proved, plenty of mathematicians don't consider it "mathematics".

If a result has a real-world application, then it can easily be published in an engineering or applied scientific journal in which it is already the norm to present methods that work empirically with little to no understanding of how.

If you are free from physical and mental labor, you are in fact, not supplying labor, and are therefore surplus to requirements.

> I don't know why anyone should care about understanding the results if the AI is better at math than us

This is a big if, right? AI can still generate subtle or even silly mistakes that any normal human, let alone a mathematician, wouldn't make. Besides, math is more than just getting a conclusion but to understand and to generalize new ways of solving problems. After all, mathematicians are a curious bunch. To quote Hilbert's epitaph: We must know. We shall know.

I’m not anti AI but thinking the human brain is obsolete and using it will become a hobby is a dystopian view of the future where no one has any agency anymore. By your logic since our brains provide no value why not just shoot ourselves in the head while we’re at?

> If Amazon uses AI math to come up with better routin

Most research mathematics is pure mathematics which is completely useless. No routing algorithms. It's only relevant because we (or at least mathematicians) are interested in it. So an AI producing incomprehensible proofs would be completely pointless. That's why Tao insists on the importance of human understanding.

What if the better routing leads to an outage that the AI can't explain or fix and all the humans who might have understood it were laid off or otherwise unavailable?