Understanding the world and math, and discovering beautiful explanations is a worthy pursuit for humans in and of itself.

However, math and science and engineering and biology/medicine have profound implications - those useful parts of that 'culture' - which we call 'technology' - extend human lifespan, healthspan, prosperity, safety.

The main practical value of investing in maintaining a population of math artisans is that they are/were needed as part of a well-trained science community needed to discover and develop new useful technology.

I think its a rational view to say LLM generated "AI-math" is a net positive if and only if, it results in _more_ high quality "human-math". By human math I mean well digested math residing in human minds, being discussed between humans and being actively re-discovered by humans, including a pool of new human student devotees.

A very bad outcome is where we lose the next generation of scientists/lawyers/mathematicians/engineers/doctors/researchers/authors because we let the AI do it all. In this dark future we outsource all our 'thinking', and avoid the years long training of grappling with hard-to-understand aspects of reality. All our culture is sucked into the event horizon of an AI black box.

AI could be a new renaissance of human math- and science- culture, or it could be the death of it.

AI isnt going away, the financial incentives and high current economic inequality, geopolitics guarantee that it will proceed as fast as possible.

AI has given us the structure of nearly every protein, which may well solve Alzheimers and cancers. AI may well find a solution to stable plasma for nuclear fusion, unlocking vast cheap energy and help us humans halt global warming.

So, how do we make sure that the economic windfalls of AI are reinvested back into human-culture, funding more human-math and human science .. resulting in a deeper pool of well educated scientists, engineers and researchers ?

I don't think that will happen by default - we are likely to have an AI-assisted dumbing-down rather than an AI enabled age of enlightenment.

Most of the general public are happy enough not to learn any math - when it doesn't make you much money and university is such a debt burden anyway. School and university students can just get the LLM to do their assignments. Why should they pay tax to fund science at universities when the cost of living is so high, and the LLMs can do all the research anyway ?

I think part of the solution is a policy to tax the windfalls of AI to mitigate the downsides of AI.

Governments should have taxed the carbon polluters and used those funds to mitigate climate change effects and research new forms of clean energy, but didnt.

We should tax LLM/AI profits and use that to fund science research - not just research to mitigate the effects of runaway AI, but to fund general science and math research and teaching, to guarantee that there is a net increase in human-math and human-science.

It is a cautionary tale that fewer students know their times-tables by heart, because a cheap calculator can do that ... but it gives me some hope that there are still people enjoying playing chess, even though chess programs are super-human.