>AI understanding of math is millions times more important than human's.

This is a persistent misconception that I see on HN (although not usually framed as abrasively as you have chosen to frame it).

Math is not an engineering discipline. Pure mathematics research is not done with an eye towards practical applications in other fields. You should think of it more like the humanities--it is done because it enriches the human experience (and it's not very expensive).

You could give us a black box oracle that could tell us, with 100% certainty, whether the 50 most famous and important open conjectures in math were true or false, and it would be more or less worthless. What does it actually get you? This isn't a rhetorical question.

AI in math is valuable only insofar as it ultimately helps drive human understanding.

There is another side of math that is more driven by practical applications: statistics and "applied math" and whatnot. This is what most people think of when they try to imagine math research, because it is much closer to the math that they have learned in their school education. A lot (but not all) of this math would get more value out of black box results, yes. But don't conflate this with the entire field of mathematics as a whole.

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calf 2 hours ago | parent [-]

But why? Responding to vulgar economism/instrumentalism with, "Well actually mathematics is this and that, human understanding/journey etc. etc." does not explain why mathematics ought to be those ways. Without elaboration such assertions amount to professional dogmatic narrative in the other direction. Professionals can be very good at that kind of rationalization too.

	▲	jltsiren an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Some things are valuable, because they keep people alive and healthy in the short term. Some are valueble, because some people find them inherently valuable. Pure mathematics is in that category. And then there is bureaucracy. Bureaucracy has no direct value, but it may have indirect value, if it helps us achieve things that are more directly useful. Pure mathematics has had a lot of indirect value until now. It turns out that training people to do mathematics for the sake of doing mathematics, at any level from schoolkid to mathematics professor, teaches skills that transfer to other domains. If human thinking becomes obsolete, that indirect value may be gone, but the direct value will remain. The results in pure mathematics are largely irrelevant, except as means of acquiring transferable skills. Sometimes they have practical implications, but such situations are exceptional. And there is not much correlation between the practical value of a result and its value as seen by mathematicians.
	▲	askjdfksdbfhk an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I think I already answered this in my comment. I claimed that I don't see much value in a magical black box theorem-proving oracle whose proofs could not, and would not, be understood by humans. If you disagree (as the GP does, apparently), I ask you--what value do you see in it?