Similarly, I got into software because I like working with computers and solving problems for others. I see TONS of similar sentiment where people are almost joyously exclaiming “Software is solved! Sorry!!! It’s been a long time coming, you all deserved it, get fucked!”

And I can’t imagine feeling the same about any group of people. It’s been odd, to me. I’m just trying to support myself and the people in my life, and now there’s a looming fear that I can’t do that anymore… business owners are drooling over that, and other sectors are laughing.

Hard times, I guess.

I saw something similar on Twitter responding to 45yo software engineers making comments of depair in that HN thread about the increased suicide rate of middle-aged men.

For some reason I'm stuck in a real depressing, doomer algorithm / homepage on Twitter. But everyone on my homepage seems to have a take on the HNer comments along the lines of "see, this is why you don't make your job into your identity".

But that's such an antihuman response. The only reason you can put decades into a field to grind and build expertise is because you have an identity-level interest in a subject.

It's also not a good thing if the optimal way to live going forward is to have no passion for anything lest it changes so that we won't feel bad. I don't think that's possible unless you remove the human part of our brains or make life so horrible that we're happy just to survive another day.

Lots of people have lost their jobs and had to overhaul their lives due to layoffs or technological advances or political choices or factories moving overseas or whatever.

They are showing as much care for mathematicians as they received themselves, which is not much.

i think a big part of the backlash isn't about math per se and it's about what 'work' or 'a job' are supposed to be.

when mathematicians complaining about losing the part of the job that they love, people think "if you love doing it, why is anybody paying you? you're describing a hobby."

Because we don’t see it as something for them to be legitimately upset about, except that it’s going to disturb their ivory tower unserious profession.

If AI got significantly better at performing surgery overnight and doctors started crying about how they were going to be replaced, what do you think the public response would be? Non-doctors want the best possible care; they aren’t interested in protecting an industry. The same will be said for pilots and lawyers, too.

People dislike self-serving whingeing, end of story, but that’s doubly true when it comes out of a profession (theoretical mathematics) that is mostly practically useless.

This is a fundamental human need and it's being taken from everyone eventually, by design. It will take a generation to turn over and find new ways of being useful. Those who ran into this wall and could not safely reduce their income and retire/pivot to other fields, will be the coal miner oxy crisis of this generation.

Mourning is fine if it is temporary, however no man should dread their own future if they still have control of their life. This is the idea of unalienable rights and was enshrined hundreds of years ago. It seems to me that anyone dreading the future of their field failed to take a page out of their retirement strategy and diversify their own interests, i.e. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymath

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life,_Liberty_and_the_pursuit_...

I was talking to a mathematician friend about this, and she was telling me that a lot of the proofs that have been produced in the past couple weeks don't have an application.

To me it begs the question: in a theoretical world where we don't have human mathematicians anymore, what is the point of these proofs if there's no human who actually understands it?

If the point of a lot of this math is only to expand the boundaries of human knowledge, it all seems kind of pointless.

Is AI at the stage that it can also point out all interesting things to study and then solve them? Otherwise humans would still be able and needed for progress.