The doom and mourning is that it's no longer their craft. Their involvement is on the threshold of no longer being useful. What does it mean for humans when the best their involvement accomplish is slowing down progress?

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jvanderbot 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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1970-01-01 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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_...

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j2kun 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

My friend, this happened a week ago. If a spouse dies you don't come back a week later and say "welp, chin up and diversify your dating pool!"

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1970-01-01 5 hours ago | parent [-]

https://record.umich.edu/articles/study-grief-is-short-lived...

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j2kun 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Ok, so if you really believe that losing one's vocation at 25 is the same as a 75 year old losing their spouse, that paper suggests you should wait at least 6 months before you start being a jerk about it.

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1970-01-01 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't see what point you are trying to make. At 25 losing your vocation gives you more than plenty of time to transition into another lifestyle. Many people will consider this the very beginning of their career. At 75, retirement is near. Your legacy is known but not final. 6 months is less than 1% of your lived life, and you have a lifetime of memories to reflect and enjoy.

	▲	0c3ca83 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'm not entirely sure what you're on about. Are you suggesting that mathematicians should become truck drivers or plumbers and be happy with that (until the next physical-aware models release, and then...)?

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0c3ca83 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What do you mean, "control of their life"?

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skohan 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

	▲	chasd00 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		heh these models should be turned loose on all the proofs paid for and sitting on the shelf and see if they can find an actual application useful to mankind.
	▲	0c3ca83 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Often, we don't know the applications of new math. For a long period of time we had "useless", "purely theoretical" mathematics that eventually turned into relativity and quantum mechanics. Proofs are somewhat like legos. A bigger toolbox of them can only help in solving other, possibly practical, problems. As far as the utility of a human being involved -- In a non-theoretical world where we don't have feline mathematicians, what is the point of these proofs if there is no cat which actually understands it? The cats can benefit from, for example, advances to optimziation algorithms that reduce costs for cat food delivery, of course.

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RandomLensman 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

	▲	0c3ca83 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Good question. I'm not a professional mathematician, but I would be interested in seeing what results the mathematicians get from trying to prompt it to come up with new and interesting problems. My intuition is that it'll be at 'smart undergrad' levels today, though as the cryptographers say, attacks always get better.