I think ‘destroy his field’ is ‘destroy his method of being famous in the field’.

Terrence Tao is famous because of solving problems better that most mathematicians because he has an uncanny ability to look across different math fields. AI gets everyone this ability for 20 to 200$ per month, eventually free.

Most mathematicians are happy to see interesting problems in their field being solved, and are looking to build on these to find more interesting problems.

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oytis an hour ago | parent [-]

Hm... I'm not a mathematician, but why would these new more interesting problems not be solvable in the same way by the same - or newer - models?

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fooker an hour ago | parent [-]

They will be, that’s the point.

The point is to make the field progress by discovering new things!

Who gets credit for what and how credibility is assigned is going to be muddy for a while but that’s the case whenever a bunch of new science happens in close sequence. History is full of math/science discoveries having debated and dubious provenance.

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oytis an hour ago | parent [-]

I can't see how the field can even exist - not to say progress - if any problem can be solved before a human can understand it. Looks like mathematics without mathematicians, "progressing" in the same way as paperclip optimizer progresses in its productivity.

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fooker an hour ago | parent [-]

Math doesn’t exist to make mathematicians famous.

It provides deep insights into logic, computation, provides tools for us to understand the universe, establishes mind blowing relationships between seemingly unrelated things.

For example “how much information can a black hole contain?”

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oytis an hour ago | parent [-]

> provides deep insights

To whom? If there are no humans in the field, there is no one to get the insight. Maybe you are right, and there is just a new type of a mathematician being born, but as an outsider I just can't see what they could look like, what will be left for humans to contribute

	▲	curt15 11 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> Realistically, math will be done by well funded teams of people instead of cult of personality mathematicians. Most math is already being done by poorly funded mathematicians. The entire US federal budget for mathematics is like $100M. One college football coach can already make 10 percent of that. No math prof is making bank. Is the implication of all this that mathematics research should get a cash injection to pay for high-powered computational tools?
	▲	fooker 29 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		There is a huge jump from AI solves math problems to > If there are no humans in the field Realistically, math will be done by well funded teams of people instead of cult of personality mathematicians. Also, insights from scientific discoveries are for everyone. You do not have to understand the complex multi dimensional algebraic geometry of general relativity to appreciate that gravity bends time as well as space. You don't need to understand fifty years of linear programming research to use a modern solver.