Put yourself in the shoes of a mathematician
Mathematicians like Tao endure 8-12 years of grueling academia, developing an understanding of math far beyond ordinary people. Their field tests the limits of human abstraction, creative problem-solving, and raw insight. These mathematicians have propelled humanity to incredible achievements over thousands of years, and their contributions continue to be vital for progress.
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PublishedOffset at this time: UTC+0Oct 9, 2026, 00:46 UTC
IngestedOffset at this time: UTC+0Oct 9, 2026, 03:00 UTC
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- Oct 9, 2026, 00:46
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- Oct 9, 2026, 03:00
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I'm incredibly critical of the behavior of Tao and other prominent mathematicians, but you really do have to marvel at what it must be like to be in their shoes for a moment.
So far, all of the fields hit by AI, it has been a slow motion car crash. Using it for programming still requires a software lifecycle around it, using it for design still has an element of taste in selecting outputs and driving towards creative needs.
For math, it's just over. There is no "kind of" in math. If you have a problem to solve, and AI solves it, and formalizes it in lean, that's it. There's no creative needs. There's no decision making. The problem is unsolved or it's solved.
And not only that - this was hard for you to achieve. You have 8-12 years of grueling academia. Your relationship to math is so far beyond the ordinary person, that trying to help most people understand what you do would be like explaining baseball to a dog. It is a field that truly tests the limits of the human capacity for abstraction, applied creative problem solving, and raw insight.
One day, people are laughing at how AI can't do basic addition. Now they're laughing at the fact that your entire academic (and for many people - like any career - parts of their social life) has become an instant relic. If desired, any major lab could decide we don't need a single additional mathematician on earth.
A lot of fields are going to experience something like this in the coming months and years, but not every field is exposed to it happening so violently and completely - and of course, only one field can be first.