Taken on its premises at least, I think this piece inadvertently fails to make a case for why "pure mathematics" should persist as a field of human or machine activity. A real-world system with the abilities of a robustly superintelligent mathematician can, when some practical problem requires it, formulate a problem statement, churn for a bit, spit out a formalized answer, and continue whatever outer-loop task it was doing without a human even finding out.
If you have a system that gives you arbitrary on-demand math results, dedicating any resources, be they human labor or compute, to producing them for their own sake just seems like a waste. Why catalog the Library of Babel?
If you have a system that gives you arbitrary on-demand math results, dedicating any resources, be they human labor or compute, to producing them for their own sake just seems like a waste. Why catalog the Library of Babel?