The elephant in the room no one talks about yet, imo, is "should public funding of math studies be adjusted due to AI breakthroughs?"
The sports comparison is wrong here because general public never paid for the specific match results. The value was always in the show, the advertising and betting around it, the health and educational value of doing sports, etc. And the sport mostly lives on what it earns, not on public funding.
Math, on the other hand, was paid for because people and states believed progress in math might lead to meaningful improvements in other branches of science, and, in turn, in our lives. If this is better served by AI, should we keep paying for the same number of tenure positions? Should we increase their number to handle the speedup brought by AI? Or decrease because they're being replaced? Should we pay more to those using AI to do their research, or to those explaining and exploring the AI-generated results?
The sports comparison is wrong here because general public never paid for the specific match results. The value was always in the show, the advertising and betting around it, the health and educational value of doing sports, etc. And the sport mostly lives on what it earns, not on public funding.
Math, on the other hand, was paid for because people and states believed progress in math might lead to meaningful improvements in other branches of science, and, in turn, in our lives. If this is better served by AI, should we keep paying for the same number of tenure positions? Should we increase their number to handle the speedup brought by AI? Or decrease because they're being replaced? Should we pay more to those using AI to do their research, or to those explaining and exploring the AI-generated results?