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Comment by wisty

Or that chess is over because stockfish can easily beat any human player. Or that warehouses don't need workers now that we have forklifts.

Maaaybe.

On the other hand, proofs was the main thing that distinguished good mathemeticians. It was the way of sorting out who should be a math professor.

It's probably a bit of a blow for math professors. For almost everyone down the "food chain" though - who cares? I'd argue that mathematical thinking is still very useful, even if you offload the heavy lifting to power tools. Math teachers still need to exist. Math tests probably still make sense - you want to incentivise learning, and test to see who the brightest or most studious students are. Math will still be used for physics, economics, etc - no one actually cared about most of the new proofs anyway, it was just a fun tournament to pick math professors with a side effect of generating a bit new knowledge.

At some point, maybe humans don't need to make decisions. We can just sit in VR racks being fed and entertained by AI like we're in The Matrix or Wall-E, as they fill some age-old instruction to make the humans happy and healthy. But until then, humans still need to make decisions, and mathematical thinking makes us better at that.

parent wisty 26 days ago

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