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  • > (that’s philosophy, which I would never be a doctor of)

    I'm in the office and was trying to contain my laughter next to my colleagues, but this tipped me over the edge

    by hatthew
  • Great satire, it is nice to see people with a human spirit left. The NYT should ask to republish this.
    by ahsgtq
  • I sympathize with some feelings the author is trying to communicate, but the cynical and sarcastic style really detract from the authors points in my view.
    by cbdumas
  • The question is the right one. "Why are we even doing all this?"

    Why, indeed, is society funding pure mathematics? Many mathematicians are complaining that they do not like AI and their jobs are less fun when AI is involved. But does that matter? Should that matter to the institutions who fund mathematics research?

    To me it seems that we fund pure mathematics because we believe that some pure mathematics will end up being useful. Turing was doing "pure mathematics" when he invented the Turing machine, because we didn't have another word for it, yet.

    So, which is going to be more useful - the sort of pure mathematics that AI does in 2026, or the sort of pure mathematics that humans do in 2026? That is the debate I would like to see.

    by lacker
  • Not a huge fan of the sentiment in this article, and the very cynical way it was communicated, but the references to the library of babel reminded me of this fun site.

    https://libraryofbabel.info

    by its_ethan
  • I think the author is hiding the ball a bit. The problem is that, for a long time, humans have attributed meaning, value, and social status to great cognitive insights. Taking physics as an example, it has almost always been the theorists who develop new ideas, not the experimentalists that test and validate them, who have won praise and acclaim. The name Arthur Eddington doesn’t have the same cachet as that of Albert Einstein. But now that the creation of those insights can be automated, there is a great wrenching as esteem shifts away from the former.

    Well, maybe it’s a good thing that we are seeing this shift. Maybe it is good and right that we begin valuing your ability to exist in the real world, rather than play math puzzles on a sheet of paper. Because, while the AI labs are receiving a lot of attention and excitement now, that’s a short run phenomenon. Ultimately, people aren’t impressed for long by a machine doing something novel. Once it’s up and running, it fades into the background just like the combustion engine, or the dishwasher, or electric lighting.

    by derektank
  • This is so well written, deep, funny, and sad.

    > Looking up at the stars in wonderment, or enjoying a complex puzzle game, or being inspired by an encouraging teacher, and dreaming that one day an unfeeling corporate robot[1] will burn a rainforest to compile a list of 700 highly obscure barely-readable facts that might be true that nobody can understand as part of a marketing gimmick to raise hype for an IPO[2].

    But if I am going to critique it's main point it would be this part:

    > in the pursuit of advancing humanity’s knowledge as quickly as possible, many academics will recoil in anger at the suggestion that it is worth spending any time making results understandable to humans. It is inefficient to explain or check a result when those resources can be spent generating another.

    While obviously ridiculous, I think this does not go far enough. The problem isn't that people don't care and resources should not be spent to explain AI results to human minds, the problem is that AI will soon be better at explaining itself than humans. The puzzle then changes from can AI formally verify and explain a proof to: do human minds trust the proof. Do we believe that the proof is correct and not an elaborate AI hallucination using tricks that are beyond our understanding. In order to trust it a formal verification is not enough unless it is human understandable. In fact human understandability is the only thing that matters. That is something that AI can never do on its own.

    by bryan0
  • >And now that AI has solved all our problems, we can devote ourselves to more important work: going into quantitative finance, vibecoding sports-betting apps, consuming AI-generated TikTok shorts, and arguing with political bots on Twitter.

    Grim but this is exactly where society is heading.

    by Gigachad

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