The headlines keep coming: such and such an AI system has solved such and such a math problem. And more and more I’m hearing people saying: maybe we don’t need people doing math research anymore; maybe we should just delegate it all to more and more powerful AIs.\n\nI must admit that I’m getting a bit impatient with some of what’s being said. Because it seems to me too often to involve fundamental misunderstandings of what math is really about—and also, frankly, what AI is about.
Back in 1988, when we first introduced Mathematica, there was also some of the same kind of talk about math being taken over, and made pointless. Of course that’s not how it worked out at all. Instead, Mathematica (now Wolfram Language) just raised the level of math that can be done—and over the years led to all sorts of important new math.\n\nThe enterprise of pure mathematics is an old one, crucially entwined with the history of civilization.
From the time of Plato and Euclid pure mathematics was the defining example of a place where abstract, rational thought could build an ever larger structure. And over the centuries, pure mathematics has come to be the single largest intellectual edifice that our civilization has built.\n\nThe first thing to say is that it’s unquestionably useful, sometimes very useful. For me, its greatest use in mathematical pursuits has been its ability in effect to thematically mine the knowledgebase of human mathematics.
But great math is—more than anything else—defined by the questions it asks. Yes, the AI can successfully automate things that humans would normally have had to do themselves before.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing