Jacob_Hilton's Shortform — LessWrong
About a year ago, I wrote that superhuman math AI will plausibly arrive in the late 2020s/early 2030s. It now looks like if anything, I was underestimating the pace of progress. In this post, I will try to say something about the sociological implications for mathematics. I don't want to focus too much on the predicament of the mathematical community today; instead, I'll try to take a longer-term view, and say something about where I think human mathematics might eventually end up. For the sake of argument, I'll assume that within the next decade or so, AI systems are developed that are vastly more capable than humans at every mathematical task (including proving theorems, building theories, and explaining mathematics to humans), and that there nevertheless remains a community of human mathematicians, alive and well, and with funding to pursue mathematics as they please. What would such a community be doing? Of course, in this hypothetical, mathematicians are not pursuing mathematics f