What Happens When the World is Run on Code No One Understands?

Mathematical verification must be a national mission in the AI era, write Patrick Shafto, Ken Ono, and Scott Duke Kominers.

The International Congress of Mathematicians met in Philadelphia last month, its first U.S. meeting since 1986. Minutes after accepting the Fields Medal, mathematics’s highest honor, Jacob Tsimerman told reporters he was leaving academia to work on AI safety. “I think the world is changing,” he said, adding that he did not expect the mathematical career to survive in its present form. Two months earlier, he had been one of nine mathematicians asked to review whether an AI model had truly refuted an 80-year-old central pillar of modern geometry, known as the Erdős unit distance conjecture.…

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