Why are we even doing all this?

>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.

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.

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.

> This aligns with my own lived experiences — I didn’t become a theoretical physicist to learn about the universe or better appreciate the beauty of nature myself (that’s philosophy, which I would never be a doctor of).

If one truly philo's sophos, then wouldn't one at least be curious what the computer says about a difficult problem? Like, if you've been wrestling with an especially troublesome integral for years then I feel like that somewhere along the line you should have plugged it into a CAS - even if you want to clean up the derivation afterwards it would be foolish to ignore every tool at your disposal and even rail at the Mathematica authors for the temerity to write a symbolic integrator.

I feel that the article is so preoccupied with clever sarcasm that it doesn't really engage with nuanced views and is instead happy to just spend a few KB of text tearing down vibe research strawmen.

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.

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

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.

Great satire, it is nice to see people with a human spirit left. The NYT should ask to republish this.

Man, mathematicians and scientists are going through it! I think one thing that makes things different for software engineers is there was always a belief that you were building for a specific use. It was rarely just for your own intellectual satisfaction. I think math and some of the sciences will now have to shift given that no one will be impressed by their intellectual achievements any longer.

What I’m most curious about is how this impacts our perception of who/what is smart.

> From what I know about the academic community (mostly from Twitter and LinkedIn, which I assume are representative), there seems to be near-unanimous agreement that the purpose of math and science research is to gather a large quantity of potentially true factoids in a repository that nobody will actually ever read, in a ritual called “advancing humanity’s[3] knowledge”. That these results are well-written, understandable, pleasant to read or look at, or even completely correct is a secondary concern — in fact, 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.

Am I the only who thinks this is rhetorical? Modern mathematics is so far removed from the base average knowledge (lets just assume high school instead of going to axioms) that the only people who understand most (if not all new) mathematical achievement are the mathematicians themselves, heck not even all mathematicians, it needs to be spread and developed from "hot spots"?

Your math results are not "well-written, understandable, pleasant to read or look at" unless you literally operate with two or three levels within the proof paper compared to the average person who probably starts at an order of magnitude levels higher.

To the average person, asking a mathematician to explain something is the same as asking the AI/LLM. Both are asking an oracle to dumb it down to their level of abstraction.

To the person who are not career mathematicians, both LLMs and mathematicians do the same thing, pump out garbled output that they themselves understand, and to mathematicians, the difference is one probably explains using axioms rather than theorems.

I don’t accept this framing. If tools allow us to pursue ever more deeply into the mystery of being, and get to both questions and answers we never thought we’d see, that’s a good thing. I think the genuinely curious should have no problem redoubling their “freed up time” into further exploration. The library Borges describes is infinite. I won’t mind getting to read a few books I wouldn’t have otherwise.

> (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

> No rational person, least of all us masters of rationality in STEM, pursues these for the joy of creation, learning, or beauty

well yeah the purpose of STEM education is to be a factory to produce the correct worker for another factory

> AI has solved all our problems

What about the Collatz conjecture? AFAIK, it requires some novel approaches to mathematics, which would be a real testament to AI creative skills.

I don't doubt it will be solved some day, but as of now it's too early to say that all our problems are solved.

I work in construction now. Commercial Millwork/cabinets as a project manager.

It is so much harder and more stressful than my php/jquery mini saas coding days.

Often at work I start thinking "why are we doing all this? Why does anyone want this fancy reception desk?? This desk is not worth the human aggravation that it's causing."

I genuinely start thinking we should go back to concrete eastern European communist type buildings just for the simplicity and efficiency. Why all this fancy stuff that causes every project engineer, superintendent, and subcontractor Engineering department to get grey hair.

But I guess it makes the economy grow. I don't know.

> First, they came for the artists, and I did not speak out, because I was not an artist.

// actually FIRST they came for the programmers. and many of us were ultimately ULTIMATELY pretty tickled to get such a massive productivity boost. this anti-AI sentiment as seen here and in Jon Stewart's rant that all AI is good for is optimizing shopping carts or something... it's so upsetting see good folks buying into this and not realizing how much benefit it will bring. If anything, I've seen how much amazing power it has now given programmers such as myself... I can do what would take me years in an afternoon.

// Btw, can we retire the "first they came for the..." template, it's a little tired.

Such a weird take.

There's a library of babel simulator here: https://libraryofbabel.info/

Just hit "random." It's always gibberish. The odds of getting something that isn't gibberish are astronomically low, like winning the lottery.

The actual library Borges describes has 25^1312000 books, the very vast majority of which are utter nonsense. (As the simulator makes clear.)

Yet with AI, we're getting an abundance of very credible -- and, as Tao himself notes, frequently correct -- mathematical proofs. In these new AI math results, the ratio of signal to noise is high, which makes our current situation the exact opposite of the library, which is pure noise where signal emerges only by random necessity.

This is not a very upbeat post. It does not say much about the AI Library of Babel but I have been wondering about the same thing.

We must secure the future of humanity and preserve dignity, freedom, purpose and agency.

So we have the Fields medal, awarded for making "progress" in math.

Now we are told explaining, understanding things, asking new questions is more important than proving things. So where is the math community medals/awards for this job?

> 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

The climate effect argument against AI is so intellectually dishonest. It’s the same as saying that Tao is on the side of stopping the advancement of Cancer research.

I thought the people clowning him were dumb, but the people arguing for either side are really fighting on a mud pit.

oh stop it

> This is a guest post by Rikab Gambhir.

Very much worth nothing for those about to read this! haha I got a couple of paragraphs in and shook my head.

All the nihilism in the AI space is so tiresome. We have a tool now that can accelerate the technological development of our species and actually reach for the stars! How exciting! All these ruminations and lamentations about what it means to be human are downright laughable to people on the front lines of war, living in abject poverty, etc. "Oh, to be so lucky!", I'm sure they'd say.

The luddites and doomers should do the world a favor and go establish a commune in rural Alaska, then they can be happy and the rest of us can get back to building and playing with amazing technology!

I’m not doing it. Why are you?

It's a nice rant that I think will become more common until everyone burns out and one important realization dawns upon them: the corporations doing these things don't really care about your plight, suffering, etc. You can write thousands of books using this kind of tongue-in-cheek-but-really-angry language, and they'll just laugh it off. Felix Reisenberg will make a new post about something he's doing with Claude, Boris will make a tweet and everyone will rush to turn it into LLM-generated images so they can post on their LinkedIn for their bosses to measure their engagement KPIs, and we'll forget about the rants.

...for money

if I had guaranteed access to housing, healthcare, and food I'd stop immediately

Unlikable text. Just a rant with the usual “corporations” socialism-slop. Terry Tao’s blog rapidly diminishing in quality. I didn’t think that the way machines would approach top mathematics is to transform top mathematicians into boring Redditors who eagerly retweet other annoying Redditors.

Now imagine what quantum computers will do. AI in polynomial time.

You can sense the fear and anxiety in the article.

Is existence not enough anymore? Do humans need more?

They're so butthurt about losing their social status of not being the top intellectuals anymore, I find it hard to take them serious.

Dear friends: you may not like to hear this but the profit motive is what ruins everything.

I have a degree in Economics. I have read Adam Smith (and not just the Wealth of Nations, by the way!). I spent years on this stuff. I understand markets and for some things they are indeed the best solution. No argument there.

It is a FACT that some things in life should not be done for profit.

>> reimagining what it means to be human. By outsourcing the burdens of curiosity, creativity, and understanding, we can finally focus on what matters most

... the fact that this shit doesn't even scrape the ass of more than 500 million people, 60% of which are utterly useless with or without (mit oder mit ohne) ... neither sacrasm, nor cnysims or inorys will uplift this worst of all narratives ever written.

this is all soooooo baaaaaad

Why Ai? Because its development was pretty much free and paid by the pension funds. The objective is supremacy and being the first entity and country to collect rent via Ai supremacy and block every other entity in their analysis; reality who knows what will happen..

It started with internet which was subsidized through military for sake of military supremacy and then it transformed to become a utility connecting everything and collecting information and it subsidized by the markets to collect rent from the world using this utility and now it is subsidized to replace labor around the world by knowing everything that humans know and to collect rent from its use to discount labor.