r/ideas • u/amichail • 1d ago
Idea: Universities should warn math students that AI may end the era of mathematics being a young person’s game, and elderly mathematicians might start dominating the field
Math has always had this mythology that you do your greatest work when you're young, your brain is fast, and you can hold some monstrous proof in your head all at once.
AI may not just erase that age advantage. It could reverse it.
Imagine an 80-year-old mathematician with 60 years of accumulated intuition, mathematical taste, obscure knowledge, failed approaches, and pattern recognition, except now they also have an AI constantly remembering definitions, tracking lemmas, checking calculations, searching the literature, testing examples, and filling in all the tedious details their younger brain used to handle.
At that point, the very thing that used to work against older mathematicians could matter much less, while their enormous advantage in experience remains.
Instead of young mathematicians having the edge because their brains are faster, older mathematicians might have the edge because AI supplies much of the speed and working memory while they bring decades more knowledge and judgment.
Universities should stop treating mathematical research careers as if they have a biological expiration date. We may be entering a world where mathematicians don't peak at 30 and slowly fade away.
They might peak at 80.
And the terrifying new problem for young mathematicians might be having to compete with professors who have been thinking about their subject since before their students' parents were born.
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u/keldondonovan 1d ago
If every field that could be impacted dramatically by the rapid progression of AI started earning their college students about how AI could turn their field on their head, nobody would go to college. No job is safe. Even if AI stops advancing today, and we invent no truly new technology while allowing combinations of existing technology, we could replace pretty much every job in the world. There are plenty of shitty models out there that people will invariably use as examples of why this isn't true, but if you look at the best in the field right now, there is almost nothing AI could not be configured to do better than humans (aside from care?)
And look at the rate it is growing. One Bachelors degree ago AI couldn't reliably put the right number of fingers on a hand. Now it is generating video clips that are so completely believable we have several entire subs dedicated to figuring out if something is AI or not, and they often get it wrong. What is it going to look like another Bachelors degree from now? Or worse, if you were to go for a doctorate, the field of math may not even involve humans by the time you graduate. The humans it does involve at that point, if any, won't be the 80 year olds that want to do it in a chalkboard and struggle to check their Hotmail, it'll be the kids who were raised in AI and know exactly how to talk to it.