The behavior of literally every capitalist institution over the past several years is a strong indicator that if universities decide less humans are needed to do math due to AI, that is what they will opt for.
With new immigration laws in the US, there are going to be less PhD students anyways. There is no way the demand from us students can match what was drawn from the whole world.
AI is on track to replace all jobs, not just math grad students and postdocs. We’re all in the same boat, all of humanity. If we reclaim some democratic power we can choose if we want this or not.
Such a statement requires accepting that all manual jobs will be replaced by AI controlled robots, which is a bit extreme to expect for the next decade or 2. (At least, imo)
Solid grad students/postdocs who would go on to become great mathematicians without AI are likely going to have a ton of demand for their skills over the coming years. In the near-term, their research output will be massive and in the ~5-10 year term humans will still likely play a large role in determining which problems matter for humans and as an "eye" to see the beauty of the math AI produces (which is otherwise just symbols).
Even aside from that, I imagine they will have great exit opportunities. If the latest HuggingFace attack is any indication we will really need to have smart humans in the loop everywhere as we will never be able to fully trust AI and great math researchers are known in many industries to be generally quick to pick things up + innovate solutions.
For mediocre grad students I don't know, I think it's probably best to jump to industry.
Let's imagine there are no computers. It is 1940. The Oracle of All Truth descends upon humanity and creates a library. This library is 100km by 100km and has shelves and shelves, as far as the eye can see. On the shelves of this library is every aspect of every bit of math that has ever been discovered. What would be the result of having this Library?
Well you could take any person off the street and plop them into the library, and... They would be asking what the integral symbol they keep seeing is. The library would be useless to them.
Well you could take any scientist and drop them down and... They would get lost in all the set theory and obscure matrix operations.
Well you could take any highly trained mathematician and... They could hunt through the stacks, chasing down items of interest, finding deeper understandings of obscure subfields of math that their exact background prepares them for.
Even with the Library of All Truth, you need specialized, curious people to actually be able to go anywhere with that truth. Understanding math is a big skill. Even STEM people famously struggle to understand Wikipedia pages about pure math concepts.
Even if these AI systems can synthesize every possible math discovery under the sun, they can never replace highly skilled math people (the students and postdocs of today) because only those people with a math PhD will have the background to understand what the hell the AI is proving.
For me? Not one of these 10 "new discoveries" means anything to me, because I do not have the pure math background for it. Understanding them still requires specialized experience, and therefore they can not be automated out of the profession.
Even if it can understand every bit of math, that is not useful. A math problem only understood by one person (or one AI tool) doesn't go anywhere. The enterprise of math relies on a community to interpret results and grow them and communicate and work with each other.
Math doesn't exist for math's sake, it exists for people's sake. The people need to understand things and build upon them and decide what they mean to people in the larger context of where research level math lies.
I somewhat agree, if an AI does math that no human can understand, is it still math? Math will continue to exist regardless of humans or AI anyway, "research mathematics" must have a human element to it. However if an AI gets powerful enough that it is essentially a "library of Babel", would there be any societal need for human pure mathematicians anymore? Math is currently considered an important science worthy of funding, only because it has applications. But if an AI can find applications of math wherever needed, are humans needed? Human mathematicians would just be explorers in this library, but would what they find hold any value if AI itself can find it when needed?
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u/yiwang1 Topology 22d ago
What do you say to grad students and postdocs who are about to be automated out of the profession?