Personal feelings in this AI hurricane

Like anyone who does maths, I have recently spent a large part of my mental space ruminating on the fact that computers are now better than humans at proving theorems. And this has created a lot of feelings, mostly negative ones. In a crisis like this, I guess it helps to share feelings, so here is where I stand. (This is only about the impact of AI on maths.)

The first feeling is anxiety about an uncertain future: What will our job look like next year? What will happen to my position in five years? What will happen next year to people around me who are less privileged than I am (e.g. students, postdocs, foreign colleagues)?

The second feeling is harder to describe. It is a mix of absurdity, injustice, dejection, and anger: I have spent years of my life trying to prove theorems, only to discover that the same work can now be done in a matter of hours by a computer.

The third feeling is weaker, but positive: it’s relief that the maths competition is over. The feeling of not being as smart as other people is somehow gone: when it comes to hardcore problem-solving, we are all outrun by computers now.

Metaphorically, I feel like someone who has been saving for years, only to wake up one day and find that the money is worthless. There is anxiety about the future, there is anger at the situation, and there is some hidden relief in knowing that everybody is in the same position, and that we will have to cope together. One also realizes that when money loses its value, what remains is what you spent on helping other people and building things.

Some additional comments on the maths competition aspect:

• I’m certainly not among the least privileged here, but this competition has not had a positive effect on me. Like many people I used to visit my colleagues’ webpages and be saddened by the fact that they had more papers, better papers, more citations, more prizes. The most absurd moment was probably reading lists of accepted papers and, instead of thinking “wow, all these awesome papers!”, feeling sorry that my name was not on them, even though I had not submitted anything. (I had planned to blog about this someday, but life moved too fast.)

• Of course it might be that maths is over, in which case this feeling of “now we are all equal” is like finally feeling that everybody is in the same boat because a massive asteroid is heading towards the Earth.

• The optimistic scenario is that maths will now be about collaborating to build human understanding. Of course, even then, there will always be some competition, some bad behavior, and so on.

• The competition aspect did have some virtue: you could be a complete unknown and earn respect by proving a theorem. Now, as in other sciences and in the humanities, your career may depend even more on “unfair” factors like where you grew up (as a person and as an academic) or how charismatic you are.