The End of Mathematics

Taken on its premises at least, I think this piece inadvertently fails to make a case for why "pure mathematics" should persist as a field of human or machine activity. A real-world system with the abilities of a robustly superintelligent mathematician can, when some practical problem requires it, formulate a problem statement, churn for a bit, spit out a formalized answer, and continue whatever outer-loop task it was doing without a human even finding out.

If you have a system that gives you arbitrary on-demand math results, dedicating any resources, be they human labor or compute, to producing them for their own sake just seems like a waste. Why catalog the Library of Babel?

> What I find striking here is that there are both fewer questions and fewer answers.

Assuming the ratio of answers per question remains the same (or drops because the answer quality raises) this is the sort of thing I would suspect.

It wouldn't even be theoretically surprising if the number of Qs & As on MathOverflow trend down purely because all the easy questions get answered. Wouldn't necessarily expect that, but because we can't really anticipate whether questions should trend up/down/sideways I don't think analysing MathOverflow is really all that interesting. Like the writer observes, kids these days are probably all over on Discord.

Seems like clickbait so I'm not clicking it