alt Hacker News> But even if it had solved every problem in the Langlands program, to imagine that would have “solved number theory” would be as naive as saying that the construction of the periodic table solved chemistry.
This analogy is pants on head stupid. They're talking as though the only thing AI will ever solve is the Langlands program, not as though we have discovered a generic tool.
It's like saying "they drove the car one mile -- and every mile driven leads to more roads that we can trot along, why are you so worried about the future of horses?"
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I don't think it was a particularly well-reasoned essay (I thought the classification of finite simple groups is almost evidence for the opposite of what he says), but at the same time I don't think you understood his point.
If we have a theorem proving machine, then we can use it to prove theorems. If we have a machine to solve the Langlands program in one day, then we'll think of more things to prove after that. There's a million unsolved questions in number theory unrelated to Langlands, and if we knew Langlands (and why it was true) we could make new conjectures that our theorem proving machine could solve, rather than having to speculate for 50 or 100 years like now.
The possibility he's not considering is that the machine might be better even at conjectures, and then there really is no role for humans once the machine already knows things our primitive meat brains are too small to understand. But what he's saying isn't "pants on head stupid".
I think I’ll take the professional mathematician perception of how AI affects his field over random HN commenter saying it’s “pants on head stupid”
People are allowed to process their anxieties. And processing takes time. That said publicly doing it on the great modern internet attention/noise factory complicates the story.