Mathocalypse
The title of this post comes from Scott Aaronson’s blog, and it describes the state of math today quite accurately. OpenAI’s recent results have, once and for all, dethroned humans as the most intelligent entities, at least in the arena of mathematics.
Kevin Buzzard rightly points out that this is a time to grieve the end of math as we know it. But that is not necessarily a bad thing. Change is the only constant in life - impermanence - and it has finally come for the math community too. The old makes way for the new.
I don’t think we should try to hold back the tide. OpenAI could have handled the release of its results better, but to me that’s a minor detail. The fact remains that there are now entities better than humans at solving math problems. Perhaps now we can make progress in fundamental physics and break the stalemate it has been stuck in for decades.
I am excited about what the future holds, and at the same time grieving for a math community that can no longer exist in its current form, now that it knows of a “higher power”. It is going to take us mathematicians some time to process this change. Only time will tell how, or whether, we come out of it.
I’m a big fan of Quanta Magazine’s The Joy of Why podcast, hosted by Steven Strogatz. In an interview with The New York Times, he beautifully describes what many of us are going through right now. And no, it’s not about jobs; it’s about something much more spiritual.