Post #2919621

2026-05-28 08:40 UTC

Dispatches from the possibly last days of human relevance Look, I admire professional math researchers as much as the next guy, but they’re literally balancing on top of the economic pyramid of needs. This is a profession that cannot exist outside a culture with a surplus that can afford higher education, because there’s no economic incentive to hire them to do that kind of work. So GenAI can solve Erdos problems. Can it unplug a drain or repave a road? Fuck no. Can it handle refuse for a city? Also fuck no. Maybe professional math researchers will go the way of professional typesetters. I think humanity will retain its relevance.

Replies (5)

@rook@awful.systems 2026-05-28 09:15

because there’s no economic incentive to hire them to do that kind of work. isn’t that the old “basic science is boring and unsexy” issue though? There are economic incentives, but not in a short term-big-bux sort of way, so capitalism can’t be trusted with it. To conjure up a recent example, something like “The number of curves of genus two with elliptic differentials”, published back in 1997, probably had limited commercial value at the time, but 20 years later completely sunk a promising post-quantum cryptography algorithm (“An eﬃcient key recovery attack on SIDH”) which might have had some non-trivial commercial implications if SIKE had got through the key exchange algorithm competition. Anyway, the Erdős problems are good candidates for llm work because they have been specified in a careful and formal way, which requires a reasonably competent mathematician to do. That then opens up mathematics to the same deskilling problem that other sectors afflicted with llms have, and because capitalism is shortsighted and stupid we don’t know what the future economic impact of that will be, right?

Open ##2920116
@lurker@awful.systems 2026-05-28 09:29

Its the “expert in one field = expert in all fields” stuff that I hate. There’s still plenty of jobs and areas of expertise that require humans: medicine, psychology/therapy (AI has arguably made the need for human therapists way more important), physical labour like construction work, linguistics etc. Hell human authors are definitely keeping their jobs since so many people hate slop

Open ##2920326
@o7___o7@awful.systems 2026-05-28 19:21

Not a pro mathematician, but I’m not convinced these solutions (or something analogous) aren’t in the training data. Wouldn’t be the first time. Several seem like the kind of thing you might figure out for a lemma on the way to something else unless you’d previously examined tHe ErDoS PrObLeMs.

Open ##2929388
@Soyweiser@awful.systems 2026-05-29 09:35

Dispatches from the possibly last days of human relevance His drama knob is always set to 11. See also the previous article and how he talks about the “[fucking] NYT.”

Open ##2943730
@scruiser@awful.systems 2026-05-30 14:28

In addition to what rook said (that I strongly agree with), there is the issue that LLMs can only do certain sorts of math work. They can parallelize and try to brute force counter examples quite well and they can spread a very wide net trying to combine different techniques out there in disparate parts of the literature but it still remains to be seen if they can create entirely novel methods (and I and probably almost everyone on sneerclub/techtakes would bet not). And what are we left with if we let LLMs automate all the low-hanging fruit? Deskilling and devaluation of a field that cannot actually be solved by the hyperscalers’ slop machine.

Open ##2970116