Ask HN: Do you think AI has now disrupted math more than it did programming?
Hi,
In this spring and early/mid summer, we saw tons of headlines about how "programming/coding/software has changed forever", and now, suddenly, we see very similar headlines about math, some from very prominent mathematicians.
To those of HNers well versed in both, which disruption do you think has been bigger `so far`, if any at all?
Thanks
The disruption in programming is more obviously tied to changes in productivity, changes in demand for programming work, impact on the whole economy.
In math there are more obvious examples of AI achieving things that humans have failed to achieve for decades without AI. But in practice the number of mathematicians is relatively tiny and most of the value they produce economically isn't tied to how many cutting edge proofs they produce. So the changes are massively disrupting but not as existential as they feel to some of the mathematicians - they'll still be able to do research, write papers, teach, give talks and everything else they've been doing; the changes will be in the tools available, ways of working and in the system of incentives in academia which will finally be forced to stop pretending that people's value comes from publishing papers (it was never true but the people who are most upset now are the ones who fell for that lie).
You can always make another Doom clone, but in math there is(was?) a heavy culture to give a lot of importance to the fist person that proved a result and ignore most of the later work to refactor, simplify and write a graduate student book about it (that may take 10 or 20 years, and involve a few persons or teams).
Interesting year to be a mathematician.