The New York Times on Monday told the story of Sidharth Hariharan, a mathematics graduate student at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University who spent more than two years helping translate one of the past decade’s most celebrated proofs into a form a computer could check, a painstaking task called formalization. Earlier this year an artificial intelligence system called Gauss, built by the startup Math Inc., finished the job in five days. Hariharan rushed into his adviser’s office in tears. He and his collaborators had been “Gaussed.”
This isn’t a story about mathematicians (they’ll be fine, Jane Street is still out there). It’s about everyone who fears that AI might be able to do their job better than they can, and everyone who leads them. Hariharan has lost his motivation, and that feeling is coming for everyone who does knowledge work. Leaders have the dual task of reshaping the identities of their people to account for the new way of working while preserving their old skills for the moments when the machines fail.