[lmm]

The camera didn't kill painting. Neither the bicycle nor the motor-car killed running. There are already subfields of mathematics where it's believed that all the interesting discoveries have been found and no-one is looking except for the occasional amateur - and other subfields where to even have a hope of doing cutting edge research you would need to both do multiple years of postgraduate study and then get accepted onto one of a small number of close-knit teams that are pushing that cutting edge on an industrial scale.

So I don't see any reason to worry about the impact of AI. Unlike most fields with AI worries, mathematical research isn't even a significant employment area, and people with jobs doing it could almost certainly be doing something else for more money.

[lo_zamoyski]

A recurring problem I see is that people have absolutely drunk the koolaid of the utilitarian worldview. They've been marinating in it for so long, with no exposure to anything else beyond this parochial and base existence, that they have no idea they've been marinating in it. Everything is reduced to economic exchange. Everything is reduced to economic output. Learning is reduced to something that has value only if it is "marketable", only if it results in more units of toilet paper. The human being disappears from the picture as a mere instrument of the economy, and economy that exits for its own sake, that hovers over us like a god.

Given that kind of picture of reality, it is little wonder that AI seems like such a profound threat to so many people (putting aside for the moment the distinction between the aspirations of AI companies and the actual affordances it possesses). If being human is to be an economic instrument, then any AI that could eliminate the economic value of human beings is something akin to extinction. The god of economics has no further need of you. You may die now.

But this utilitarian view of the world reeks of nihilism. It is the world of total work, of work for work's sake. We never inquire about the ends that are the very reason for work in the first place. We never come to an understanding that economies exists for us, that we create them for mutual benefit. And we never seem to grasp that the economic part of human life is only part of human life, that it exists for the sake of those parts of life, the more important and most important parts of life, that are not a matter of economics. We have come to view life as meaningless, so we run into the embrace of the god of economics, losing ourselves in its endless churn, its immediate goals, truncating our minds so that we do not conceive of anything else, longing to escape the horror of the abyss that awaits us outside of its dreary confines...

The point of studying something in a theoretical capacity is to understand it, not to produce something of economic value. Each person must come into understanding from a state of not understanding. Homo economicus does not comprehend this. Homo economicus lives to eat and shit and cum and to accumulate things.

[thomastjeffery]

Another problem this creates is that every action is evaluated as a competition. Even collaborative work must be encapsulated in a team. The only success that can be imagined is victory. The only path to consent is by concession and contract.

This framework is explicitly enforced by copyright law. Because a copyright monopoly is automatically granted to every content creator, every person is automatically expected to participate in the copyright system.

Copyright law hinges on incompatibility. The easier it is to make compatible work, the easier it is to make derivative work, which copyright defines as the penultimate evil.

Generative statistical models (what everyone is calling AI) are calling this bluff harder than ever. Derivative work is easier than any time in history.

So what do we do about it? It's pretty obvious from my perspective that the best move forward is to eliminate copyright for everyone. It seems instead, that the most likely outcome is to eliminate copyright exclusively for the giant corporations that successfully launder their collaboration (derivative work) through large generative models.

[auggierose]

I agree with much of that, but of course, we MUST eat and shit (at least for the time being). So the economic part MUST function, otherwise all other parts are not important anymore.

[jcelerier]

> The camera didn't kill painting

But it did. Painter used to be a trade where you could sell your painting skills as, well, a skill applicable for other than purely aesthetic reasons, simply because there were no other ways to document the world around you. It just isn't anymore because of cameras. Professional oil portrait painter isn't a career in 2025.

[prennert]

The Royal Society of Portrait Painters might disagree: https://therp.co.uk/artists/

[awanderingmind]

Well, it is still a career, but it's very niche, and more attuned to 'art' than 'documenting the world'.

[sgt101]

and instead we have photographers who can document the world at a great volume. My Grandparents had no visual record of their wedding. My wife is a wedding photographer...

[Suppafly]

>Painter used to be a trade where you could sell your painting skills as, well, a skill applicable for other than purely aesthetic reasons, simply because there were no other ways to document the world around you.

Source? If anything I suspect there are more people making a living as painters now than at any point in history.

[ninalanyon]

As a proportion of the population?

[Chris2048]

> nor the motor-car killed running

Is running an art/vocation comparable to photography and/or painting? We no longer have mailmen who run the length of the country afaik.

But running did heavily contribute to sedentary lifestyles in western countries, along with a bunch of other things.

> mathematical research isn't even a significant employment area

I agree, I think it will move from mathematicians "doing" math, to managing computerised system that do it instead. I'm sure we already have such systems.

I think far more important to humanity is improving mathemetical-literacy. From my perspective, math is made for mathematicians - it could be more accesible. As "pure" amth matures, there is still plenty opportunity in "applied" math (however you might define it).