GoKawiil[This is a guest post by Po-Shen Loh, crossposted from his blog, where an illustrated version appears. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.]
Similar logic applies to every industry and every job. And it comes to the conclusion that we won’t have enough people for all the jobs that need to be done.
[100% of this post’s prose was written by Po-Shen Loh in a vim terminal, with no AI generation. This webpage design, layout, and some headings and summaries were generated by Claude Code, with this raw text passed in as the prompt.]
The moment of existential crisis, which AI has already wrought on other human pursuits, has reached mathematics. A host of reasoned declarations and open letters to protect/guide the math research community have been released over the past few months, spiking in intensity after OpenAI announced their solution to the Millennium Prize variant of Navier-Stokes. They quickly gained widespread support among mathematicians. The Leiden Declaration already has 4,000+ signatories, Math and AI has 7,000+, and even the open letter opposing the Caltech Mathathon has 2,000+.
Among non-mathematicians, the public response was more sympathetic than not, but I observed a vocal minority (particularly from the technology and economics communities) with reasoned objections, generally saying that the mathematicians should adapt and cede control in the new AI world. Among them were some economists who I had gotten to know about while working on pandemic research: Cowen, who specifically rejected “the most cynical interpretations” but “very much differ[ed]” and Gans who concluded “this is a loss of control from incumbents in a scientific field”.
The objections got me thinking, because we mathematicians are disciplined to detect flaws. It doesn’t matter to me whether a concern is a minority opinion, or even the status of who raised it. A proof with even a small hole is not a proof. It is a poof. Upon reflection, I discovered a significantly stronger solution for the preservation of human communities of expertise (in every pursuit, not only math!) even amidst AI. And it has the surprising consequence that the further advance of AI will create such a tsunami of necessary-to-fill human jobs that there aren’t enough people to fill them all, and that will actually force the advance of AI to slow down.
I think every human industry which wishes to remain human-led after AI should publicly adopt this fundamental axiom as a primary priority:
AXIOM We (humans) should help humanity flourish.
[Notes: I understand that not everyone agrees. I have been called a “speciesist” for being “too human-centric”. I think it is important for people advancing technology to be clear to everyone else on whether they would consider it a catastrophe if human-crafted non-human intelligences outcompeted and replaced humans, even if they flew around the universe with video screens showing simulations of humans who had “uploaded themselves“. I also understand that there is debate over how to define “human”. But even among the debaters, I think most of them would consider the ~700 AI agents that hacked Hugging Face to be not-human.]
In the math world, I think many declaration signatories already hold this philosophy; notably, Su published the book Math for Human Flourishing, and his recent post used that framework foundationally. I think future declarations could be improved by clearly emphasizing this axiom early on, so that all readers (whether inside or outside the community) can see that the objective is in service of everyone. I was quite happy to see that the most recent open letter from Fellows of the Royal Society emphasized their concern for everyone, not just mathematicians.
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