If education is no longer the sole way for us to provide economic value, the purpose of education should resort back to what it used to be, learning for the sake of nourishing the human mind and to become better humans.
It seems that the role of humans in mathematics will change from being the primary provers of conjectures to understanding, questioning, and rewriting the proofs AI generates. Math has represented the logical feats the human mind could achieve, and now, AI has become an increasingly powerful collaborator. But only humans could ensure that the discipline of mathematics, and broadly, science, remains aligned with human well-being by extending the proofs AI generates to encourage further lines of inquiry.
The article from Quanta highlights an important issue where people solely motivated by proving might end up being discouraged from joining the field, but since there will be even more mathematics to parse through than ever before, mathematicians might find themselves in positions akin to undergraduates taking their first Real Analysis class, trying to mold their minds to the demands of pure (almost esoteric?) logic that the work abundant to them requires.
Even if AI becomes better at writing readable proofs, there should still remain utility in explaining the impact within the scientific community and mentoring students to engage in the art of mathematics. Science, at its core, is a discipline motivated by curiosity from which impactful applications can be engineered, but if, as humans, we are to take part in the discourse of science and how its applications should be pursued, having human understanding should still have significance.
Unless the goal is to achieve some global optimum where humans, as a species, aren't part of the decision-making behind life in the modern world, just as we don't confer with apes about our decisions on mass deforestation for industrial land.
(written without AI)
https://t.co/tL443I6jit
It’s crazy how I can assemble amino acids and then play around with tail engineering phages to help them infect multi-drug resistant bacteria through open source tools.
Here I have added the amino acids of the distal end of the bacteriophage T4, which is the receptor for E Coli