Automation Displacement Parallels - Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

Comparisons to historical automation of jobs like human computers, textile workers, elevator operators, and bank clerks, questioning whether mathematicians deserve special treatment compared to other displaced workers

The displacement of mathematicians by AI sparks a heated debate over whether high-level cognitive work is a uniquely human "sacred" pursuit or simply the next victim in a long line of automated professions like textile weaving and human computing. While some argue that mathematical research deserves special protection because it exercises our highest reasoning capacities, skeptics view this as intellectual elitism, noting that every industry from banking to garbage collection has faced similar economic "upgrading" with mixed societal results. A recurring concern is the "ladder-pulling" effect, where AI handles the introductory problems essential for training the next generation of experts, potentially gutting the field’s future even if it solves ancient theorems. Ultimately, the discussion highlights a tension between the excitement of one-shotting complex problems and the realization that professional prestige offers no immunity to the cold, historical logic of efficiency.

View on HN · Topics

While you are right in a way, I think you miss the point. In the past "computer" was a job description and mechanical power came from serfs. They surely developed skills we are lacking today but I'd argue that overall the world is a better place with digital computers and electrical motors. It frees up these people to do something else, something of higher value.

View on HN · Topics

Sure, the world is a better place with fewer serfs in it, but what exactly is of "higher value" than being a research mathematician? It's already a profession that consists essentially of exercising our highest and most distinctly human capacities: creativity, abstract reasoning, and passing the results of those on through a distinctive language and culture. I don't think the comparison with serfs is useful.

I'm sure most research mathematicians would like more freedom from some of the drudgery of their work (grading, admin, etc.), just like the rest of us. But we should be aiming for a world that allows more people to become mathematicians, not fewer.

View on HN · Topics

I see that point of view but there's another that I've recently been thinking about.

Many of the fields that were traditionally considered for "smart" people (STEM etc.) are the ones that are being really hammered by AI. Whereas, things which people considered lightweight often involving social relationships and interpersonal skills are still beyond the scope of AI (much of it even theoretically beyond the scope although perhaps robots might have an effect there).

There used to be a sysad T-shirt from the BOFH days "Go away or I'll replace you with a very small shell script" which pushed the idea that whatever could be replaced by a computer was something trivial. Now we find that the things which we thought were only for "smart people" are the very things being replaced by computer programs which is telling. Perhaps what we considered tough and smart really wasn't.

View on HN · Topics

When I was a child, I lived in a neighborhood. Every week a garbage truck picked up the house hold trash.

5 guys were on that truck. 1 driver and 4 guys that actually lifted up various shaped trash cans and dumped them into the truck.

Today I live in an apartment complex. 100 families take their trash to the compactor. 1 guy in a garbage truck comes once a week to collect the compacted refuse.

I wonder what happened to the other 4 guys. 80% of the garbage collecting labor… freed up to do something of higher value.

Maybe they cured cancer.

View on HN · Topics

The cancer of p50 users having comfy housing, 2 cars and a life. Almost all of the efficiency gains move to the 1%.

View on HN · Topics

> In the past "computer" was a job description and mechanical power came from serfs.

Serfs, all right, but in what world do you live where "computers", people who did manual computing (i.e. mechanical additions/multiplications/... with very large numbers) are the same as actual research mathematicians, who are basically pure logicians?

The only perspective where it makes sense to root for mathematicians to go away is if you're a misandrist that thinks humanity should be replaced by robots (for reasons...). Or isn't logic something that's a defining human trait, and one of the main reasons we became the dominant species on the planet?

View on HN · Topics

I don't think that "root[ing] for mathematicians to go away" is the problem. The problem (if there is one) is that the process by which that occurs is economically determined. No amount of complaining will stop AI from being useful in mathematics or erase the incentives to make it better. It's automatic process, like photography sidelining painting or shoe factories sidelining cobblers. We go through this with every technological advance and the outcomes are pretty much determined. No cheerleaders are needed.

View on HN · Topics

>>Similarly, the output of programming is not only a program, but also a programmer. It is you.

This can be said about pretty much any job on earth.

By that definition nothing should ever be automated.

Everything thinks they are special, actually no one is. You become special by being rare. Find something that can be done by no one or only a scant few.

View on HN · Topics

> This can be said about pretty much any job on earth.

That isn't really true. After push button elevators with floor-logic relays eliminated the need for "elevator operator" to be a job, nobody needed to be an elevator operator anymore. The equipment could do 100% of the job and if the equipment was out of order then you call a repair technician or install a new elevator rather than needing to find an elevator operator to pull out of retirement, since knowing how to repair or install elevators was never part of their job to begin with.

The trouble with AI-generated code is that it can't do 100% of the job, so you still need a programmer to do the parts that it can't, but then you need the programmer to understand how to do the parts that it can't, which in turn requires them to also understand how to do the parts that it can.

View on HN · Topics

>>Why would we want to sever this last thread of human control?

Trust me a fair bit of boomers and the generation before lost jobs to computer automation in the 1990s through the 2000s. And they used pretty much the same justification, every bit of work, take for example designing something like a machine spare that was earlier done through painstaking process of bringing the thing to life from the meticulous work on the drafting board till machining was now in the domain of computers.

In India alone, banking jobs were considered those commanding tremendous prestige and income potential, got automated through computers. Tax consultants, accountants, postal services etc etc. The list is endless.

AI is some what like that for us in this generation.

View on HN · Topics

For many of those automations, we're worse off for them.

Like not being able to get some actual human when you call support, and talking to some fucking automatic system.

This includes many of the " 1990s through the 2000s" ones, and earlier ones too. Sometimes what was lost was an added layer of attention and quality that was previously required, but it was sacrificed away for efficiency.

View on HN · Topics

That really depends on who is the one that benefits from automation. Companies automate support systems in order to keep their support staff small, because apparently for many of them it is more profitable to frustrate their customers with crappy support than to pay more support staff to do a better job.

In addition to your last paragraph: lots of things that we used to do the less efficient way had side-benefits that were not immediately obvious, probably because they compounded over time. Now that we're not doing them anymore, we notice all kinds of widespread societal problems (in particular among young people) that come up that were never there before.

View on HN · Topics

That's an interesting perspective and I wholly disagree with the conclusion

You are saying that tough problems with no applicability are useful because people that you happen to respect got good by their curiosity and pursuit of trying to solve these kinds of problems and failing, but branching off into other cognitive areas as mathematicians

Now if I know anything about math for the sake of math, and academics, these are the same people that lament the idea of intelligent people going to the finance sector or any other trade they just happen not to respect as much

The similarity being that their exact criticism of why, something they don't respect and view as having little utility, is the exact reasoning presented here now that AI can solve their pointless problems

What I'm seeing is that human mathematicians have a laundry list of problems they have failed to solve for decades, centuries, which is what they are funded and employed to do. "Computer" used to a human job title too.

This leads me to being excited about AI one-shotting these problems, let move on to something else.

View on HN · Topics

Anyone else draw similarities with this and the artists and authors who complained when gen ai first came out. I think a lot of people don't realise the disruption ai will cause to many industries, until its directly impacting them, basically personal fable at scale ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_fable ).

View on HN · Topics

I'm not sure the similarities hold. The best comparison I've found is the construction unions in San Francisco. They frequently block housing that is factory built somewhere else in the Bay area even though that would make it possible to build tonnes of new housing in the city at a fraction of the cost.

"But Jobs" they scream and hijack the council to block new housing. I'm sorry folks, the point of housing isn't the jobs it creates, the point of housing is housing! New jobs ARE actually created, they are just higher leverage ones in the house factory.

Mathematicians are now facing the same... calculation (pun intended). And I think they are empowered to create a lot more leverage, and they shouldn't be afraid of it. A lot of them are catching on to this [1]

[1]: https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2060451757818601808

View on HN · Topics

I think the disruptions are temporary. Using AI still takes someone's time and the skill can be honed, which means there will be people specializing in using AI in different ways that are better than what someone just picking it up can do. It's just a reset on skill floors but the people with talent will rapidly regain ground and find their way to the ceiling again. The ones who learn the most, the fastest, will probably end up being worth more than they were previously.

I don't think any of these AI layoffs are actually because AI replaced a human. I think a lot of the layoffs are actually just due to a faltering economy or greedy companies trying desperately to get a piece of the pie, so they're sacrificing their long game for short term gambles. I don't think that's going to pay off for them.

View on HN · Topics

I’m curious, do writers and authors still really care about AI? I think by now most people are completely put off by AI slop, the value of AI writing or image generation is basically zero

So I suspect that the cloud will pass on math too, initial demos get extrapolated and people get worried but in the end slop is slop and serious people aren’t getting replaced or even threatened.

View on HN · Topics

This is quite a way to admit that you don't have any writers or artists in your social group. It has absolutely gutted jobs in these industries, and will continue to do so.

If you think 'most people are completely put off by AI slop', you're living in a blessed bubble because: most people cannot even tell that the slop is slop, and are happy to engorge themselves on it.

View on HN · Topics

> If you think 'most people are completely put off by AI slop', you're living in a blessed bubble

I think most knowledge workers don’t like AI because most of them are aware that AI was created to replace them.

Just about every CEO that has given a speech about AI at universities have gotten booed by the students which isn’t surprising as those CEOs are effectively promoting technology that will take their future from them.

View on HN · Topics

Ehh, I've had the opposite experience, with lots of writers and artists in my circle.

The markets that have replaced writers and artists with slop never valued them in the first place, and the markets that do will never replace them with AI, and I say this as an AI engineer.

Writing movies, writing theater, creating clearly original illustrations for various purposes, these are all tasks AI will never threaten, because there is just no point. And also, the market sizes for this kind of thing are a rounding error compared to say coding or back office automation which is incidentally the bulk of the token spend right now, confirming all this.

View on HN · Topics

But this is missing the fact that the vast majority of starting jobs for artists/writers would be in the former category. Similar to how AI coding or automation hurts junior hiring more than it does senior.

I found myself thinking about this issue when I was experimenting with an MCP server to handle tuning some precision parameters for scientific simulations. Claude did a much better job than I used to do when I was a fresh PhD student, yet being given tasks like that was how I learned, so it almost felt like pulling the ladder up after myself.

In the sciences, I think this is less of a problem because the PhD to scientist pipeline is pretty normalized, labs are used to the idea of having to let younger people take longer on problems that experienced people could solve much faster. But this doesn't seem to be as normalized elsewhere.

View on HN · Topics

> do writers and authors still really care about AI

it is demographics.. there is no single answer, you are talking about millions of people with varying amounts of this JOB description

> most people are completely put off by AI slop

this is almost pathological.. most people consume media not produce it. Those in the business of media have been eliminating people for thirty years, and this AI tooling has multiplied that effect

> the value of XXXX writing or image generation generation is basically zero

yes - bingo.. the average capable person now can expect to be paid ZERO for their ability to personally produce writing or image generation.. and, if you don't start somewhere, you will never get to ascend the ladder of success in those fields, by definition

> I suspect that the cloud will pass on math too

consistent with the other statements here, this is 180 degrees false.. substantiation? the content of the letter signed by world class mathematicians, who are visibly quite concerned

View on HN · Topics

> Depends entirely on whether "the market" ends up valuing what humans add to various artistic processes.

No, it does not, at least for arts. There is a chance, that AI will free art from it's utility or the necessary to create value. Maybe graphic designers and illustrators will lose their jobs due automatization, but most paid art (concept work, corporate design) was instrumental compromise anyway. Take away the commercial floor and what's left is the part they cared about most. Engineers on the other hand identify mostly by being optimizators and creating value. They may keep their jobs, but at what cost?

View on HN · Topics

> Have you ever been exposed to concepts that are so complex that you feel like you could devote your entire lifetime to trying to understand it and still fall short? It’s a very humbling experience, especially if you have classmates who pick it up effortlessly.

I do have a PhD so I kind of know how that feels. I watched my entire field (PL) get eaten up by AI though, the problems that I thought were huge 10 years ago are just silly footnotes now.

> Without a human holding the reins, consider an LLM a rudderless superboat speeding erratically towards the horizon, finding and proving meaningless theorems that not even your most talented classmate could ever begin to understand.

I don't disagree with that. LLMs are a tool, a super fast pattern matcher, research, token predictor. I don't expect it to go out and define its own esoteric (or useful) problems to pursue without human interaction. That's for the humans to do.

I don't understand what that has to do with my original comment though. I wasn't addressing what problems the LLMs were answering, just how to review and dissect the answers that they would come up with.

View on HN · Topics

That seems about as shortsighted as claiming the value of human understanding has cratered after the invention of the electronic calculator.

View on HN · Topics

what's wrong with artists having jobs via a program? whats wrong with struggling alcoholics having jobs via a program? athletes? politicians? there is no inherent virtue in the struggle and effort associated with great mathematical achievement. It may be satisfying and worthwhile for the solver, but not for society at large, any more than any other pleasurable activity. No, as it is, the sole reason for it is in the result itself. In increased understanding, as it flows down into the sciences, and engineering. There are other benefits, recreation and joy as experienced by others, from access to beautiful proofs, though these are never explicit goals of such programs because they are both impossible to quantify and rarely ever remotely relevant compared to the value brought by the practical value brought by maths.

Of course, there may be some valid arguments that everyone should have a jobs program in the form of ubi or something similar. But I feel thats very different to arguing for mathematicians specifically

View on HN · Topics

Well, if progress in LLMs will steadily continue over next 5 years, then models will be so powerful that there will be no longer place for (most of) human researchers in math (remember that 5 years ago there was no chatgpt!). But I think it's more likely that progress will stall and then open models will catch up to frontier models and almost everyone will be able to afford them.

View on HN · Topics

Sounds very good for regular joe software dev, almost too good to be true

View on HN · Topics

>My job is uniquely creative and human, other jobs can be automated away but mine is just so special.

If you love mathematics so much, and it's not the prestige and accolades that drive you, then what stops you from just solving problems on your free time even if they are already solved by AI?

Why does your field have to remain economically viable for you , why does this not apply to textile manufacturing or something? Someone's positions in society is owed to textile manufacturing too, and it has a culture that some people would lament the loss of and so on.(See guild system, craftsmanship in Europe).

I can't predict whether this will be a good thing in the long run, but this is literally the same complaint that every industry affected by automation ever had, and many who are now complaining would dismiss it if it were about something they personally do not care about or isn't sufficiently "noble" or intellectual.

I know it hurts, but the core complaint is just economic displacement, many have had to deal with that before. Most people who have something they love have to do that on their free time because it's not economically viable as a job, tough luck.

View on HN · Topics

Is it possible they feel threatened their jobs are at stake?

View on HN · Topics

I don't think current mathematician's jobs are at stake, as much as the field itself, if LLMs take all the "easy" problems that phd students would try to learn by solving on their own. Mathematics is susceptible to the same ladder-pulling situation that we see with junior programmers and LLMs.

View on HN · Topics

Are they? The jobs of programmers are definitely at stake; at any given time there's some fixed amount of software that can be consumed. Mathematics research doesn't have an economic buyer. If you raise the complexity floor for discovery, you reduce the annual productivity of a researcher, but that might not matter to the field.

View on HN · Topics

>and the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake

Except when someone hands you a magic button that just gives you knowledge?[at least in the framing of this "warning"] Then it's about peoples' livelihoods, about "culture", etc?

"Computer" used to be a job. Did science on the whole lose or gain by making these clerks obsolete?

View on HN · Topics

I don't see how this is different than things replaced decades ago:

Music is a human endeavor and musical recordings hurt musicians, bands, orchestras, etc. Especially those starting out.

View on HN · Topics

And the goal of computer mathematics research is computer understanding of mathematics. I fail to see a reason provided as to why society should defund automated reasoning just so mathematicians can put off burger flipping for another year.

View on HN · Topics

the least i expected the math dorks to be luddites

View on HN · Topics

Eh. This isn't "AI" or language models masquerading as intelligence. I submit that this is actually the long tail of the internet and the decision to rest on the laurels of peer reviewed submissions rather than advancing the field to better disseminate knowledge.

The barrier to entry just got lowered. This has happened many times before in history. We just end up with fewer of what David Graeber would call "bullshit jobs."