I wrote the following paragraph in response to this:
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I read with great interest the article about the profound disruptions new developments in AI are bringing to mathematics, and the anxiety is this causing mathematicians (see reference below). However, I don’t see this disruption as qualitatively different from the many technological upheavals that have come before. Is this a bigger deal than the advent of digital computers and calculators, which replaced legions of people doing long arithmetic by hand? Is it bigger than computers surpassing the best human chess players? Or GPS eliminating the need for map reading skills? One could go back further, to the advent of the printing press, which displaced a longer verbal tradition where people stored knowledge through interaction and conversation. These technologies displaced particular human skills, but they did not eliminate the larger intellectual traditions in which those skills existed. However remarkable the new AI capabilities in mathematics are, I suspect mathematics will adapt to them, just as it has in the past.
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MORE DETAIL ON ARTICLE
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NYTimes: ‘Breathtaking,’ ‘Devastating’: Mathematics Reels After New OpenAI Release
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/08/science/mathematicians-respond-openai-release.html By Siobhan Roberts
Oct. 8, 2026
