Sanguine

“In order to get good at proving theorems, computers will have to judge what is interesting and worth proving,” Timothy Gowers said. If they can do that, the future of humans in the field looks uncertain.

Computer scientist Erika Abraham at RWTH Aachen University in Germany is more sanguine about the future of mathematicians. “An AI system is only as smart as we program it to be,” she says. “The intelligence is not in the computer; the intelligence is in the programmer or trainer.”

Melanie Mitchell, a computer scientist and cognitive scientist at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, says that mathematicians’ jobs will be safe until a major shortcoming of AI is fixed — its inability to extract abstract concepts from concrete information.
—The Nature