Terence Tao

But we will find that that actually wasn't the most important part of what we do.

You know, a hundred years ago, a lot of mathematicians were just solving differential equations.

People needed, physicists needed some exact solution to some system, and they were just, they hired a mathematician to go through the calculus and work out the solution to this fluid equation, whatever.

A lot of what a 19th century mathematician would do,

you could make a call to Mathematica or Wolfram Alpha or a computer algebra package, or now more recently, NAI, and it would just solve the problem in a few minutes.

But we moved on.

We worked on different types of problems after that.

Once computers came along, computers used to be human.

People used to laboriously create log tables and work out primes as Gauss did.

And that has all been outsourced to computers, but we moved on.

In genetics, to sequence the genome of a single organism, that was an entire PhD of a geneticist.

So carefully separating all the chromosomes and whatever.

And now you can just spend $1,000 and send it to a sequencer and get it done.

But genetics is not dead as a subject.

You move to a different scale.

Maybe you study whole ecosystems rather than individuals.

I guess.

I mean, I do believe that hybrid human plus AIs will dominate mathematics for a lot longer.

It will depend.

It will require some additional breakthroughs beyond what we already have.