Mathematics is experiencing the same generative boom that software engineering and many other fields have been undergoing over the past few years.

A lot of the reaction has been closer to mourning than excitement. That reaction is understandable when people have spent their lives mastering a craft that suddenly looks automatable. But it is also causing two fundamentally different questions to be confused.

1. Is this good for mathematicians?
2. Is it good for mathematics?

I find the second question more fundamental because the first cannot be answered independently of it. “Mathematician” is not a fixed identity with a fixed set of tasks. It is the role humans occupy in relation to mathematics, and what that role looks like is necessarily downstream of what mathematics has become and what its frontier now requires.

AI can do in an hour what used to take mathematicians ten years. I struggle to see that as anything other than cause for celebration. It is the kind of leverage most people would welcome everywhere else in life. Mathematicians should use it to augment themselves and turn their attention to whatever harder problems remains beyond reach.

We should also consider that we may have spent thousands of years exploring only the small slice of mathematics reachable by unaided human cognition, then treated the boundary of what humans could discover as the boundary of what mathematics contained.

The printing press did not end scholarship by making books cheap. Planes did not make travel meaningless by turning an ocean crossing from weeks into hours. Electricity did not make human effort meaningless when one machine could suddenly do the work of many people. Each technological revolution removed an old constraint and opened up new possibilities. The people who gained the most were the ones who adapted fastest. So why should this be any different?

I hope some can find solace in knowing that mathematics is already running into the same issue as software engineering and many other fields. AI can generate more than the small number of people with enough skill and context can properly verify, understand, and turn into something useful. In a sense, mathematicians are becoming more valuable and relevant than ever.

Mathematics is only one example, and I believe experts in every field will eventually face the same choice.

It is my personal recommendation that we do not spend too long mourning the old constraints of our fields and instead take advantage of the opportunity to augment ourselves and explore places we simply never could before.