I seriously hope that AI completely destroys math and pure mathematicians lose their jobs, the math establishment deserves to burn. I'm glad I decided to work in tech and not pursue academia.If you didn't do olympiads at 12, go to an Ivy League/MIT/UChicago/Berkeley undergrad, get noticed by a famous professor, go to the right grad school, acquired a famous advisor whose advisor was one of the big mathematicians of the 20th century, attended the right seminars, got the right postdoc, and get invited to the right conferences where everybody else learns who the important mathematicians and what the "interesting" problems are, then you are treated as subhuman.There's a caste system around academic genealogy and precociousness even though a lot of the olympiad kids were simply groomed by their parents to be like this and forced to memorize combinatorics tricks. In physics at least among experimentalists this insufferable culture does not exist nearly to the same extent, people are in it because they just love physics. Physicists are better people. Remember the surprise that Lisa Piccirillo proved the Conway knot was smooth slice because she wasn't an olympiad kid who went to an Ivy League program? yeah it's that bad.
I'm cracking up reading the Fields Medalists' article that AI threatens the collaborative nature of math and genuine discovery and other platitudes about the beautiful math culture. Shut the fuck up, math culture sucks, you only work on these problems for prestige because others told you they were important. Not because you care. V.I. Arnold was right, Bourbaki ruined math. Probability theorists used to get harassed at conferences because math needs to be as useless as possible o algo. Navier-Stokes was interesting because of its physical nature but nobody wants to "get their hands dirty" doing math that isn't as removed from reality as possible and take the prestige hit, even now ergodic theory is seen as less impressive because it's useful. AI burning it down will be good. Perelman was vindicated, mathematicians are scum.
