Terence Tao: prediction

Transcript context

…You’ll just go on all the podcasts after. It might not be the right question to ask. I think within a decade, a lot of things that math students currently do—what we spend the bulk of our time doing and a lot of stuff we put in our papers today—can be done by AI. But we will find that that actually wasn’t the most important part of what we do. A hundred years ago, a lot of mathematicians were just solving differential equations. Physicists needed some exact solution to some system, and they hired a mathematician to laboriously 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, Wolfram Alpha, a computer algebra package, or now more recently to an AI, 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, carefully separating all the chromosomes and whatever. 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 take your point but when is most mathematical progress, or almost all mathematical progress, happening by AI? If you find out this year a Millennium Prize Problem has been solved, you would put 95% odds that an AI did it autonomously. Surely there will be such a year.…

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