Math as a strip mine: why AI can exploit decades of pre-mapped intermediate results
_onionesque · x · 2026-10-07
The author likens AI's impact on math to strip mining: mathematics holds vast deposits of results whose expensive 'geological work' — mapping terrain, inventing the right language and definitions, identifying promising directions, intermediate results — is already done, giving AI both a mine and a path to verifiability.
He notes it remains unclear how AI alone would handle upstream conceptual development, and is curious whether isolated but important problems will be attacked.
Related event: Mathematician argues AI can 'strip mine' well-developed areas of math(7 posts)→
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