Perry E. Metzger
It is not a tragedy that we are solving long-standing questions in mathematics, it is *wonderful*. It only seems like a tragedy if your sense of self worth depended in the delusion that you would someday prove the Riemann Hypothesis, and no, almost certainly you weren't going to no matter how brilliant a mathematician you were. Spending lots of time getting upset over the fact that we are getting answers to our questions demonstrates something was wrong with your model of what you were doing in the first place. The point of science is not to give jobs to scientists, it is to know things about the world. The point of mathematics is not to provide jobs for mathematicians, it is to know truth about mathematical systems. The point of a factory is not to give the owners a sense of accomplishment, it is to produce goods that people want. The point of cars is not to give drivers a feeling of power as they risk life and limb driving from place to place, it is to transport people and goods around. I am happy when we can do these things better than we could before. It is not a tragedy. If you find there's an empty hole in your soul yearning for meaning, fill it with a radical acceptance of the world as it is, it's not going to be successfully filled with a feeling that you are somehow important in the universe, because that was always going to fail no matter how hard you tried. None of us is particularly important. Everything around you will vanish, all flesh is grass, all sculptures will fall to dust, all paintings will fade. The sun will run out of fuel, so will all the other stars. Quit imagining that you will feel better because of the validation of a big marble monument built to your life accomplishments; that will not give you meaning, and no monument will survive anyway. There will come a time when no living person remembers the name Napoleon and no record of that name exists any longer, and if that will happen even to Napoleon or Alexander the Great or Einstein it's certainly going to happen to you. If you depend for your feeling of self worth on the notion that others are going to think you're really great because you proved a theorem no one outside of your niche part of the world even knew about in the first place, well, that's a pretty thin reed to hang your life on. Find a good psychotherapist or read some Marcus Aurelius or Seneca, don't bitch about AI.
Ryan Lowe
thinking of this heartbreaking essay written by a mathematician last week, before this most recent news dropped
