Much has been and will continue to be written about how the field of mathematics is changing because of AI and how it...

Much has been and will continue to be written about how the field of mathematics is changing because of AI and how its community is holding up. Socrates is said to have worried that writing would ruin our memories—and Socrates’ crowd probably did remember longer stretches of the Odyssey than any of us do. But the Fields letter argued that the use of A.I. was not like merely off-loading the memorization of poems or phone numbers; it was more like off-loading, or bypassing, daydreaming and debating and thinking. It’s not that humans will come to know too much too quickly but that they will understand less and less—eventually less than we understand now. The Year Math Changed Forever, by Rivka Galchen. Optimizing away cognitive friction is a double-edged sword.

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