We are seeing a general panic around engineering and scientific work, and it is showing up even in mathematics. I have even read people worried that mathematics might no longer exist in 50 years.
I wonder, for those people, what did mathematics mean in the first place? Same for the software engineers worried about their jobs… what did creating software mean in the first place?
I am surprised by how little understanding many seem to have of their own profession. We talk about what we do as if it were purely logical work, as if the only purpose of a mathematician were to prove theorems, or of an engineer to produce software that meets certain specifications. And if tomorrow a machine can do that faster and cheaper, then it seems there is nothing left to do.
But, as many mathematicians (still) remember, rational thought can range from the most scientific and empirical end possible to the most humanistic and artistic end there is. We are practically dealing with disciplines where human intervention IS part of the flavor we are after. We don't program thinking only about an outcome; there is a path we want to walk beautifully. We don't look only for new mathematical proofs; we look for elegance, understanding and direction.
A mathematical proof can be completely correct and still not be particularly interesting. Another can reach exactly the same conclusion, but in a way that lets us understand relationships we couldn't see before. The same happens with software. Two systems can solve exactly the same problem and still represent completely different ideas about how to solve it, what to prioritize and which possibilities to leave open.
In the end, we are not just solving problems. Often we are deciding which ones are worth solving, and that decision is also part of creating.
These future mathematicians will have much to do. After all, Litt added, “there’s no amount of well-writtenness that lets you understand math.” They’ll have to rewrite AI proofs, find more elegant arguments, come up with theories and frameworks and definitions, ask questions, formulate new conjectures, develop a sense of what’s interesting and important. They’ll be the ones building research programs, creating communities around certain ideas, and passing that knowledge on to others. (I am reminded of the literary theorist Roland Barthes’ famous 1967 essay “The Death of the Author,” in which he argues that it is the reader, and not the writer, who has ultimate control and agency in actively creating a work’s meaning.)
— Is AI the End of Math as We Know It?, Quanta Magazine
Quoting this, I remember how Borges himself said (paraphrasing in my own way and interpretation) that there are practically as many books as there are readers willing to be challenged by them. He firmly believed that the reader's interpretation changes the book. In his story Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, Borges illustrates this perfectly. Menard writes, word for word, fragments of Cervantes' Quixote in the 20th century. Borges argues that, even though the text is exactly identical, Menard's Quixote is far richer and more complex because it is read from a completely different historical, philosophical and literary context.
And I think this has a lot to do with what we are living through. If two identical texts can mean different things, why would we think the value of creating software lies only in the code produced? Why would we reduce mathematics to the number of theorems proven?
Even if an AI could produce the same result as us, there would still be a whole world of interpretation around that result. What we do with it, how we understand it, why it interests us, how we relate it to other problems and what new questions it lets us ask.
I understand that a mathematician who spent their days copying and pasting inferences from one place to another might not feel this, or that a programmer who only moved CSS boxes around according to a given design might think they're done for. But I believe the problem lies in having reduced the profession to those tasks in the first place. I find it hard to understand how we confuse the automation of those tasks with the disappearance of the discipline itself. The profession, as with interpreting a book, is also about giving your own path, your own elegance, to the solution of the problem at hand. And often, even, about realizing that the problem you were asked to solve wasn't really the problem worth solving.
I'm not naive; I know we work at companies, we chase revenue and try to minimize costs. I don't think we're painting works of art. I also know that it's one thing for engineering to keep its value as a human activity and quite another for the market to keep needing the same number of engineers. I don't think there are guarantees there, nor that creativity alone secures a job.
But I genuinely believe that anything we do as engineers with a reasonably meaningful impact needs elegance, needs creativity and, above all, human direction. We inherently seek it as consumers, as creators and as part of society.
How many Coinbase clones could be vibecoded in a few days? How many Minecrafts inside Skyrim? We can generate infinite variations of things we already know, but that doesn't mean we are creating something interesting. As consumers, many of those things give us nothing more than a couple of minutes of junk content in short-video format. We are not necessarily adding value just by producing more.
Nor am I saying an AI can't create something beautiful or interesting. It surely can, and probably better and better. But that doesn't take away our ability to interpret, to choose what speaks to us and to build from there. The fact that a machine can produce a solution doesn't mean we've lost interest in exploring it ourselves, nor that every possible solution is equally valuable.
Finally, to all my colleagues worried about the profession: I recommend you find your own philosophy, find what speaks to you and how that can speak to others, interpret the product you're building. Don't limit yourselves to implementing features; try to understand what you're building, for whom and why. Bring something of your own to the process.
I have no doubt that this diversity of perspectives is necessary to build better products. I don't know if the market will always reward it, but I do believe it is one of the best ways we have to keep generating value, and to enjoy what we do a little more along the way.
Problems have never been solvable at today's speed. A range of possibilities is opening up in front of us that would have been unthinkable a few years ago and, even so, will and motivation seem to be hitting rock bottom.
And maybe that's the strangest part of all this. We have more tools than ever to create and yet it seems we are losing the desire to do it. As if being able to reach a result faster made us forget why we wanted to get there in the first place.
I propose we go back to playing, to falling in love with the process of creating again. To take advantage of the fact that we can now build things that once seemed impossible, ask ourselves new questions, try absurd ideas, make mistakes, find paths nobody asked us to walk.
Because if this new capacity to solve problems gives us anything, it's precisely more room to choose which ones we want to solve and how we want to solve them.
And block by block, I believe we can all build a much more beautiful landscape.