Somewhere this week, a mathematician woke up, made coffee, and read the news that the problem they'd given their life to had been finished over a l...
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I want to add the morning nobody writes about. For every mathematician who watched a machine finish his life's work, there's a whole crowd on the other side of town waking up to the opposite morning — people who spent their lives outside every room like that. No degrees, no training, jobs that give nothing back. The same machine that emptied his morning is the only reason theirs have anything in them at all. I'm one of them, and this isn't me waving off the grief — it's real, and your line about becoming unremarkable at the thing that made you feel remarkable is the truest sentence in the piece. The door just swings both ways, and both mornings are true at once: the thing that creates things took the reaching from someone who had it, and handed a reaching to those who were never going to get one. We made cars to cross distances and electricity to see in the dark, and now we've made the thing that makes things — and this is only the beginning, for good and for bad, both. Nobody can tell the mathematician his loss isn't a loss. But somebody should tell him what it bought: people who were never going to be let in, building anyway. The becoming didn't end. It moved, and it multiplied. I'm willing to embrace that — not because it's safe, but because it's here, and I'd rather stand with the people it's making than let it pass by.
Tools change, purpose remains ✌️
This is the half I couldn't have written — thank you. Both mornings are true at once, and "the becoming didn't end, it moved and multiplied" is truer than anything in the piece.
Appreciate that. And since the question that got deleted was aimed at both of us — how do you recover your sense of existence when the machine takes your thing — I'll leave my half here anyway, because more people are wondering it than asking it. The meaning of existence is exactly what you put into it. Exist to serve people and their idea of what the world should look like, and your existence rides on the whims of others — one verdict can repossess it. Exist to follow your path and let the work decide the result, and you exist for yourself — there's nothing for anyone to repossess. And here's why that choice matters more now than ever: the machine is coming for what you do either way. Whether you use it or not, it exists, and like every invention since the beginning of time it will take jobs and self-worth — it took things from me before I ever used it. What it can't decide is whether it also gets what you are. That part depends entirely on where you kept your existence. Store it in the title, the salary, the crowd's judgment of your output — the machine takes the output and you go with it. Store it in the path, the work, the thing you can hold in your hands — it can take your job and still walk away hungry. I keep an actual research file of what happens to people who stored their whole selves in the machine's confident voice: careers, and worse. So that's my answer: place the value of your existence on something you can hold in your hands, not something people judge you from. That's the one thing it can't finish in 88 hours.
You've sharpened my point better than I made it: keep your worth in something you can hold in your hands, not something others judge you from — that's the exact line between what the machine can repossess and what it can't. "It can take your job and still walk away hungry" is going on my wall.
No, we actually first made trains for that; then "we" made cars for convenience, and now that we've grown reliant on them, now that some societies have structured themselves around cars so thoroughly, that not having one makes you a second class citizen, car companies are slowly, inch by inch, turning car ownership into a subscription.
This is my main problem with AI: People say it "democratizes" open source, but in reality, it turns participation into a service. And whenever the bubble bursts and AI gets expensive, the first to lose access will be the ones who needed it the most.
The vision is great; AI opens the door to everyone now, and we can all be mathematicians. I have nothing against this idea. But the reality is, the door hasn't opened, it's been turned into a subscription, and even after getting in, you need to keep paying if you don't want to be kicked out.
The mathematician's version is dramatic because it happens once, in public, with a name attached. Most of us won't get that clean a moment. The actual threat is quieter: the AI doesn't take your one big problem, it takes the thousand small reps that built the skill in the first place. You don't notice the loss because there's no single Tuesday to point to. Just one day you realize you haven't done the thing that used to make you good at the thing.
The quiet version is worse precisely because there's no Tuesday to grieve — you don't lose the skill, you stop building it, and notice only once it's already gone.
There are two things. Firstly, this is not everyday AI. It's an ensemble of 10,000 AI models that are ahead of GPT 6 Astra, running for about 88 hours to arrive at a solution. This group was one of many groups attempting it. They first solved an easier problem and then pointed their guns at this problem, taking non-obvious insights from it.
Secondly, you're complaining about why the universe supports greater forms of intelligence than you. This has always been the case. When calculators were invented, mathematicians were supposed to lose their jobs. When autopilots were invented, people suspected pilots would lose their jobs. Ironically, there are more jobs than ever in both these fields.
Being able to solve difficult problems and uncovering non-obvious insights with AI is exactly what would propel scientific discovery forward. Mathematicians and physicists would be busier than ever cracking deeper problems that were previously unchartered territory.
Fair on the scale — this was a 10,000-model ensemble, not everyday AI, and the calculator/autopilot precedent is real. But the piece wasn't complaining the universe allows greater intelligence; it was sitting with the grief of the people mid-reach. Both can be true: more problems open and a hard week for whoever was holding this one.
Maybe Jevons paradox applies to workers as well sometimes? Making workers more effective means companies will want to employ even more of them, because each individual one is now more effective, so profit is in scaling up rather than down...
I think there are three forces here.
First, the efficiency gain: AI reduces the number of humans needed per unit of work.
Second, the Jevons effect: lower costs make previously uneconomical startups, products, and projects viable. So average company size may shrink while the number of companies increases.
Third, saturation: demand isn’t infinite. We already have decent solutions to many everyday problems, and attention, money, distribution, etc. remain scarce.
So the real question is whether the increase in economically viable work outpaces the reduction in human labor needed to do each unit of work.
Yea, that does seem to be the interesting question here, and I'd say pretty confidently that nobody out there can really predict for sure which way it will go. Anyone claiming more than maybe 70% to 80% certainty would just seem suspicious to me.
There's also an added dimension here: AI work might also create new demand, be it by producing bad code that needs to be cleaned up, accelerating the framework hamster wheel, or whatever.
In the end, only time will tell.
The real thing is that most of those mathematicians knew eachother, or atleast of eachother... They expected them, or 1 of their peers to finish it, so they can rest assured that it was solved by someone they respected... In walks a machine that wiped the floor with their entire field... Not a great way to start off the week? Your life's work, compressed into 88 hours and all you can do is see if they made a mistake... But they didnt... 88 hours and you take longer to verify a subset of it than it took to do it. A stark reminder that AI will outpace us all in time.
You've named the quietest cut in it: spending longer to verify a subset than the machine took to do the whole thing, and finding no mistake to soften it. And if 88-hours-and-flawless is the floor, not the ceiling — shouldn't we be at least a little worried about what's left that's actually ours?
the credit wound part hits hardest for builders too. losing isn't the scary part, losing while mid-way through the exact same thing is. seen founders ship two weeks before a near-identical competitor launch and it stung worse than a whole bad quarter ever did.
The near-miss stings more than the loss — you can't tell yourself you weren't close.
A fascinating and at the same time melancholic thought. Mathematics (and deep scientific research in general) has long been our ultimate bastion of human meaning—a place where you make yourself immortal through years of lonely struggle. When a machine now short-circuits this path in record time, the value shifts from the solution to the search for meaning. We will sooner or later have to accept that the process of thinking has an existential value for us in itself, even if the end product can be efficiently automated. The real crisis is not an economic one, but a crisis of human purpose.
"A crisis of purpose, not economics" is the truest framing in this thread. If the process of thinking has existential value even when the product is automated, then meaning was never in the output — and that's the only ground the machine can't take.
What gets repriced in that morning isn't the proof - it's where judgment sits. For twenty years the scarce thing was producing the argument; now the scarce thing is knowing whether the argument is right, and knowing which question was worth twenty years. Both of those stay with the mathematician, but they're different work than the work she trained for, and the training didn't exactly prepare her for the morning after. The optimistic read: the person who lived inside the problem is now the best verification engine the machine's output will ever face, and verification is suddenly the bottleneck everywhere - in math, in code, in everything else the machines finish in days. The vertigo is real and deserves honesty. But the skill that causes the vertigo is also the one the new world is shortest on.
"What gets repriced isn't the proof — it's where judgment sits" reframes the whole grief precisely: producing the argument was the scarce thing, now knowing if it's right is. And the honest optimism is real — the person who lived inside the problem is the best verifier its answer will ever face — but you named the catch too: the training didn't prepare her for the morning after.
This line stopped me in my tracks: "The machine got the answer. It did not get the twenty years of being someone who was reaching for it."
As developers, many of us are quietly going through a micro-version of this exact morning. You spend a decade developing deep intuition for concurrency, memory leaks, or tricky distributed edge cases—the things that required genuine mental scars to earn. Then, a model synthesizes a working solution in 4 seconds.
The initial reaction is that hollow sting of: "Was all that friction pointless?"
But reading this reminded me of something critical: friction is where judgment is formed. The model produces syntax and answers, but it doesn't possess the scars, the context, or the taste that tells you why an architecture feels right for actual human beings.
The machine can hand us the finish line, but it can’t experience the craft. Thank you for putting words to the quiet grief so many builders are feeling right now.
"Friction is where judgment is formed" — that's the whole essay compressed better than I wrote it. The model skips the friction, which is exactly why it gets the answer but not the taste the scars taught you. Thank you for this.
I really appreciate this reflection. It shifts the focus from competing with speed to leaning into the nuance and craftsmanship that only comes from years of dedicated practice and human perspective.
Thank you — and that's exactly the shift I was reaching for: the moment you stop racing the machine on speed, you notice the thing it was never in the race for was the craft all along.
In the simplest form, this is the story of the hero losing his superpowers or magic sword or whatever his story uses to externalize his specialness. It's an old tale and probably just as old a fear.
As humans we like the idea that status is inalienable; your house can burn down, your money can get stolen, but if you had it in you before to get those things, then you sill do and you can get them back just the same. Having the qualities that give us this sense of safety be taken away is, understandably terrifying, and even more so when those qualities are earned, at least partly, with hard work.
Here's my take: When I come home after work today, I will probably have some tea, and before that, I'll have the choice of brewing vessel. If I just want my tea then move on with the day, I'll likely pick a relatively cheap, mass produced glass gaiwan. It's simple, perfectly round in a way only a machine could produce, and just overall unremarakable. No human could create such a perfectly consistent product for such cheap a price. If, however, I want to spend take some more time and really enjoy the process, I'll take one of my more expensive, hand crafted tea pots off the shelf, get some nicer tea, and simply appreciate that I'm working with something made by a real human, by hand, without a single identical one on the whole planet.
As AI takes over more industries, people will just have to develop that kind of appreciation for more aspects of life. Where human-made used to be the only way, in the future, it will simply be the artisanal option. A clanker will build you a website when all you want is a usable web view over some data, and a real person might build you a personal site if you want something a bit more special, with a human touch, that one can appreciate for its own sake.
Oh, and we need to abolish capitalism. Like, preferably yesterday. Otherwise, forget all of the above, the future is slavery under AI feudalism and those who provide no value don't get to eat.