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Aaron Roth
@aaroth.bsky.social

Right now we have "problem overhang" - lots of problems we as a community are interested in because smart and charismatic people thought about them and convinced us that these problems are important. So we are happy/interested to see them solved by AI.

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Aaron Roth
@aaroth.bsky.social

But as we move to a world in which well defined "open problems" are solved by AI, will we find new problems that we as a community care about? We don't care about most true statements, even if they are difficult to prove. The process of agreeing on interesting problems is social.

Aaron Roth
@aaroth.bsky.social

Could it be that once AI models exhaust the overhang of existing problems we care about, no new such problems emerge? There will be plenty of true statements with difficult proofs, but we may stop caring about (any of) them.

Aaron Roth
@aaroth.bsky.social

So we are clearly moving to a world that will be without open problems, but this doesn't mean math is going away. Interesting work will correspond to discovering new questions and coherent theoretical frameworks. Well defined agreed-to-be-interesting problems won't last long.