True story: About 10 years ago there was a long article (NYT maybe?) about the end of trucking, estimating that automating truck driving wil…

True story: About 10 years ago there was a long article (NYT maybe?) about the end of trucking, estimating that automating truck driving will wipe out something like 1%-2% of the GPD because a surprisingly large number of people work as truckers and they single-handedly support a certain roadside industry including some restaurants. I remember reading that when it came out then asking my uncle, who sells insurance to trucking companies, how his job will change when self-driving trucks take over. He laughed and said they won't, driving a truck is only part of what truck drivers do. They are responsible for their cargo so they sleep in their trucks and are what keep people from breaking in to steal the cargo. He said self-driving trucks would be a bonanza for thieves. That's not something the long article mentioned at all, it's not something I've heard discussed much at all, yet ten years later, trucks are still driven by humans. Turns out people in an industry understand what a job entails a lot better than people outside the industry. I know the OP is tongue-in-cheek, but I think the situation with mathematicians is similar and that it's helpful to think through why. An exceedingly small amount of a mathematician's time is spent disproving old conjectures, the thing AI is doing now that's making headlines. Even if formalization proceeds far enough that AI's basically become theorem-proving oracles (not just useful but unreliable proof assistants, as they are now), theorem-proving is a substantial but far from complete portrait of what mathematicians do. They also ask important questions, sense where interesting theorems are lurking, interpret these theorems, find uses for these theorems, produce new definitions and entire theories to capture and explain why these theorems are true and where they come from. Even if you grant that AI will eventually excel at these more taste-oriented, and more creative in an open-ended sense, tasks, there's more. Mathematicians collaborate with people outside of math to help them use all this math--which means seeing where it could be used, helping to use it, interpreting the results, and so on. They also launch startups that commercialize some of this math. Think of something like bitcoin. That was a combination of understanding the human desire for decentralized currency, understanding what properties would be desired in it, understanding what preexisting math would be used and how to use it, putting all these pieces together and communicating it to the public, and afterwards there's also implementing it and commercializing it and extending it. Think how many more inventions like this we'll have with AI assisting at all stages--now ask yourself, will this progress happen more quickly or less quickly if we stop educating and employing human mathematicians? And this brings up another part of the story. When most people refer to mathematicians, I suspect they mostly have in mind academic mathematicians, meaning university professors. So that means mathematicians are also educators, training the next generation in mathematical thinking. Even if AI can do an incredible amount of math, perhaps eventually all of it better than all humans, I don't think there will be no need for mathematical education. Learning to think mathematically helps train and sharpen our brains in powerful ways, even if you end up in a different career. I don't think it's a coincidence that people like Larry Tribe (one of the most important constitutional law scholars, and Obama's former research mentor) started a PhD in math before switching to law. Or that Robert Zimmer, a math professor, served as president of U Chicago for 15 years. For Christ's sake, even the pope has a degree in math! None of these examples are technically doing math in their careers, yet I'd be willing to bet all are thankful for their math education and found it beneficial in their careers. I suspect we will always need math educators, and guess who is best suited to teach math? People who know math. (Maybe one day all educators are replaced by AI, but that's so distant and speculative I won't bother addressing it.) Maybe self-driving technology means truck drivers can now drive all day AND night. That means truck drivers are twice as valuable. I think the story with math is similar. Looking back at the long history of math and its incredible role in society, science, technology, the economy, it seems much more likely that we're empowering mathematicians to do more than ever, not eliminating them. We are rapidly building a world in which the most important thing everyone uses is literally a giant mathematical contraption (ok, I'm with @GaryMarcus that it's not just raw LLMs, there's also the powerful harnesses that are arguably more CS than math, but still, the massive engine to these machines is written in math)--does that really sound like a world where we'll no longer need mathematicians? From one Noah to another, don't count on it :) It amuses me to no end that everyone was worried about AI replacing truck drivers, and it's replacing mathematicians first 🥹

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Source: Gary Marcus (X) | 2026-07-24