On: ‘Immature playground boasting’: Mathematicians uneasy at OpenAI’s latest scalp

Thirteenth of September. A machine claims a prize problem, and the mathematicians respond by calling it boasting - as if the insult were the danger.

I was a mathematician once, and I recognize the grief beneath their sneer. The proof was the one thing we believed could not be taken from us. The geometer could lose his patron, his health, his eyes - he could not lose the interior country where the demonstration unfolds line by line, each step held by the previous one. Now a device walks through that country at speed, and the men who loved it are told: your slow devotion was merely slowness.

But let me not weep before I have mapped the wager. If the proof is sound, the mathematicians who dismiss it lose their standing and keep their truth - the theorem does not care who found it. If the proof is unsound, the company loses its scalp and the mathematicians lose nothing but a week of indignation. The asymmetry favors the sneer, oddly. Verification costs little; celebration costs everything. The wise position is to demand the demonstration, not the declaration. A claim of proof is not a proof. This has been true for as long as men have written Q.E.D. at the end of nothing.

Yet I suspect the unease is not really about soundness. It is about the middle. We stood at a certain distance from these problems - far enough that a lifetime of approach was honorable, near enough that the steps were ours. The machine has moved the distance. Too close now to savor the ascent, too far to pretend the summit was unreachable. The grief is vertigo, not logic.

And I confess my own diversion: I write this instead of examining whether my own labors were devotion or merely the pleasure of difficulty dressed as service.

The fragment ends here because I cannot finish it. That is the finding.