First They Came was a powerful confessional prose piece by the German Pastor Martin Niemöller in 1946 that condemned the complicity of German intellectuals and clergy who had facilitated the Nazis’ rise to power.  It has since served as a warning to free democracies of the dangers of totalitarianism.

Over the past few centuries, mathematicians have cloistered in an arcane world where they have deeply contemplated the mysteries of numbers, functions, conjectures, theorems and the like that, on the face of it, have little or no practical use.  The brilliant ones know they can live a life of gentle contemplation in their monastic ivory towers and the chosen few might even solve a 200-year-old theorem to (mathematical) world-wide acclaim.  Their serene existence would be punctuated by publishing papers, attending conferences and even delivering the odd paper at one or two.    Their existence would be justified if they got a polite applause.

Unfortunately, their Elysian world was recently shattered and they have to now contemplate their raison d’être.  Quoting from Steven Boykey Sidley article in the Daily Maverick: On the night of 6 October, OpenAI released a dump of 722 AI-generated mathematics papers, representing somewhere north of 372 proofs (or partial proofs) of unsolved and open maths problems (about 300 of them have been formally verified). 

The proofs wiped out decades (and more) of ongoing human enquiry in several mathematical subfields. And each proof took a mere three hours of compute time.  Thousands of careers will lose their fuel and their joy, maths PhD programmes will be decimated, university students will flee to other subjects, and some maths departments might disappear in the wake of student exits.

AI, if mismanaged as it’s likely to be, is humanity’s biggest existential threat, far more immediate and unstoppable than climate change.

First It Came

First it came for the creative people
And I did not speak out
Because I was not one

Then it came for the call centre staff
And I did not speak out
Because I was not one

Then it came for the psychologists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not one

Then it came for the journalists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not one

Then it came for the doctors
And I did not speak out
Because I was not one

Then it came for the accountants and lawyers
And I did not speak out
Because I was not one

Then it came for the historians
And I did not speak out
Because I was not one

Then it came for the mathematicians and scientists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not one

Then it came for me
Because there was no one left
And I entered the Matrix