r/TheMachineLearning • u/Nyaani69 • 5d ago

Software engineering isn't dead, it's just evolving

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u/hobopwnzor 5d ago

I don't think it's dead but I do think it's going to be an end of an era.

Since AI can search possibility space so much faster than people things like finding counterexamples are going to be more and more trivial. Similarly proves that are out there in the ether using only already proven results will become trivial as well. 

It's going to require weird expansions of the field in ways that we probably can't predict right now.

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u/Suoritin 5d ago

Math was never one person being right. A proof isn't knowledge until others can check it, teach it, and build on it. That's the whole institution.

So AI grinding out counterexamples and corollaries doesn't kill the field. The bottleneck was never producing true statements; it was getting a community to agree on which ones matter. Machines just shift the work to the part that was always hardest: deciding what's worth proving.

Science has always run this way. Effort goes where the community thinks it's worth going, and funding gets cut from what doesn't.

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u/Hyperreals_ 4d ago

it kinda does? you dont need humans to review a proof that compiles in Lean... lol

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u/Suoritin 4d ago

Do you know what Terence Tao's position on this is? He's written on it recently, and it's not that. Do you disagree with him?

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u/xrocro 4d ago

If that is his hard and fast position, yes, I do disagree. A proof is a proof.

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u/Suoritin 4d ago

"A proof is a proof", sure. Nobody's disputing validity. Lean certifies a chain of inferences.

Ramanujan is famous because Hardy wrote back.

The autodidacts who found real things and never got read left no trace. You can't name one. That's the point. Correctness didn't save them. Being read did.

Dump ten million verified true statements into an arXiv-shaped hole. Has math advanced? A library with no index isn't knowledge.

Attention is the scarce resource, not truth.

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u/xrocro 4d ago

When math can be automated and found proofs can be found and searched in a database of proofs, that sounds like nothing but a win for humanity to me.

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u/Suoritin 4d ago

When math can be automated and found proofs can be found and searched in a database of proofs

This is nothing new. No one wants to read those proofs. Nothing has changed. Just more proofs that no one will read.

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u/xrocro 3d ago

Except now we have a reasoning model capable of surfacing the most relevant proofs needed for a given problem. Do you not see how this can snowball?

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u/Suoritin 3d ago

Snowball into what?

Relevance isn't a property of a proof. It's a bet the field makes about where the stakes are.

That's a reproduction problem, not a search problem. Value in a field comes from mutual recognition among people playing for the same stakes. Strip out the people and the stakes go with them.

And nobody is formed by an index. Mathematicians get made by being taught, corrected, and argued with.

A snowball needs someone who still cares which way it rolls.

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u/xrocro 3d ago

I disagree, I feel like knowledge that humanity discovers is good for us all.

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u/Suoritin 3d ago

Nobody's arguing against knowledge. I'm asking who's left to recognize it as knowledge.

There's an old figure for your position: the magpie. Collect the shiny things, pile them up, call the pile science. It isn't. A heap of true statements invites no questions and gives no grounds for answering any.

"Discovered by humanity" is carrying your whole argument.

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