"This month, 27 Fields medalists — winners of mathematics’ highest honor — have signed a joint declaration stating that solving famous open problems is not, in itself, the goal."

"Such problems are 'landmarks and lighthouses,' they write, whose deeper purpose is to guide mathematicians toward conceptual understanding and insight. Terence Tao, one of the signers... has described what’s happening as 'strip-mining' mathematics. Good problems, he argues, are like nonrenewable resources. Some of them — the smaller, easier ones — can help train the next generation of mathematicians. Young researchers try their hand on them, learning what they will need to push the field forward. If A.I. strips away the big problems and their satellites, it could destroy the entire mathematical ecosystem. Tao has suggested that some questions may even need to be fenced off from automated solvers, as if they were national parks for math problems.... From the outside, mathematicians’ insistence on human understanding looked like guild protection — an attempt to save something for themselves now that machines are starting to beat them at their own game...."

From "Mathematics Isn’t Just a Game to Let A.I. Solve. History Shows Why. In our field of applied mathematics, the long, human process of trial and error — not just the solutions themselves — is often what has led to progress" (NYT).

Here's the joint declaration: "A Severe Misalignment of AI in Mathematics."