If you are afraid that artificial intelligence will steal your job then you can well understand what a mathematician today can experience in an algorithm-based world.
Mathematics is the discipline that first addressed the topic of artificial intelligence. Starting with Alan Turing's insights at the beginning of the last century, the development of AI owes much to the theories and demonstrations of mathematicians. Think of probabilistic theories, liberal algebra, and information theory.
At the same time, mathematics is the discipline where artificial intelligence is most frequently applied. After all, numbers are the raw material of algorithms. The formalization and principles of mathematics offer a seemingly ideal terrain where artificial intelligence can express its full computational power. Perhaps to call it a clash is overstating the case, but it is true that mathematics is a privileged area where the confrontation between humans and artificial intelligence can be observed.
If this is true, the contribution of those like mathematician Junaid Mubenn who live this challenge every day is particularly valuable. In his book Mathematical Intelligence. What We Have That Machines Don't, published in Italy by Einaudi, Mubenn proposes seven elements that seem to strongly distinguish the mathematical intelligence of humans from artificial intelligence .We leave it to the reader's pleasure to learn about all seven elements in detail, but here we intend to delve into two of them:imagination and questioning.
Let's start with imagination. The author highlights an aspect of mathematics that we too often underestimate: its creative nature. Many of the concepts we take for granted today, think of zero understood as a number, were invented to break out of a given system of rules that proved too narrow to explain. Indeed, if today we cannot imagine life without zero, its invention required an effort of imagination. Effort that AI, generative as it is, does not seem to be able to make at the moment. Thinking outside the box still remains a human faculty.
The second point concerns the ability to ask questions that may seem outlandish but whose answer leads to scientific advancement. Such is the case in the Prussian town of Koenigsberg (Kant's hometown, perhaps not coincidentally) where in the 18th century citizens were questioning whether it was possible to visit the different areas of the town that is cut by two rivers and connected by seven bridges by passing over bridges and land once and only once. It is unclear what led the populace to discuss this puzzle but the problem had become so famous that it attracted the attention of Euler, a well-known mathematician of the time, who in an attempt to answer it invented graph theory, which ironically is the basis of artificial intelligence today. In the end Euler proved that the problem was unsolvable but in doing so opened up a new field of mathematical research. Here asking questions that we are unable to answer seems to be a human faculty. The search for the limit and the very reasons for exceeding it seem to interest humans more than machines.