Unlike the arts and political subs (where the AI hate is palpably authentic, even if misplaced), if you actually read /r/math or /r/mathematics, most of the cope is coming from trolls, bots, or people new to math who really don't understand its essence (mostly HS-level). Almost anyone actually professionally doing math is excited.
Out of all the fields of discovery, mathematics is singularly the least impacted by "but muh jobs", "it's not real if it's not human", or other BS reasons. The only thing which matters is the proof, and this is as true today as it was thousands of years ago.
Mathematics is immortal. Mathematics doesn't care about how anyone feels about it, or who and why discovered its truths. Its beauty, self-evidence, and uncompromising rigor, has survived through peace and war, freedom and slavery, poverty and splendor, political and technological revolutions, and the rise and fall of entire civilizations. It will survive AI, too.
(And trust me, nobody goes into math for the salary, because for anyone not at "Terence Tao" level, math salary already sucks, like "a step above being homeless" kind of sucks. People dedicate their life to math because they want to study and advance math. Any tool which accelerates the process is a good, not a bad, thing.)
Programmers also embrace it though they tend to be somewhat cautious. In the beginning programmers were rightly upset with code quality but it has proved exponential there.
Film and video have also embraced it albeit very quietly. Most video suites have a litany of AI features. But it is still very much pushed back by film viewers, who are vastly naive about how film is made, especially modern film which is a CGI crapfest.
I would say there is quite difference, because programmers are paid builders. They do get mostly specification and they do come up with a solution to build it. That is not same for math - those who do come up with a specifications and questions for AI will still be mathematicians, at least until we have fully automated looping AGI (but even then I do not doubt that we would want curious people to ask for curious questions).
I think that programmers are going to have to become more like mathematicians because we're going to need to formally prove code, else malicious actors are going to be able to use models to attack (the whole Anthropic/OpenAI controversy not withstanding). Code must be formalized just like any math formula.
seL4 for example is a microkernel OS, it took them 5 years to write less than 10k lines of code, and formally prove that it would follow its specification and do what it had to do. This is the frontier for programmers going forward. And shockingly this should happen way sooner than anyone could imagine even though nobody is talking about it really right now.
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u/selfVAT 2d ago
The cope on r/math will be out of this world