Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably noticed how the world of high-end and cutting-edge mathematics is in what can only be described as abject terror.
Artificial intelligence is wreaking havoc on what folks have built their entire identities around.
At the same time this morning I spotted something on Reddit, which I must admit I sometimes spend a little bit too much time on. Someone doing their last year of their PhD was going through an absolute loss of meaning in life because what they have been building turns out not to be that super useful in the industry outside the comfortable sandbox of academia.
And I’ll admit, a couple of years ago, when we got these lovely all-capable artificial assistants, I felt the same (or rather, when I was looking back and thinking about all those afternoons I spent debugging a random plot in R ggplot2).
I felt horrible, like, "What have I done with my life?"
Nobody really knows what the future brings and those who claim they know are either selling you something or lying. Or making a lucky guess without knowing, themselves, that it’s just a guess.
We all have to learn to tolerate a degree of uncertainty about whether whatever we’re doing right now makes any sense in the long run. I genuinely feel the skill of not taking everything too seriously is one of the best ones we can possibly learn.
Those lonely afternoons debugging a plot wasted several precious moments of my very limited life but I like to believe that they had a purpose. If nothing else they gave me a nice war story to share now with you.
Do the best and most beautiful work you can do but never take it too seriously. Work with people. Trust that it’ll turn out well in the end because there is no way to have certainty about that, so we just have to trust that everything works out just fine. All I can do is try to maximize the ways it can possibly work out.
Almost everything that we do mechanistically can be replaced by AI.
And at some point probably later in your life, you will realize that there are more things to life than work.
My one takeaway these days, which I’m trying to also do myself, is just to learn to enjoy the work and do it together with people who got your back.
And never, ever, ever, ever, never outsource your understanding of what a good academic life is, to anyone. Look for what’s possible, find nice collaborators, do the kind of work you love, and love the process of doing it.
Everything else is just overcomplicating.
I want to part you with something beautiful today:
One of the symptoms of approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important. (Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness (1930))
-Simo