Emad Mostaque, on camera: "It's a bad time to be a pure mathematician." AI just solved 10 decade-old math problems for $2,000.

A panel of AI researchers and founders — Peter Diamandis, Alex Wissner-Gross, Emad Mostaque — just sat with a number that's hard to argue with: $2,000 in compute, and ten decade-old, previously-unsolved math problems came back with machine-checkable proofs. Not "AI is getting better at math" in the abstract. A Fields Medalist said he'd recommend one of the proofs for publication without hesitation. A cosmologist called it "a dark night for mathematics" — "the old gods are being slaughtered by the new machine gods." Then Emad closed it flat: "It's a bad time to be a pure mathematician." Here's what they're not saying yet. Back in 2013/2014, I was with M+W High Tech Projects, on a design-and-build project in Kulim, Kedah, Malaysia. Our M&E engineer wanted an opening cut straight through the middle of a reinforced concrete beam — right where the bending moment peaks. I caught him before he did it. Told him no. That's beyond madness — you don't sacrifice a beam's structural integrity for an M&E opening. Had him redirect the ducts instead. Structural safety came first. The engineering knowledge wasn't rare. The judgment — catching the mistake before it became permanent — was. Same pattern here. Ten unsolved proofs, correct on paper, for $2,000. The correctness was never the scarce part. Hmm — this actually pulls the same thread as a post I put up about the corporate ladder losing its entry-level rungs to AI. Different profession, same mechanism: whichever rung gets automated first isn't random, and the people still standing on it are the ones who saw it as a pattern instead of a headline. Drop your take — is judgment actually the thing that survives this, or is that just the story we tell ourselves until it's our turn?