Nikhil Bansal

There are two main points in the Leiden declaration, one good, one bad imho: > Good: science is underfunded, mathematics included. We need more researchers, not less, and with the advent of AGI we will need even more. If AGI is a magical wand, someone still needs to wield it. Researchers are the best prepared for this. > Bad: 'mathematics is a human enterprise + it disturbs existing incentive structures'. Mathematics is a not a human endeavor per se. It is definitely so within academia, but science is free for all. If AI can make math progress faster, then it is only for good of mathematics. It definitely does disturb existing incentive structures (grants, who proves what first, peer review), but these are not optimal to begin with and it's a good time to rethink it. Academic mathematicians in the last 50 years have started thinking that mathematics is done solely by university-affiliated academics. This was true for around the last 100 years, but wasn't true before, and it seems won't be true for long. And this is a good change. Good for science, good for mathematics, but perhaps bad for existing academics within their status quo incentives. But they will adapt, and mathematics will only flourish more. In the end the goal should be to expand mathematics (and generally science) as vastly as possible. Abundance of proofs, abundance of explanations, thanks to LLMs, is a great thing for progress.