this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2026
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Also there's a "thousand monkeys at a thousand typewriters" effect going on, but what people neglect to notice is that each of the thousand AI monkeys is (either out of necessity or mere curiosity) currently being supervised and edited by a brilliant mathematician who would otherwise be working on their own proofs and discoveries right now. And sure enough, one team might actually come up with a genuine shakespeare-quality draft eventually, but even if that is the case, you also have to consider the opportunity cost of having 1,000 brilliant mathematicians focusing on reviewing monkey-typewriter output instead of each working on their own groundbreaking work much more slowly and "traditionally". The work being delegated to AI isn't replacing human work, it's overriding it.
I don't know if all this AI work is a completely net-unproductive and worthless endeavour or not, but I do know we're not doing an honest accounting and AI companies have a huge incentive to cook the books to make it look way more productive than it actually is.