A Mathematician's 'Dark Night of Mathematics' Essay Reframes AI Proof Automation as a Spiritual Crisis, Not a Productivity Story
Kirwin Hampshire's Substack essay, subtitled 'What are we really doing?', was written after a week of LLMs producing counterexamples to long-standing conjectures, and argues that 'the creation (or even the pursuit) of novel mathematics is one way that humans have historically accessed the ineffable.' His central image is the Library of Babel: if every conceivable masterpiece already exists in a million variations, why would an author keep writing, and why should anyone ask that of them. Willison cited it directly against Terence Tao's optimistic 'big mathematics' framing in his August 1 post, and a critique of the essay was published on Medium in August, making this the piece the field is currently arguing over rather than a one-off lament.
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