Superintelligent machines may well need us after all

In 1915, Albert Einstein stood before the Prussian Academy of Science and revealed the now-famous equations of his general theory of relativity. Einstein and relativity are synonymous today with genius, but these revelations were initially met with indifference, in part because the maths was too radical for his peers to fully digest.

Today, tech firms would have us believe we are on the brink of “superintelligent” artificial intelligence capable of outperforming experts in most domains, producing scientific breakthroughs on a par with Einstein. As Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei put it, we will see “a country of geniuses in a datacenter“. Claims like these are often provided with little evidence, and identifying genius or elevated intelligence is a murky endeavour.

But one corner of academia that might be seeing superintelligence come to pass is mathematics. In this week’s cover story, we learn how mathematicians are in a state of wonder and panic about the rapid rise of AI’s mathematical ability.

This glimpse of the future doesn’t appear to exclude us, however. AI’s successes also show how integral human mathematicians are to the scientific process. The most impressive AI-fuelled discoveries, such as OpenAI’s recent falsification of an 80-year-old conjecture, are credible only because mathematicians say so. We report how humans are already using AI’s ideas to make progress on other maths conundrums.

If this spreads to the other sciences, then it suggests we won’t be following AI geniuses, but will instead look to people who know how to use these tools and insights best. This might not be quite like the superintelligence that AI companies proselytise, but it could be closer to how human genius has always functioned.

Without Einstein’s colleagues, like Karl Schwarzschild or Willem de Sitter, who went on to apply relativity to our universe, predicting black holes and an inflationary universe, it wouldn’t have had the outsize impact on our understanding of reality that it does today. Genius, by itself, has never been sufficient.