A couple of thoughts in agreement..

First, "cognitive labor" is a form of labor - it's different vs. creative work, even though both use your mind. If your math theorem can be written up in partnership with an LLM, wow! You can be done with that, and go do other great work. Cognitive labor is a form of labor. Let's talk about physical labor and leverage to understand how removing labor translates to time. On your farm you've a tractor and a backhoe. If it is a hobby farm you get in the tractor and you're done super fast. Or, you can take that tractor, buy a bigger farm, and spend the same amount of time you'd have spent backhoeing, but in a far more leveraged way. You can trade removed labor for time in a way that suits you.

Second; the joyful moments we get from finding generalizable abstractions and nice solutions are an adaptation. Humans can climb infinitely high conceptual hierarchies - we'll never stop climbing, using the previous ones as tools to find the next. As we do, we gain joy with each discovery because. We get so much done with brains that run on 20 watts - are we tuned to receive a neurochemical reward for finding cognitive efficiency? If AI means more concepts are discovered the tower gets taller - and we find those joyful moments more often. If there are infinite moments to be found, why not go as fast as possible!

Third; everyone else is doing it, it's a baseline skill. Knowing how to work without AI is like knowing how to ride a horse. Useful and fun in some contexts! Bedsides - only 150ish years ago horses were the only viable transport. Cars were new; toys for the rich. But cars got so good so fast that we eventually reconfigured whole cities. Your homework is to consider why horses got disrupted.

New divisions are emerging in the lump of roles humans had at work. AI takes away roles from your job and lets us do more with less. That's identical to every mechanization before it. It's compressing roles in your job, even as it creates new roles.

There's so much to be excited about and you by reading HN are better positioned than most to do so! Fear is a rational response to change. But so is hope :)

3blue1brown has the absolute most educational and entertaining videos. Always fascinated by his animations which are custom programmed by him. I also appreciate the diversity of topics covered from deep math to software to science.

What does it mean to "go into" math?

Too early to tell, but IMO unlikely. Let's see what his take will be once an AI can propose a topic, write the script, animate, and narrate a good educational math video.

In other news, there's never been a better time to be a software developer. Come to think of it, there's also never been a better time to invest in learning copy-editing and proof-reading as a side hustle. It's a Brave New World. Everything is fine, the demand just got expanded, the pie got bigger, nothing more. New doors will be opened, nothing has changed; in fact, everything improved. Stochastic parrots are no match for our carbon-based g.