> Our society does not support classical musicians in the same way that we support ‘popular’ musicians.
It really really does. Popular/rock/folk/classical musicians all earn much the same way now: a blend of teaching, occasional performance fees, functions performances like weddings and galas, music-related side-gigs (composition, arrangement and recording for commercial music), and non-music-related side gigs — teaching non-musical things, gardening, painting and decorating, bar work, office temp work, even full time jobs (doctors and lawyers, accountants). I know a couple of classical musicians whose actual money-making music is playing other instruments in funk/rock functions bands.
Even the "best" or most famous musicians, popular or classical, have side gigs. Approximately nobody makes their money only from performing or from recordings; that ended twenty-five or thirty years ago.
Elite soloists, maybe — but that is actually a pretty expensive life to live. I would be surprised if many of them risked a life where they had no other job.
The idea that a "conservatory" system exists that meaningfully supports classical musicians is nonsense almost anywhere in the world, I would think. Even the first-chair musicians and conductors have side gigs.
(ETA: I can't believe this is a workable model for mathematicians, either. Maybe for a couple of dozen the world over. But there is no performance, no regionality, little in the way of public dissemination, little in the way of reflected glory for benefactors. No, the "conservatory" will perhaps be the intelligence agencies, as it was before.)
> Even the first-chair musicians and conductors have side gigs.
A principal player (I don't think anyone beyond high school band calls them 'first-chair') in a major symphony orchestra in the United States makes $250k-400k a year. These are extremely competitive jobs and they are paid well. Certainly enough to live on if you wanted to.
These people often teach, but not really because they need a "side-gig." If you ask them, they will likely tell you they feel a certain duty to prepare the next generation, they like teaching, and their rehearsal/performance schedule affords them the time.
At a first approximation, no musician who does it for money makes a living out of it. Classical, pop, rock, whatever.
Nobody in music, basically, makes real money. Fifty, maybe a hundred violinists in the entire world do earn a pure living. Perhaps another twenty five of each other instrument. A few international soloists in other instruments. But musicians in those jobs are often burning as much money as they are making. (Even Anouskha Shankar has a portfolio career).
This is essentially nobody. Everyone else in classical music is earning just the same way as popular musicians — and society doesn't "support" popular musicians at all! The perception that rock musicians make money touring, for example, is just that: perception. The vast majority of tours either just break even or lose money. Working in music production and staging makes better money than musicians make.
Everyone else, essentially, has another job.
> (I don't think anyone beyond high school band calls them 'first-chair')
Snark noted, though I have no earthly idea why you felt it necessary
Most of the major orchestras have a union and they negotiate salaries in the $100-200k range for everyone. It’s a lot more people than you might think (70-150 people on payroll in each orchestra). There are also a lot of touring soloists in the world compared to what you expect. It’s a very stressful life, but it yields somewhere between $100k and $1M per year, and many of your living expenses are fully paid for on top of that.
There are at least 20 such orchestras in the US alone, not to mention all the orchestras in Europe and Asia. There’s also a very long tail with compensation down to $50k for players.
The US BLS has 35,000 paid musicians listed, with another 10,000 music directors (a lot of church organists are in this category). Median wage of $40/hour, mean of around $52.
> The US BLS has 35,000 paid musicians listed, with another 10,000 music directors (a lot of church organists are in this category). Median wage of $40/hour, mean of around $52.
$40/hour is not bad. Aside from the few thousand tenured orchestra/chorus musicians, none of them are going to be making 6 figures from one job, but a number of musician-musician households pull in over $100k between two incomes built around relatively unstable gig work without either one having a high-prestige job.
Also note that churches, which are a hub for working-class musicians, are exempt from BLS reporting.
$40/hour is $83,000 per year, that is more then livable in the US, and by definition of the median half make more. So I can't agree that it's not a living wage for most.
it's nowhere close. Most orchestras are playing 1-2 nights a week (max) and each performance has 0 or 1 rehearsal (1 if it's a new program, 0 otherwise). Average when performing is maybe 20hr a week
I understand your point. Music is one of those careers, like professional athlete, that make parents cringe when optimistic children announce an intention to pursue it. Your numbers are off (the base pay of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra last time I checked was around $200k) and there ~30 violinists in that orchestra alone. But it's not an order of magnitude.
But just because the numbers are small doesn't mean society does not support them. There just isn't a need for a lot of them. It would be like saying society does not support professional athletes. Clearly it does, but only at the highest level. And at that level, it supports the very well.
> Snark noted, though I have no earthly idea why you felt it necessary
I apologize. I come from this world, have close friends in major orchestras and experience on the world's opera stages. This culture is full of shibboleths: referring to works as "songs", clapping in the wrong place, hell, even pronouncing 'Don Giovanni' the same way you pronounce "Don Draper" lets people know you are not from around here.
Oddly enough I'm one of those parents. Yes, I cringed, but at the same time I would also have cringed at watching them go into something they hate just for the money. I've seen that too.
An observation I made is that the tournament career system is supported by the entire cadre of players and families, of the kids who won't win one of the prize jobs. One reason is we just don't know which 18 year olds will rise to the level needed to win a symphonic audition a decade later. I've always been ambivalent about this, but don't have a good idea for how to reform it.
I majored in math and physics. My parents didn't cringe, at least quite so much. I became, quite honestly, a mediocre physicist at a time when you had to be a research superstar to apply for a tenure track job at a third rate college. The consolation for me was that a mediocre physicist could still earn a decent living doing something in industry, and I'm now at a late stage of a satisfying career.
Conservatory kid parent reporting here too. At least I live in a country where there is likely a job for him, even if he shouldn't win out against all the other extremely determined classical piano students.
But society in general does not really support professional athletes in any directed “conservatory” sense, beyond the weird obsession with college sports in the USA.
Corporate sponsorship pays the bigger amounts: that is a side job with its own commitments. Prize money: by definition not available to most.
Directed pay is a tiny fraction of it (stipend level), even at the highest levels.
Athletes have other jobs.
Again: a bad model for mathematicians. None of them are going to be signing merch deals. Most aren’t winning prizes. I am afraid that mathematicians are just going to have to keep doing all the other jobs they already do.
> But society in general does not really support professional athletes in any directed “conservatory” sense, beyond the weird obsession with college sports in the USA.
At least some countries have programs where (candidate) Olympians get professional support and a stipend.
A country like Spain has a formal system of grants and awards for athletes designated as "elite" and supports them roughly at the same pay as it supports junior university professors.
In Germany every small town has a (state-funded) orchestra. I know someone who plays the violin in such an orchestra, he has a solid salary, big house etc.
He has a side gig, he has a quartet with some friends of his, but it's for fun, not for money.
>Fifty, maybe a hundred violinists in the entire world do earn a pure living.
This has to be off by at least two orders of magnitude.
The Reykjavik symphonic orchestra in Iceland alone employs some 30 full time violinists. The nation's population is less than El Paso, tx - which also employs some 80 musicians in their symphonic orchestra.
Your main point might still have merit, but this forum is one where missing the numbers by so much will distract many readers. It distracted me, at least. :)
Pop musicians have fewer options and need to chase gigs, but the payoffs are also larger if they make it. One-hit wonders drive Ferraris.
This is confidently presented, but seems incorrect based on other commenters.
> Snark noted, though I have no earthly idea why you felt it necessary
I think it's useful if you are, in fact, talking out your ass. It's hard to tell given your confident phrasing, but saying something which gives away that you don't actually have meaningful experience in the subject is worth calling out. It sounds like your interlocutor has a better sense of the state of the music world, and that was a way for them to indicate it.
I think you are talking about the US. In Europe (at least France & Germany) most professional classical musicians are doing it exclusively (we might be an outlier but it's the norm here), competition is fierce though but at that level it's a full time job. In France we have prestigious ensembles (Orchestre de Radio France, Opéra de Paris, Orchestre de Paris), roughly 20+ subsidised regional orchestras and opera houses, military and police ensembles. That's for full-time permanent job. Underneath that there's the intermittence regime (roughly 100k people) freelance entertainment professional. Between gigs, the government provides a special unemployment insurance program to maintain a steady income. Germany is the same story, on an even bigger scale (100+ state-funded ensembles) but no intermittence equivalent.
But even in the US, are you sure that musicians from the big 5 need side gigs? It seems that the salary in those orchestra are in the $100k-$200k range annually. Enough to live even in the most expensive cities, right?
On a side note: It's not called a "conservatory" because we are conserving the art in it. The name seems to originate from a place where orphaned children were taken care off (i.e. conserved) and part of that was through musical education.
I don't think fully employed opera singers, and professional orchestra musicians, tend to have side gigs. But it's also extremely difficult to get full employment in such jobs, and I think they're pretty intense: of the few people from my school days who succeeded in getting that, at least two of them quit/downshifted into teaching jobs after a decade or so.
My experience is different ; Somehow I befriended a bunch of professional opera and orchestra singers in my mid 20s. It is now 20 years later and they absolutely all have side gigs.
We need to distinguish "professional opera singer" and "professional orchestra player" vs Pavarotti though :). Just like there are hundreds and thousands of "professional singers" and one Jennifer Lopez (though one could argue she's a perfect example of side gigs:).
My musician friends teach, do social networks, do all kinds of gigs, and are usually "multi barely employed". Not a single one of them, and two are fairly successful, are "full time employed" in the same sense a corporate professional is :-/.
I think it's a lot about which country you live in. I live in Norway, and went to a music oriented high school (I'm not terribly talented myself, but only half the places were set aside for people doing well on audition, the rest of us got in on grades). A good deal of my classmates became professional musicians of various sorts, two got orchestra jobs. But Norway isn't the best country to be a full time classical musician at all - apparently there are far more positions in Russia and Eastern European countries.
As someone who's been close to several opera singers (long story), I would say that the amount of opera singers who don't have side gigs in teaching or otherwise is very, very small.
Yes, if you're one of the few world famous sopranos you don't need to teach, but most singers are not world-famous. I knew one singer who toured internationally, had sung in front of thousands of people, had sung with world famous people, etc. But who lived in shared accomodation and worked several other part-time jobs to make ends meet.
i know some musicians, and it's how you describe it. They have multiple gigs all the time. Even 20-30 years ago. Most of the time one main job, one that pays the bills and is stable, like teaching, and more on the side. A conservatory is just a high-end agency for distributing classical live music.
>>> Elite soloists, maybe — but that is actually a pretty expensive life to live. I would be surprised if many of them risked a life where they had no other job.
Yes, they really did. Getting to that level requires training at an intensity that closes off the option of training for an alternative career.
I think often in families, if a generation is successful with money (for example as engineer or enterpreneur), then next generation often become artists or politicians etc.
>I can't believe this is a workable model for mathematicians, either.
It already is. Pure math departments are largely service oriented. They exist to teach engineers calculus. They are already spending a great deal of time doing non-research tasks, just like musicians you described. The exceptions would be the very top researchers at R1 schools, and even then they often spend time advising students and teaching occasional courses. It's not super common to have people do nothing but research in a pure math department.
Modern 'classical' music is a myth. In their day, classical composers were essentially pop performers. Women used to throw their undergarments at mozart...
Today classical music is filled with people who want to pretend to be superior to pop musicians because they keep their repertoire confined to academically acceptable areas.
And then the LARPers that want to make new music make complete and utter arhythmic and atonal trash that demands humans subdue our own aural feelings of beauty.
You'll find classical musicians who complain about this stuff are usually incompetent musicians who really stretch the definition of artist.
Sorry spent almost a decade of my young life in a somewhat competitive music school environment. Lots of the other kids were upset I played what I wanted to and people liked it.
Actual modern composers in the classical tradition (I.e. people alive today who compose music that is similar in feel to older composers) are well compensated because they're often hired to score films, video games, and other capitalist interests that the supposedly 'real' classical musicians would scoff their noses at.
> Today classical music is filled with people who want to pretend to be superior to pop musicians because they keep their repertoire confined to academically acceptable areas.
As somebody with classical training and a brother in the industry, it pains me to read this misinformed opinion of yours. Top-tier symphonies world round are doing crossover concerts with pop artists, play pop songs, modern and experimental music, and regularly feature works by living composers. In my high school orchestra, circa '98, we played stuff like music from Star Wars and West Side Story -- not just the ancients.
Down the foodchain, it gets even weirder. The favorite gig I played involved interpretive dance featuring waterboarding, gallons of fake blood, a live chicken race, and more.
Where you certainly will find a subset of afficionados of any genre who scoff at anything but their extremely narrow definition of "good music," if you take the time to rub elbows with mature classical musicians you'll find many to most of them quite open minded.
Your experience with young artists, finding them to be idealistic and purist, does not extend to the whole field. I know people who only listen to a single narrow genre or decade of pop music. How are they different?
Edit to add:
> And then the LARPers that want to make new music make complete and utter arhythmic and atonal trash that demands humans subdue our own aural feelings of beauty.
Oh, no. No, no no. I've been to a circuit-bent punk show. I recently went to an ambient music festival. I've heard glitch pop. Angine de Poitrine is blowing up because they use a semitonal guitar (though as a bit of a noise snob, I find their use of semitones milquetoast and rather uninspired).
Here you are, narrowly defining music, and excluding what you dislike. But it's not just "classical" living composers doing this.
One thing I've observed is that a subset of that weird and interesting music is only possible due to the availability of musicians who have gone through the classical training. Having access to players who are capable of doing anything you ask, is what allows composers to be even more adventuresome, for two reasons. One is the sheer ability to play the stuff, and the other is the efficiency of doing it with a minimum of rehearsal.
The same has been true to some extent in the past for popular music. Up through maybe the 70s and even 80s, a lot of the instrumental parts for the "hits" were recorded by trained jazz musicians.
I've heard this argument many times, there's a grain of truth and I strongly agree RE 'arhythmic and atonal trash', but it strikes me as disingenuous.
Classical music was somewhat elitist even at the time, coexisting with popular/folk music traditions. The Romantic period definitely saw music and art break away for traditional forms and conservative mores, but it wasn't a free for all.
The people who enjoy classical music today are largely the same people who enjoyed it at the time. Educated and 'enlightened' upper/middle classes, who sought music celebrating their aspirations. Freedom from political oppression and aristocratic control. A world where people could succeed based on talent, hard work, intelligence, and propriety. Where the middle class would have the power to reshape government and social institutions to advance their interests rather than those of the nobility. A personal experience of the religious rather than state ordained. The music pivots to natural, romantic, mystical themes as these people lost faith that industrialization will deliver for them.
Compare modern popular music which deals with universal themes - love, loss, sex, money, partying. You can enjoy pop music and still feel that these themes are not important to you.
People don't fake enjoying classical music to convince you that they're smart and cultured. They just gravitate to music which represents their idea of smart and cultured. The same is true for a lot of art.
The idea that classical composers (before about Liszt) were the "pop music" of their day is uninformed. Consider 1) the size of the venues that Mozart or Haydn's secular music was performed in, and 2) the fact that the bulk of the population was peasantry who wouldn't be admitted to such venues in a time of strict class distinctions.
Outside church settings, classical music of the Baroque, Classical and early Romantic eras was for the elites, and the masses had their own musics. This only changed gradually over the 19th century.
It's also weird to still be hung up on atonality in the contemporary classical world, when the pop-music world has for decades now had acts like Merzbow that are often farther out into noise.
Merzbow is not pop music, or arguably even music at all.
>I threw all my past music career in the garbage. There was no longer any need for concepts like 'career' and 'skill'. I stopped playing music and went in search of an alternative.
— Masami Akita
Pulse Demon is the only Merzbow album with any cultural importance, and that's mostly because the eye-catching cover art let it replace Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music as the default "check out how extreme this is" meme album. Only a tiny minority of music listeners will enjoy listening to it, and there is no establishment pushing it as the future of music.
Merzbow gets booked for popular-music festivals regularly, and plenty of other artists have credited him. The Japanese noise scene even inspired a Detroit noise scene through the 1990s and early millennium.
I don't care for the genre myself, but having been to events and seen pleasurable crowd reactions and met people who traveled some distance for it, I can't deny it has at least some real following. Who cares if it isn't discussed as the future of music? There are punk, metal, and hardcore subgenres that draw the same narrow audiences and don't aim to shake the world, but claiming that disqualifies them as part of the popular-music world would be silly.
> Today classical music is filled with people who want to pretend to be superior to pop musicians because they keep their repertoire confined to academically acceptable areas.
What an incredibly cynical take. I’ve done several chamber music collaborations with a violist who also plays pop music gigs on keyboards.
There are arrogant pricks in classical music. And in software engineering and every other discipline. Personality is orthogonal to field of interest.
Anyway you complain that classical musicians look down on pop music while you yourself do the same about modern composers.
> while you yourself do the same about modern composers.
I literally gave several examples of modern genres in which classical composers still produce good work. I just said they're unlikely to be found in academia
We are largely having a reckoning with whether a discipline is the process or the outcome.
Music didn't enter the conservatory so much as the relative interest in various styles have changed over time. I get that the author was implying that by talking about pop music, but what was music doing before Mozart came around?
Every field is having this existential crisis right now, from art to math. Especially in art, the anti-AI hate mostly reduces to arguing that art is the process not the outcome.
The need for research-level math isn't changing (if anything, it may accelerate), but how we do it is. The languages, systems, and process I used to write code has changed a lot since I wrote my first line of BASIC in 1994. Mathematicians, I expect, have not encountered nearly the same amount of disruption in academia. I feel for them.
>? Especially in art, the anti-AI hate mostly reduces to arguing that art is the process not the outcome.
That is not my objection to AI art at all. The value of art for me is that somebody has an idea to express and they're trying to communicate it to me. That's totally absent from AI-generated material. I'm not categorically opposed to AI, but my interest in automatically generated content tailored to indulge my personal taste is absolutely zero.
> somebody has an idea to express and they're trying to communicate it to me
I don't see why that would exclude GenAI - you have an idea, you write a prompt, you get something that's sort of but not quite what you were going for, so you iterate a bit until it's good enough to communicate what you wanted.
In my experience the AI still does a lot of heavy lifting of thinking for the person.
Just like if I tell an artist can you draw a painting of a deer in the forest, but make it ominous and tense. I could have a vague idea of what that would mean for me but the professional artist will make correct decision in composition, light etc. to create that.
Just my sentence is nothing but the image can evoke feelings if done right.
The difference for most people against AI is that there is no world where someone with intent and skill can engage with AI to make anything approaching art. If your process includes AI, it is impossible to be an artist.
It sounds like the problem you have with AI art is that instead of an artist iterating over parts of the image to get what they want, someone iterates over entire images to get what they want. (Or... they still iterate over parts of the image, but with a generative model instead of manual brush strokes.) Somehow that process distinction makes the difference for you.
Before AI it was possible to "express" yourself to someone else by recommending them a piece of art you liked. There's a lot of art in the world, expressing many different things, so you could actually get across something very specific by being a good curator / recommender.
But nobody would seriously claim that they were actually creating, painting with a broader brush at a "book level" instead of a "word level" when they were just curating good novels.
They didn't create the works they recommend, but they did create the recommendations. AI art is kinda like that, even if you didn't create the work in the dataset. Unfortunately it's also like if the recommendations tried to pass off as original work instead, and didn't actually cite the original work, which I think is a huge reason why people dislike it. I still think it's possible to create art with generative AI, but it takes more than just a prompt, if that makes sense.
I express myself with AI all the time, I just can't share it with anyone because it's banned from all the platforms where I'd care to do so. I don't really write stories without AI anymore, so probably people won't see expressions like that from me again. Maybe you could call that "AI hurts artists", dunno.
I like this framing. I know that AI has it's place and in others it doesn't. I recognize I sound like an AI shill in personal conversations, but I'm a very outcome driven person. I simply want multiple, thousands of outcomes even, and those outcomes all coming together is my process/journey, which is different to a developer or musicians process may view their career.
What happens if the outcomes were obtained instantaneously, and without effort on your part? Would it be more enjoyable for you?
Besides, I don't think you can be driven by thousands of outcomes, by definition, as you can't be in love with thousands of people. Your main motivation must be the thing that unites them. Perhaps you are driven by the process of imagining solutions to problems and/or realizing your ideas.
People who write prompts can have emotion. If someone is feeling really sad and they say to a computer "draw me a sad thing" and it draws something really sad and they break down crying, and then they show it to you and you also break down crying, that meets your goals, but it probably isn't what you meant.
The sad thing was produced by the machine, as its idea of something sad. It is not s result of this particular episode of sadness.
Put another way, “draw me something sad” is too vague; a million people can issue the same prompt, and what comes out does not correlate to any specifics of their own experience of sadness.
I think classical and symphonic music are helped in the US by school music programs. It's the best way to have 100 kids practice and perform for a concert. Breaking them into 25 jazz quartets is a lot more complicated.
Why are you guys talking about Mozart as if you can split the mass adoption of music into pre and post Mozart? Mozart was one of many in an ongoing evolution of European music. The way masses interacted with music varied based on the time and the culture. Some cultures at any given time would vary based on whether they produced much music at all (look at how Calvinism and the way the Dutch aristocracy handled music patronage vs Italy or France impacted Dutch music's dominance before vs after the Renaissance), what kind of music they produced (worship music only or also secular patronage?), etc. Mozart did not significantly overhaul this, rather he spent his latter years desperately trying to keep his reputation and relevance alive with travels.
>the anti-AI hate mostly reduces to arguing that art is the process not the outcome.
The outcome is also bad though, once you scale past static images. That's why consumers, who otherwise are apathetic at scale, are extremely negative against generative AI. at least where they (perceive to) notice it.
Yeah, that's my impression from games. Even being told that a game was vibe coded doesn't matter much unless the game runs like crap. GenAI is a OR disaster, though, and very few Indies can really "hide" the usage as of now. How AAA navigates it will be interesting to see, but this isn't exactly a booming time in industry to begin with.
> Classical music has been institutionalized, sent to the conservatory as a relic. A small segment of society has decided the ability to perform it is worth preserving, and devotes a sliver of capital to that end: training young people, and paying a few of the best players in the biggest cities to do it professionally.
I had a whole discussion with a German friend whose husband works in opera (this was after Chalomet's "opera as a dead art" comments) and their view was mostly that this view of the world does not hold for at least chunks of Europe. To their mind, there is still both active input into this space, support in this space, and there's societal support to some degree or another.
I don't know the realities on the ground, but that annecdote did make me wonder if I simply assumed that the world of classical music wasn't as dire if you leave the States, at least in terms of job stability.
The comparison to popular music is kinda funy too... plenty of pop musicians that don't live off of their music, right? Maybe we're not generating "Taylor Swifts of Oboe"s but I feel like the measure is more about the median (or even the 90th/95th percentile?) when it comes to art, rather than the top of the top.
I think he agrees it is popular, but in comparison to contemporary styles of music it’s tiny (in skilled performers, listeners, funding and revenue). Right? Even in Europe.
Europe is actually worse, or at least Germany, because the government pays for opera, so it doesn't have to stand on its own two feet. So they don't (have to) care about listeners as much.
Except it runs into an excess problem. As an example, Berlin - just one city - has 7 professional orchestras. They are supported by the government financially to the tune of 200 million EUR per year. There is a very real opportunity cost here and quite a bit of a wealth transfer to old people at the same time (since the audiences for classical music tend to be on the older side).
You could pump a large part of those resources into supporting other kinds of music and arguably the outcome would be more interesting.
It's a wealth transfer to the middle class. Poor people by and large don't go to the orchestra or opera.
Of course, some poor people do enjoy these kinds of things! But if you gave them a choice between the subsidised ticket or the embedded subsidy as cash in hand, I'm sure most poor people would take the cash.
> You could pump a large part of those resources into supporting other kinds of music and arguably the outcome would be more interesting.
Or give the money to poor people, or leave the money with tax payers, etc.
The job stability in classical music is great. It's getting a job in the first place that's a problem. My partner, in an earlier life, was one of the best young flautists in Canada. There were about eight jobs in the entire country for orchestral flautists, and about a year before graduating, a few of them turned over, meaning it would probably be another five years before any more jobs opened up. Good time for a career change...
I think a lot of people just don't get how much of classical music was foundational for pop music. McCartney said blackbird was a twist on some Bach intro. Billy Joel said similar things. A lot of of good music was cooked in classical knowledge.
They didn't mention coders but my idea is to have Silicon habitats of programmers recreating nineties professional programming on Pentium PCs in dimly lit cubicles. Tourists shuffle by watching live coding like watching a blacksmith at a Colonial Williamsburg.
Our AI system don't just do things. They do it because someone asks. A lot of the boom in AI maths results are solving human formulated problems mostly for PR benefit. Once the novelty passes, would Anthropic or OpenAI keep spending? And without mathematicians to ask the right questions and able to appreciate the results, why would AI driven research continue?
> And without mathematicians to ask the right questions
Here, I disagree. What makes you think the AI won't be able to ask the right questions without prompting?
> and able to appreciate the results, why would AI driven research continue?
Here, I think I agree. At some level, there has to be a human in the process that must understand / interpret the results.
I gotta say, however, that I'm not certain about my agreement. I'm worried that I'm missing something where the human can be excised from the process entirely.
> Here, I disagree. What makes you think the AI won't be able to ask the right questions without prompting?
But why would they ask the right questions without prompting? The LLMs have no intrinsic goal to research math problems, it would just be very costly to run queries without a reason to run them... arguably a human in that loop would be a mathematician, but then we do need them after all.
> But why would they ask the right questions without prompting?
What if the models are good enough (maybe even now?) so that all you have to say is "come up with a list of interesting problems overlooked by humans in <insert math discipline>. Then work on those proofs."
I don't think that's so far fetched. Especially given the news today about NS.
I think we know enough about reinforcement learning to tell that it won’t be able to entirely replace human mathematicians. All of the techniques used by these AI firms are well-studied.
I am not arguing that mathematicians would never use AI systems, they do. I am arguing that if we stop having mathematicians we would stop solving deep mathematical problems as there would be no one to ask the right questions.
I like the framing in the headline - really more than the article itself.
I think underappreciated in discourse like this is that of course we will still have "mathematicians" - people whose work is mathematics. The job might change, but at the very least someone has to choose where to spend the compute and the dollars, decide what theorems are worth investing in, what definitions matter. Someone still has to serve as the ambassador reminding people at the relevant points to look over at the field for productivity and correctness reasons, presenting fun riddles for entertainment and education, advocating to political bodies for funding.
Metalworking looks a lot different than it used to, but the end of a man with a hammer and leather bellows bashing out a nail didn't end the career of metal working either. The work sure looks a lot different though, and there are many fewer of them.
> Could this model work for mathematicians? It’s easy to imagine: in Euclid’s time, mathematics largely existed as an intellectual pursuit worthy of a few inclined people.
NO! Pythagoras discovered his theorems because they wanted to divide up the revenue. While there have been sections of mathematics discovered by leisure, majority of mathematics has been discovered due to an engineering need.
Well, I think one good thing we can conclude from the music world is that there are people out there who want to pay for humans to do things even when the computer could do it better. I.e. when you go to Vegas and go to a bar, you want to have a guy playing piano and singing, and are willing to pay a bit more for that. You don't want just a jukebox, even if the jukebox can play "Don't Stop Believing" better than the dude with the piano.
All that to say, there will be certain jobs that people will want to pay humans to do even if the robots can do those things "better".
The big weakness of the analogy from the OP is that music is universally accessible, while high level mathematics is not. The potential audience for the human playing the piano is far larger than the human solving complex mathematical theorems.
If fumbling through 'hot cross buns' on the recorder is roughly analogous to recitation of multiplication tables, then Gould playing Shostakovich can certainly be referenced as one would the Feynman Lectures on Physics.
Certainly more effort has been put into exploring the relationship between... Bach and Godel than your surmise suggests; SHRDLU, Toy of Man's Designing!
Pure maths has foreshadowed a lot of physics, and a lot of Computer Science. We should probably keep doing it.
Does the current model (of highly-talented academics at Universities mostly arguing with each other) change because of AI? Does it invalidate human effort, or does it allow humans to push the boundaries further? Is there no point in training or paying for mathematicians because AI will take over the whole role?
Or, as we're finding with so many other areas, does AI do its best work when guided by someone who knows the area and subject well?
What do you mean by invalidate? It means we no longer need to understand math, of course.
When Claude made progress on the Riemann conjecture, here are the kind of prompts used:
> Jarred's input was mostly limited to sending Claude messages of encouragement (mostly variants of “keep going” or “believe in yourself”).2 This seems to have helped Claude overcome some initial skepticism that it could make meaningful progress.
It seems like the kind of prompts a high schooler could come up with. The prompter is the creator of bun.js, a kind of janky JavaScript execution environment. It seems like we no longer need to know the subject well at all.
What did the Medicis or Guggengheim's do other than be rich and idle at the right time and place in history?
The contemporary prompt is a port for patronage, not a point of inflection - with a similarly ludicrous symbiotic relationship defined by impression management on both sides. Same as it ever was.
I haven't done math since college. Now the things I struggled with I was able to grasp. So much so that I was able to prove a conjecture, small one, but nothing in my life I thought I would of, its even getting peer reviewed.
Its drudgery to prove these things. But man it feels cool when you do.
I now have a better understanding of the entire physical mechanics of life around me, to a gravitational sort of understanding.
Simply because I thought I had a conceptual understanding of p vs np. And after weeks I was able to prove myself wrong.
People seem to worry that AI is going to take away everything. But my experience is that I feel more able to create even ideas before I would never imagine.
It feels more like in HG Wells where he's in the far future talking to the AI about his equations and the AI says "oh your talking about time travel, thats impossible"
It feels like that reality is now more likely than any other, anyone can invent anything now and have the math to back it up.
You can speak physics into existance. I'm excited for the future
> I haven’t fully verified the proof; I worked through it with Claude Fable and it passes the sniff test, but fully digesting it will take a bit more energy than I have right now.
This is overlooked but really important. Nobody wants to watch robots play chess against each other - we watch human chess even though bots are better. Nobody needs math that has not been verified by humans. Human understanding and communication is the important part of mathematics.
> Nobody wants to watch robots play chess against each other - we watch human chess even though bots are better
Many humans have studied robots play chess and learned from them. For example the concept of a "thorn pawn" was popularized after Leela played it with great success.
> Nobody needs math that has not been verified by humans.
There already are proofs that are understood by a handful of humans; without understanding you can still proof corollaries. For example, there are proofs to theorems that are conditional on the Riemann Hypothesis.
Mathematics is not chess, it is about reality. There is a huge value in P=NP for example, if such result is ever rigorously proved, regardless of the proof. Less so perhaps for P!=NP, but it would be a definite answer to a long standing question.
This is why I think "Leiden program" and similar proposals will eventually fail. It is true that the questions to be solved would have to be interesting to humans, though. But I think that also to find such questions, one would use llms more and more.
> Consider classical music. Our society does not support classical musicians in the same way that we support ‘popular’ musicians
“Society” is a leaky abstraction here. If you reify society as a thing that is capable of “supporting” or “not supporting” something you mean essentially the government. In that case, “society” probably provides more support to classical music than pop music, through grant programs, public funding of symphonies, etc.
It's possible to have a career in classical music (I have one, for some definition of classical). But I suspect that streaming income from passive listeners (i.e. not fans) will disappear once the streaming services can eliminate those pesky songwriters and artists.
Maybe in the future mathematicians could be the ones proposing different axiomatic foundations (e.g. ZF vs ZF + C vs ZF + C + CH vs ...) and then using computers to examine the consequences of these differing foundations?
I'm sure AI could contribute to this, but this is already a well-developed field of mathematics, and most of the consequences of additional axioms have been worked out. (The most productive hypothesis has been what's called "projective determinacy", if you're curious.)
Mathematicians have also gone in the opposite direction, and tried to work out what are the weakest foundations where different results hold. This is called "reverse mathematics".
What name does this "well-developed field of mathematics" go by? (I just want to get a taste of what the field is like.)
I also thought that there are an infinite set of possible extra axioms, e.g. axiomize any statement that's true but not provably so via Gödel's First Incompleteness Theorem, though maybe the vast majority of such axioms are "uninteresting".
"Descriptive set theory" is a good starting point, though it's the bulk of what set theorists in general do.
It's true that there's an infinite possible set of axioms. It does seem that the types of axioms that have consequences that humans are interested in fall into simple families. For example, many seemingly unrelated questions are settled by assume the existence of very large sets (larger than can normally constructed in set theory).
Looking a bit more into this, it doesn't seem your claim "most of the consequences of additional axioms have been worked out" holds up.
Yes, metamathematics is well-developed, but I don't think that most of the consequences of any particular additional set of axioms have been worked out. Each such new set requires re-deriving all of this alternate mathematics from scratch. This is a lot of work!
So I think my original claim---mathematicians select interesting axioms and AI figures out their implications---still seems a possible way forward.
PS: I'd guess descriptive set theory under determinacy is the one place where projective determinacy, as you stated, pays off.
I don't see how you came to that conclusion, since I'm telling you the actual state of play. There's a big literature on what results require the Axiom of Choice, for example. (The book Handbook of Analysis and Its Foundations covers this thoroughly.) There are many results on what follows from the Continuum Hypothesis or other cardinal arithmetic axioms. There is a big literature on what follows from assuming the existence of large cardinals. There's a separate literature on adding "forcing axioms", like Martin's maximum. There are hundreds of papers on open questions that are settled by adding additional axioms to ZFC, and to identifying the weakest axioms to add to settle various open questions.
In another direction, there's even a literature on what happens when you allow sets to contain themselves as members, like Aczel's Anti-Foundation Axiom. There's literatures on purely constructive versions of set theory, where everything has to be computable. Like I mentioned before (reverse mathematics), there's work on what happens when you adopt much weaker axiom sets, like second-order arithmetic but weak choice principles such as taking Kruskal's tree theorem as an axiom.
So while AI would accelerate this work, the existing body of work on alternate axioms is tremendous. A surprisingly large amount of it translates between systems, and there are precise tools to measure how weak or strong a system is, relative to its competitors.
While the existing body of work on alternate axioms is tremendous, it's finite. The set of possible axiom systems is infinite. Does current the current body of work cover all consequences of all possible axiom systems?
Conservatories are not going to support the entirety of the white collar market, so something is going to give. Not to mention the blue collar market, as robots take off.
I honestly don't get what the author is trying to say.
> But pure mathematics is already in a conservatory, better known as the academy.
Yes, exactly. So "is mathematics about to enter the conservatory" is a quite weird question.
> who deserves funding, tenure, and fame
It's always been decided by a very small clique of academic elites and a few big companies who have too much R&D budget to spend. It's not something that can be decided by 'the pop' democratically. If you ask an average person how much we should spend on linguists and philosophers per year, the answer will be ~$0. I don't see how AI changes that.
AI could keep on generating an "observable universe," and mathematicians discover things by way of validating results. This doesn't seem much dissimilar to astronomy.
Right. It's not conservatories, because we will have communities of Lean programmers and hobbyists helping things along, a group effort that is poorly described by relegation to a limited, privileged set of performers.
> To be clear, I haven’t fully verified the proof; I worked through it with Claude Fable and it passes the sniff test, but fully digesting it will take a bit more energy than I have right now.
As predicted, we no longer need mathematicians for math; the math is being both generated and read by models. We're in for some exciting times, when the pace of mathematical advance can run faster than the constraints of human brains.
We definitely need mathematicians to understand it and verify to us that the math is correct. And it takes a mathematician to even talk to the AI in a way that will be useful. There is no way I could personally get Claude Fable or Opean AI GPT 6 to generate a proof of Fermat's Theorem in LEAN. It actually take mathematical skills. And real depth to understand the work.
When Claude made progress on the Riemann conjecture, here are the kind of prompts used:
> Jarred's input was mostly limited to sending Claude messages of encouragement (mostly variants of “keep going” or “believe in yourself”).2 This seems to have helped Claude overcome some initial skepticism that it could make meaningful progress.
It seems like the kind of prompts a high schooler could come up with. The prompter is the creator of bun.js, a kind of janky JavaScript execution environment.
Math isn't a thing people need to care about any more. AI will soon take care of it. There may be some hobbyists, but progress will not depend on them. AI will come up with new math as needed when it builds for us.
You're overlooking the word "mostly" in the quote you trotted out. Ask yourself: what were the prompts that weren't encouragement and would you understand them if you looked them up?
It really really does. Popular/rock/folk/classical musicians all earn much the same way now: a blend of teaching, occasional performance fees, functions performances like weddings and galas, music-related side-gigs (composition, arrangement and recording for commercial music), and non-music-related side gigs — teaching non-musical things, gardening, painting and decorating, bar work, office temp work, even full time jobs (doctors and lawyers, accountants). I know a couple of classical musicians whose actual money-making music is playing other instruments in funk/rock functions bands.
Even the "best" or most famous musicians, popular or classical, have side gigs. Approximately nobody makes their money only from performing or from recordings; that ended twenty-five or thirty years ago.
Elite soloists, maybe — but that is actually a pretty expensive life to live. I would be surprised if many of them risked a life where they had no other job.
The idea that a "conservatory" system exists that meaningfully supports classical musicians is nonsense almost anywhere in the world, I would think. Even the first-chair musicians and conductors have side gigs.
(ETA: I can't believe this is a workable model for mathematicians, either. Maybe for a couple of dozen the world over. But there is no performance, no regionality, little in the way of public dissemination, little in the way of reflected glory for benefactors. No, the "conservatory" will perhaps be the intelligence agencies, as it was before.)
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