I keep seeing people point to AI solved games as evidence that AI advancements are less impactful than we might think. Usually it's chess ("today there are more players than ever!"). Most of the time these are bad analogies. Games are played for entertainment, so productivity is meaningless.
I never advanced in math past high school, but my assumption would be that we as a society aren't paying mathematicians to have fun[0]. The discoveries mathematicians make must translate into real improvements in engineering and other life improving fields. So why would we pay mathematicians to work on math much the same way, if a new machine-led way makes these discoveries faster and cheaper?
[0] Being a little facetious. I know I don't know what I don't know.
Many academic disciplines bring no everyday life improvements. They exist because they provide intrinsic value and long-term foundations, hence they aren't merely entertainment. Mathematics/physics happen to be fields that span the entirety of applied/pure spectrum. Those said, your question can be generalized: Should society continue funding human intellectual activities when AI can perform them substantially better?
Mathematicians can have as much fun as they want while working on math problems, they have the skills and the brains, why shouldn't they enjoy their work?
With math you never know up front what 'real improvements in engineering and other life improving fields' will require some key bit of it that someone interested in pure math came up with a decade or two (or 10) before we found an application.
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