Why Is the Doorman Fallacy Useful for Math and AI?

Ankur Moitra treats the doorman fallacy as a good way to think about mathematics in the age of AI. The fallacy boils a complex job down to the simplest, most visible task and misses the value that is harder to articulate.

A doorman appears to hold the door for people coming and going. In New York, he enjoyed talking with the doorman, and a sliding door that detects arrivals and departures would miss the parts of the job that add a lot of value. The simplest visible part of a mathematician's job is proving theorems, including conjectures left open for hundreds of years, like Fermat's last theorem. A mathematician is someone who thinks deeply. Proving old conjectures is a byproduct. The work also builds new theories, new ways of looking at old things, and new conceptual connections. AI might swallow the less visible work too, but mathematics is not there yet.

The moment is momentous, and it is the wrong time to hit the panic button. It is the right time for the field to recenter on its values and talk about them. The work has a plurality of aesthetics and goals. When problem solving for well-defined problems becomes cheap, the goals orthogonal to problem solving become much more valuable.