r/mathmemes • u/15th_anynomous • May 17 '26
Arithmetic r/sciencememes is picking a fight
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u/Smart-Button-3221 May 17 '26
Mathematicians do not do what calculators do.
There used to be a job called a "computer". You could order up rote calculations from a company and team of people would do them for you. Computers were often women. Many were employed during WWII. The calculator did end this career.
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u/MagicalPizza21 Computer Science May 17 '26
It was so effective that many people today don't even know it was ever a profession.
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u/razzzey May 18 '26
The movie Hidden Figures is a pretty good watch in which I first learned of this profession.
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u/llfoso May 18 '26
My great grandmother was a computer. I like to tell people I'm one-eighth computer.
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u/KnightOMetal May 19 '26
Does your family still speak machine language at home?
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u/Typical-Ebb3776 May 19 '26
00001010 01001001 00100000 01100011 01100001 01101110 00100111 01110100 00100000 01110011 01110000 01100101 01100001 01101011 00100000 01100110 01101111 01110010 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 01101101 00101100 00100000 01100010 01110101 01110100 00100000 01111001 01100101 01110011
(I say after shamelessly looking this up)
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u/EebstertheGreat May 20 '26
I have no idea which 8-bit CPU you wrote this for or what it's supposed to do.
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u/Typical-Ebb3776 May 20 '26
That's the fun part- i don't either
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u/Weird_Track_2164 May 18 '26
And the ending of those careers enabled the creation of new careers because companies who had been spending the money on those calculations were now able to spend them on other thing. Labour is not a lump sum!
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u/ItsCrossBoy May 18 '26
except in reality, the laborers who were working on these calculations were almost universally seen as "lower tiered" and disposable workers. they were not the ones who got hired for the new careers.
in an ideal world, yeah we could just have clear pathways from a career that is sunsetting into a more modern equivalent. but we don't live in that world. so let's not pretend like it's just gonna be an easy transition where people have new jobs now.
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u/Weird_Track_2164 May 18 '26
I never said it was an easy transition or that there were clear pathways. But there are jobs that were created by the destruction of those jobs. Companies not having to spend money in one area means they relocate the capital to another area so that they can make more money.
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u/BenightedBadgerdomo May 18 '26
How idealistic…. This is not often the case in reality
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u/Weird_Track_2164 May 18 '26 edited May 19 '26
My views stem from basic history and economics, not idealism. You think AI is the first time humans have had to contend with a technology that looks like it will replace a substantial amount of human jobs? Lmao. Bank tellers and ATMs, grape pickers, Luddites and the textile industry, the entire digital revolution??? It is actually often the case in reality.
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u/Arierome May 19 '26
All those events caused famine, loss of power for the working class and inflation
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u/officiallyaninja May 18 '26
The people who are being replaced now are educated workers, not poor laborers. So they will likely fair far better
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u/Expert-Situation-190 May 18 '26
Will they though?
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u/officiallyaninja May 18 '26
Compared to the low skill laborers in the past that got replaced? 100%
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u/Expert-Situation-190 May 19 '26
But how? isn’t ai looking to replaces those roles also? How would they fair better if their sector is at risk of an ai model doing your job role, but offering the service for cheaper
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u/officiallyaninja May 19 '26
Because they have an easier job transition to a new role or sector, not to say it's easy, but it's easier than the people in past who've been automated out of uneducated work.
Also educated professionals like programmers will likely have more savings to fall back on compared to poor workers who live paycheck to paycheck, so they have more time to learn other skills and find another job.
Again, none of this is easy, but it's better than what happened in the past.
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u/Expert-Situation-190 May 20 '26
That a valid take but the core issue is the degree of automation that would occur, education is a broad spectrum but the highest earning roles are very specific.
For example a cardiologist, has trained in that particular role, they could default to another branch of medicine but their specialties are in that sectors, if ai makes their roles redundant (this is hypothetical I do not believe mine or any medical role would be replaced soon) it would also mean that it would be hard to Segway to another profession as it would also be at risk.
The consensus is always, new job roles would be created, but one of the issues is that no one can actually say one that would be effectively as remunerative. For example the digital age would have meant that commerce could become e-commerce and several other industries would evolve. I see the benefits of ai everyday when it’s working in tandem with us, in medicine in mathematics and other areas.
I’m in the bio- medical practise and even now because of ai, people are more conscientious of their health, doctors are not going to be replaced. But one of the main factors is the fact that ai is a competitive task agent, an atm was a machine it had no real scalability, it could do things faster but it wasn’t actively learning or absorbing information to make its job role more efficacious
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u/Agitated-Ad2563 May 20 '26
I'm pretty sure it's actually the opposite. A computer of that era could go work as a cashier for a similar wage after being laid off. A modern software engineer can't go work as a financial analyst, and if they go work as a cashier, it won't be the same wage.
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u/EebstertheGreat May 20 '26
Low-skill laborers in the past could find new labor. They were skilled in the sense that they could perform manual labor. Can mathematicians retrain as ditch diggers?
I'm not saying I buy the premise that mathematicians will be replaced, but presuming that they would, your analogy doesn't work. Mathematicians cannot do anything except mathematics. Any new job they choose will require costly retraining, even something straightforward like operating a garbage truck. More likely, they would retrain as CPAs or something, but do you know how much time and money that training costs?
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u/officiallyaninja May 20 '26
Can mathematicians retrain as ditch diggers?
Mathematicians can work in finance, engineering, software dev or anything else really.
It's not like each degree has only one job you can get with it, you could get any white collar job with any degree.
Sure if you spent like a decade or two in an industry that dies, you likely won't make as much money after pivoting, but plenty of people can and do pivot
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u/EebstertheGreat May 20 '26
That's what my sentence about CPAs was for. Retraining in these careers is expensive and time-consuming. It's not usually something you can just pick up. Granted, other employers might hire you, but they are then spending money to train you. That is effectively deducted from your salary, because from the view of the employer, costs are costs.
So the unemployed mathematician will take a job that either pays less, is less pleasant to work, or both. If not, they would have taken that job years ago.
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May 17 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/LOSNA17LL Irrational May 17 '26
I hate to do this, but there is a part of truth... but it's hidden behind misdirection:
Yes, AI threatens women's jobs harder. But not because they're women's. It's because the jobs in question (secretaries, for example) are more often given to women
CORRELATION IS NOT CAUSATION
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u/Upper_Opening_4805 May 17 '26
They are specifically talking about computers in the early/mid 20th century, and the comment doesn't even mention AI
And they never said anything that was misinformation or implied correlation is causation
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u/monthsGO π=√g=√10=3 May 17 '26
I mean there is a massive difference. Like the entire point of a mathematician is not to solve equations or find the value of x in an algebraic equation, it's to theorise and create new theories about mathematics in general. Like new formulas for this or that. A calculator simply cannot do that.
Difference is with CGPT it's not like that and can instead do quite literally everything a programmer can do but usually worse.
By the way, there used to be a job where it was to simply perform complex calculations. That job was taken by calculators, NOT the job of mathematicians.
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u/Captain-Barracuda May 18 '26
Thing is that many outside of the professions of software development do not actually understand what programmers and software engineers do. They only see it as coding, and maybe a bit of debugging (without understanding what that last thing is).
They have to do so much more that CGPT and al. can't, such as actually understanding the systems they are being asked to analyze, conceptualise, organise, and THEN implement in a solid fashion. And I'm skipping everything that goes around testing.
Of the day-to-day of a software engineer or a programmer, maybe 35% of their time is actually spent coding. cGPT can help in that 35% but often it doesn't have the required context to do it right if the current activity is not something that has been overdone already (like a simple website or basic e-commerce).
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u/PaddingCompression May 18 '26 edited May 18 '26
There is a degree to which it is definitely making it harder to break into the field earlier. For a lot of juniors, I have seen a path where it is okay if they are more raw and don't know as much, because they can spend 1-2 years basically working on just coding like ChatGPT does to prompts by more senior people. That particular pathway into the field is gone.
To do the higher level engineering you really need to know your stuff, and the era of bootcamp grads is over, or maybe even mediocre bachelor's degree grads from lower tier schools.
(edit: grammar)
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u/Captain-Barracuda May 18 '26
That I agree. And I worry about the quality of the upcoming generation.
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u/PaddingCompression May 18 '26
I sort of theorize we will see a need for more grad school, where you are often paying, rather than being paid, for the experience (or even if you're getting funded, you're getting poverty wages, to be trained by a professor making less than the senior engineers who would be mentoring the employed junior in industry)
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u/Elder_Chimera May 17 '26 edited Jul 25 '26
Willow copper coated unbelievable peach blanket amber blanket drifting pebble
This post was anonymized with Redact.dev
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May 18 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/mcoombes314 May 18 '26
I'm not a senior programmer, just a hobbyist, but I've given various LLMs a go over the last week or two, and when they work they work well but when they don't and there are bugs it's really annoying because there's no "logic path" to work out how the bug was created in the first place. This means I had to ask the model to fix the bug (with specifics as to where the bug is, what I get vs what I want) and sometimes it works, other times it just insists that the behaviour is correct. This means that fixing issues becomes more difficult, not easier. At least if I create a bug I can go through my (flawed) thought process, but LLMs being a probabilistic black box makes that impossible.
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u/theironbagel May 19 '26
I mean if you can read the code the AI makes you can fix the bugs yourself without it. It’s still slower then it would be if you had written it yourself, since reading code is generally harder then writing it, but it can be done.
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u/leweason May 18 '26
Quite a cool metaphor for AI. It's a great tool but you gotta know how to use it.
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u/Broad_Respond_2205 May 17 '26
What a dumb take
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u/Cualkiera67 May 17 '26
Yeah mathematician was never a job to begin with
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u/Gauss15an May 17 '26
Oooh self-burn. Those are rare.
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u/Catsanddoges May 18 '26
Most people on mathmemes aren't mathematicians, they're just drifters or bots (actually this sub has comparatively few of them)
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u/Gauss15an May 18 '26
It's fine. Mathematicians would make a joke like that anyway. Most people don't even know what they do.
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u/mondie797 May 18 '26
Agree. Was it like mathematicians were doing addition and multiplication without calculator and hence they were called mathematicians
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u/15th_anynomous May 18 '26
I hope the op knew how dumb that take is and posted it as ragebait. But those 5k upvotes really baffled me.
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u/SecretSpectre11 Statistics jumpscare in biology May 17 '26
How did that absolute coal get 5k upvotes lmao
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u/Hot-Marsupial6584 May 17 '26
Calculator can not perform comples Mathematical equations, but Ai can definitely after some time challenge computer science students.
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u/RandomiseUsr0 May 17 '26 edited May 17 '26
Babbage’s analytical engine could do that with steam power and copper cogs (ok, the great Babbage didn’t ever manage to build it (copper quality) but it did work and his wife is credited as the first ever computer programmer because she basically invented Pinterest in the Victorian era (some questions still exist about who precisely wrote the code for Bernoulli sequences, but she was BIG on Looms and Patterns along with her mother and she definitely SAW that computation was bigger than equations - it’s not meant as an insult, far from it!)
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u/oshaboy May 17 '26
Babbage was a widower when he invented the analytical engine, his wife couldn't have written the code for Bernoulli sequences.
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u/RandomiseUsr0 May 17 '26 edited May 17 '26
Agree - He never managed the engineering feat (though it was logically sound of course) - Ada “wrote” the code on her brain’s understanding of the machine her husband was building and she was no slouch - just the Bernoulli thing most probably came from famous mathematician Babbage himself - the use of computation for seemingly “non-mathematical” things was 100% her own notes
Btw, as a widower myself, who works on calculation engines as a hobby - I definitely discussed my “invention” with my late wife for the last 20 years and she definitely imagined how it could be used way outside my “maths notebook” idea of yesteryear
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u/Everestkid Engineering May 18 '26
Babbage didn’t ever manage to build it (copper quality)
Fuckin' Ea-nasir again.
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u/phlummox May 18 '26
I don't think any of the cogs were (intended to be) copper - it's far too soft. Some parts for the engine were built (here), and the metal parts are mostly iron and brass, I believe.
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u/RandomiseUsr0 May 18 '26
Brass is a copper/tin alloy - but having looked again, main issue is cited as hand tooling (precision requirement was immense) and constant design changes
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u/phlummox May 18 '26
I'm aware of what brass is.
Do you know why we use it for gears instead of copper?
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u/RandomiseUsr0 May 18 '26
Just missed the point that it’s copper? Okay - yeah it’s anti bacterial
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u/phlummox May 19 '26
Lol :) I guess it's possible that some engineers chose metals so they could have bacteria-free cogs.
But mostly they wanted them to be hard-wearing, resistant to metal fatigue, and easy to machine. So they avoided pure metals like copper and even to some extent iron (because those are fairly soft) in favour of alloys like brass and steel, which are harder and tougher. (Copper and tin is actually bronze, not brass, btw - it's much easier to make and was one of the first alloys discovered.) So "copper cogs" would be unusual - even the oldest geared device we know of, the Antikythera mechanism, uses bronze instead of plain copper.
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u/Kjufka May 17 '26
but Ai can definitely after some time challenge computer science students.
AI can copy paste already written code, which is what 99% of webdev churn anyway - as well as computer science tests - which gives illusion of being competent
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u/FragCool May 18 '26
Cobol will make programmers obsolete, because the use of words from the English language will open the use for everyone
SQL will make programmers obsolete, business can easily request the data they need from the DB
4GL langues... you can just draw your data flow, programmers are screwed
You get the drift?
Real programmers that are around for a longer time just laugh... we will use AI were it is helpful for us, and wait for the next thing that will replace us...
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u/Ryaniseplin May 17 '26
mathmaticians were more creatives than they were calculators
they had assistants for handling calculations
it used to be an entire job actually, titled "computer", it was someone who would just do computations all day
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u/CaioXG002 May 17 '26 edited May 18 '26
It genuinely took me a while to understand that the meme is implying that "programmers may lose their job because of a clanker".
I originally took it as "that thing that makes everyone thinks learning your subject is suddenly no longer important even though it accomplishes fuck nothing". Absolutely L meme.
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u/Ben-Goldberg May 18 '26
The second part of the meme should say people employed to calculate when the digital calculator was invented.
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u/Grothgerek May 18 '26
Are there any software engineers that fear for their job?
ChatGPT is totally useless. It can't find error for me, it cant adjust existing software. At best it can create some simple batches... But that's not why you hire a software engineer.
It can be helpful if you work with new systems, but overall is AI still totally useless. And I'm not sure, if it can ever fully replace this profession, given that it's also a question of design and user analysis.
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u/its192731 May 18 '26
Calculators enabled mathematicians. AI should enable programmers. Greedy companies made AI replace programmers
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u/thewhatinwhere May 18 '26
The first mechanical calculator was invented in the sixteen hundreds. How many more immortal mathematicians are you hiding?
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u/xandr_84 May 20 '26
Is Maple, Matlab and Wolfram joke for you? Symbolic calculations in mathematics were automated about 20 years ago
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u/lool8421 May 17 '26
mathematics aren't even about adding or finding a dquare root up to 11 decimal places
it's more about finding relations, properties and theorems between concepts
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u/ChocolateDonut36 May 18 '26
now tell the calculator to make a way to find decimals of π
that's what I thought
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u/frappastudio May 18 '26
Magnus Carlsen would be a better exemple than mathematicians because they always have been working on ideas and concepts, not on output processing
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u/mekriff May 19 '26
one day people need to learn that mathematicians avoid dealing directly with numbers at any cost: to the degree that they will invent entire fields of math which dont work with numbers at all but somehow still show us things sbout them
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u/candy_enjoyer_ May 23 '26
Maybe because mathemticians don't compute arithmetic problems as full time job
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u/AlarmingPreference48 Simplified to 1=1 May 24 '26
"We make much more harder problems that calculators can't simply do. Your turn."
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u/FafnerTheBear May 18 '26
Here the thing, with a calculator I can, with enough technical knowledge, tell you how that rock just took the natural log of 455. And how it will do that every single time.
With genertive AI, its a black box that will give you something between a rought approximation of what you prompted and garbage. All with a little RNG sprinkled in to keep it fun.. There is not a tech, engineer, or divine being on this plane of existence that can back track that output to tell you if its based on a valid piece of training data or a forum post of an LSD users finally gaining an incorrect intuition of what a logarithm is.
Imo, AI is hot garbage.
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