Professor Terence Tao, widely considered the greatest living mathematician, is right in questioning the motives of AI companies.

It is right to think out loud about whether companies like Anthropic and OpenAI have the best interests of humanity at heart or whether they are just laying down the groundwork for actions that will financially benefit them and their shareholders.

In light of OpenAI recently releasing full or partial solutions to 372 unsolved mathematical problems, it’s sobering how Professor Tao considers mathematicians like himself “the canary in the coal mine.”

The warning isn’t really about another impressive LLM. It’s about what happens when unsolved problems that are meant to challenge us and bring out the best in us, become marketing fodder in the AI race. Solutions arrive faster than anyone can analyse, verify, and learn from. The pain and joy of the human experience, intricately intertwined with the process, are no more.

If this is happening in mathematics, is any work that depends on specialised expertise and judgement safe? I guess that’s the question I’ve been wrestling with.

If brilliant mathematicians like Professor Tao are having an existential moment because of where AI is headed, I don’t need to be ashamed of thinking about how it will shape my own future as an IT professional and small business owner.

One line of his has stayed with me. In a post on 6 October, he wrote that solutions to open problems are now being “harvested at large scale in an unsustainable fashion, leaving entire fields of mathematics much less fertile.” I don’t want my own field to go that way.

What worries me isn’t AI itself. AI can now do much of the technical side of my work, and it often does it well. What worries me is a quiet assumption creeping in among business owners and decision makers: that AI can do the rest too, so they no longer need someone like me, with decades of lived experience, walking alongside them.

What I bring isn’t a list of technical answers. I look at the whole business: its mission, its goals, its values and its people. Then I help the owner weigh all of that, so together we can work out which problems are worth focusing on, which ones to fix, and which solution is right, whether it involves technology or not. AI can list the options. It can’t weigh them for your business like a human being can. And the weighing is key to making decisions that matter.

That’s the part of my work I want to protect.

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If you’re a business owner or decision maker wondering how much of your thinking you can safely hand to AI, and what that looks like in your own business, I’d be glad to talk it through with you. Book a discovery call and we can take it from there.