One of my fundamental beliefs about the world is that Ramez Naam ought to blog more. Ramez is one of the world’s greatest futurists — he predicted the solar and battery revolutions long before these were widely understood. If you were reading Ramez in 2011, you were able to understand the future of both energy technology and climate change, […]
Powerus, a US defense company with ties to President Donald Trump’s sons, drew scrutiny after signing a memorandum of understanding this month with the Pakistani Army and offering Islamabad access to Ukrainian drone technology, sparking debate over the deal’s potential impact on India and wider regional security. Powerus was founded in October 2025 by veterans […]
When Donald Trump and Xi Jinping met in Washington on September 24, AI and Taiwan shared the agenda. Xi said AI should remain “under human control” and called for continued US-China dialogue on its risks and benefits. On Taiwan, he urged Washington to “oppose Taiwan independence” and handle the issue “with caution.” Trump, for his […]
Audiophiles are sometimes described in terms reserved for cults; a 1956 New Yorker story, referenced in Colin Vanderburg’s exceptional tour of extreme listening, refers to “a remarkably articulate group of zealots” and “an almost mystical reverence for sound.” Vanderburg travels among the believers, tracing the decades-long promise of “consumer audio innovations” to their technological apex: the New York International Audio Show, where audiophiles sample six-figure sound systems in pursuit of a signal as pure as the world they already inhabit.
More than anything, I have spent long passages of this earthly life sitting on my ass, listening. I listen to music, but what I hear is sound. Texture, timbre, and tone; clarity and detail; space and depth. And I hear, even more acutely, what thwarts sound. Shrill treble, muddled bass — for me these are worse than peeves. They offend hearing. They diminish the human sensorium. Earbuds repulse me; laptop speakers grate; a tabletop Bluetooth unit is a kind of vandalism.
The word audiophile — etymologically, one who “loves to hear” — has a wine-sipping pretension that I hate, but sometimes an ugly shoe fits. Like similarly suffixed psychopathologies, the term suggests a state of warped dependence, of inbent sublimation. I didn’t set out to be this way, but neither have I ever sought help. My symptoms are apparent, their causes obscure. What, after all, do we love when we love sound?
Longreads has published hundreds of original stories—personal essays, reported features, reading lists, and more—and more than 14,000 editor’s picks. And they’re all funded by readers like you. Become a member today.
Mark and Betsy Blondin | Longreads | September 22, 2026 | 2,702 words (10 minutes)
We left Boyne City, Michigan, in the fall of 1996 in a 34-foot Coachmen motorhome towing a minivan, with three children, a golden retriever not originally part of the plan, and a desktop computer on a stand bolted to the floor where a chair used to be. We stopped in Flint to say goodbye to family and retrofit the motorhome for the road. Mark’s father had died that June. His mother was devastated, and for a while the question wasn’t which route to choose but whether to go at all. We left Flint on October 4. Five miles later, the motorhome shut down.
A loose fuel line.
A few miles after the fuel line was fixed, we were surprised by a flat tire on the van’s tow dolly, and then, unbelievably, we bent a bumper while putting the van back on the dolly. It was past seven in the evening. We were finally on our way to Cleveland, Ohio.
That was day one. What we built over the following nine months—25,000 miles through 40 states—would go on to earn a Yahoo! Cool Site designation, a presentation at a US Department of Education national conference, and a place in the federal Education Resources Information Center archive. On the road, we filed over 1,500 emails and website dispatches from museum lobbies, hotel reception desks, libraries, and wherever we could find a phone jack and someone willing to let us run a telephone cord to their wall.
Google would not exist for another two years. The word “blog” had not yet been coined. We were doing something that had no name and no manual, and we were doing it over a dial-up modem while living in a motorhome.
Blondins’ Assignment America was both the name of our trip and the website we built in real time as we traveled. We had a partnership with Northwest Academy, a science and technology charter school in northern Michigan in its first year of operation, that made it possible. We had prepared to make the case for why our children—Donald, 14, and twins Kelly and Stacy, 11—would not attend the 1996–97 school year in a conventional sense. The school board didn’t just accommodate us; they encouraged us. Northwest Academy loaned us a laptop and a 1.2 MP digital camera, and we took their curriculum on the road.
An article from September 26, 1996, in Petoskey News-Review.
The idea had been circulating for some time. For over a year, we had been looking at our future and considering ideas for our next step. Watching The Bridges of Madison County and the questions it raises about the road not taken confirmed for us that we could do something unconventional and educational. Our adventure was also, after Mark’s 12-year career run at Coca-Cola, exactly what we needed.
Red flags of risk waved. In Betsy’s 1996 site bio before the trip began, she wrote her own reasons for going: “I hope [the children] learn that although it is not always easy, unconventional choices in life can be made. Quitting my part-time job as a writer for The Citizen in Boyne City for this adventure was not easy for me. Neither is the financial risk, but I believe it will be worth it.”
What emerged was a family travel journal published to the web, which we updated continuously with photographs and written dispatches. On the site we invited visitors to submit their own travel stories and organically grew a readership we couldn’t really see or measure. Blondins’ Assignment America, our family’s online home, resided at blondins.com, running on Microsoft FrontPage 97.
It is still there. We have not updated the code. The link list on the homepage points to AltaVista, HotBot, and WebCrawler. Many of the links are broken. It is an archive, broken links and all—a well-preserved time capsule.
We were doing something that had no name and no manual, and we were doing it over a dial-up modem while living in a motorhome.
This archive holds more than our travel dispatches. Each family member had their own web page. Donald created Donald.com on GeoCities, a web hosting service that allowed users to create and publish websites for free. He dated his site-building career to November 27, 1996—54 days into the trip. One section with links to tutorials existed to teach strangers how to build websites of their own. The note for November 18, 1997, reads: “I have photoshop! Major site changes are coming.”
The photographs were 640 by 480 pixels, because anything larger would take a reader minutes to load; we could feel our audience’s patience through the phone line. We uploaded our dispatches whenever we could find a connection—this fundamental part of our publishing process was not on a schedule, nor was it guaranteed. Seven weeks in, parked in Sarasota, Florida, Mark wrote in his journal that he hoped to get something on the site before we left. The week before, in Jacksonville, three days had passed with no update.
When we were lucky, we were able to upload our accounts of adventures on the day they happened.
Stacy posted on October 15, 1996: “Dear Journal: Today was not my favorite day, but it was okay. We spent half the day looking for a place to check our e-mail and were successful. Then we went to the Portland Museum of Art where we saw some neat artwork by Winslow Homer, Andrew Wyeth, etc. Later that night we went swimming while Dad and Donald went to Maine Internet Connections. Kelly and I had lots of fun playing at the pool. We slept once again at the college police parking lot.”
Kelly wrote about our hike on the Lost Mine Trail in the Chisos Mountains of Big Bend National Park in Texas on January 9, 1997. “The trail was supposedly five and a half miles, but straight uphill. We made it back down in about 45 minutes. When we got back, we did some laundry. For dinner, we had barbecue chicken in tortilla shells. There was still snow on the Chisos. There is a legend that there is gold in the mountain.”
Our stories traveled unfiltered into the world for anyone anywhere to read.
In our 34-foot home, the dinette was the flat surface where we spread out school work and projects and wrote in our journals. It also converted to a bed for Donald. When he wanted to sleep before the rest of us, the cry went out to clear the dinette—a plea or a command, depending on the night. Years later we could still hear echoes of “clear the dinette!”
The web of 1996 was not yet monetized in the way it is today. The internet then wasn’t flooded with platforms competing for your attention and harvesting and selling your data, or algorithms constantly tuned to optimize for engagement. At the time, Yahoo! had editors—actual people employed to look at websites and decide which ones were worth surfacing to other people. That web lasted about a decade before it was dismantled, piece by piece, in favor of one that extracts profits from similar interactions.
We were the beneficiaries of that architecture and didn’t know it was temporary.
Logistics in the physical world were more challenging than in the world online. Six weeks in, we were low on propane, parked in a friend’s driveway in Maplewood, New Jersey, taking the van into New York City on day trips. The only place that filled RV tanks was in Jersey City. We left the van behind and drove the motorhome onto streets built for nothing that long. Following sketchy directions, we stopped several times to ask for help. The horns behind us did not let up. We found the place, got the propane, and worked our way back through the traffic.
It was one of the worst days of our trip.
Some of our best days resulted from meeting people while finding ways to get online. Back on day one at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, we told our story, and after a momentary pause, the receptionist at the information desk gave us her chair. We sat at her desk in that major museum and filed our dispatches while visitors walked up to ask for directions to the dinosaurs. We did our best to help.
The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, also in Cleveland, gave us free admission, a press kit, and a phone line. The Great Lakes Science Center nearby, and new that year, gave us free admission and a tour by their PR director. We got better at telling the story, and three charming children helped.
A man named Pierre at a Portland, Maine, YMCA spent an hour trying every phone line in the building to help us connect.
In New York City, our communication efforts found us, just a bit embarrassed, walking down the aisle in our travel clothes to seats five rows from the stage at The King and I. Mark had called the box office that afternoon and told a woman named Sandy our story. Our tickets were waiting at will call for a magical theater night.
A 7-Eleven outside Washington, DC, became a nightly ritual: We’d run a 50-foot cord to the backroom, upload the day’s pages, check and send email, and play a trivia game about the museums we’d visited. Correct answers were worth a Slurpee. That is what the technology was for.
Somewhere past the Four Corners Monument on the Navajo Nation, we ran out of gas less than a mile short of a station that had no can to sell us. A man drove past, saw our motorhome stopped on the shoulder, and turned around. He went home for a gas can and brought back enough gas for us to reach the pump. We never learned his name. This is what human kindness did.
We were the beneficiaries of that architecture and didn’t know it was temporary.
Betsy filed a few freelance columns for The Citizen from the road. Her parents mailed printed issues of the newspaper to whatever general-delivery post office or friend’s or relative’s address we could predict two weeks ahead.
The yeses got bigger as the trip went on. At the JFK Presidential Library outside of Boston, which also gave us free admission, Mark asked if we could park the motorhome in the lot overnight. The staff said yes, and after our visit they showed us where to park and locked the gate behind us. One family, one motorhome, one golden retriever, inside the locked grounds of a federal presidential library, with a view of Boston in the dark. Nobody had a policy for that. Someone had a key and decided yes.
When we needed someone to take Buddy for the month we spent in Hawaii, we found him a home through a golden retriever email list. It connected us to a breeder in Morton, Washington, who knew a young man near Seattle raising his own golden for a 4-H project. He needed the money; Buddy needed a yard. The family also had room for the motorhome. Nobody took a percentage. Nobody optimized the match.
No matter where we were, the realities of our past intruded on our adventure. The family parked the motorhome in Pacifica, California, and waited while Mark flew back to Michigan. He had been fired by Coca-Cola Enterprises in March 1995, and his age-discrimination suit had reached the deposition stage. It ran from nine in the morning to 5:30 p.m. His mother waited at the house our family still owned but no longer lived in. With the retirement savings spent down, much was dependent on the court case going well.
One family, one motorhome, one golden retriever, inside the locked grounds of a federal presidential library, with a view of Boston in the dark. Nobody had a policy for that. Someone had a key and decided yes.
We returned home in June 1997, rich in experience and financially broke. A brief exchange at a campground became an unforgettable memory. Betsy had told an elderly man she was worried the children wouldn’t understand or appreciate what the trip had been. He thought about it. “Maybe it’s not a matter of appreciating it as something unique or separate,” he told her. “It will simply become part of who they are.”
We spent the summer running an ice cream and yogurt business, and planning the future. While researching, we discovered a request for abstracts from the organizers of a US Department of Education conference called “Families, Technology, and Education.” We were accepted as featured speakers and off to Chicago that October.
A PowerPoint to help tell our story and a video our children had made in Big Bend National Park on its plant and animal life fit the conference title in every way. On a stage in front of 400 educators from around the country, we made our presentation. During the Q&A period, Donald fielded several questions like a pro. Our paper, People Make Dreams Come True, and Technology Expands the Possibilities: An Educational Journey across the United States, seemed close to becoming a template for the future of education—and we had played a role.
In June 1998, an email arrived from a stranger in New York.
His name was Ted Sammons, and he worked in the editorial department of Broadway Books. He had seen Blondins’ Assignment America on Yahoo!’s “Cool Site” listing and had been impressed—and, he admitted, a bit jealous. He believed the story of our trip would make a good book, and he wanted to know if we’d thought about writing one. Of course we had.
We made our pitch, but ultimately, the editorial board passed. Their stated reason was not enough tragedy.
In 1998, our story was: family leaves, family travels, family lands well. We both began new careers. It’s an adventure with an enviable ending. Eventually, Donald went to Berkeley, and Kelly and Stacy went to Harvard.
In December 1997, we put the Boyne City house on the market, loaded the motorhome for its last trip, and landed in Carlsbad, California, one of our favorite cities discovered on our journey. It was there that Betsy began work as a managing editor and Mark went into the technology industry. Our children thrived.
The household that once ran a 50-foot cord into a 7-Eleven backroom to send the day’s mail now talks on platforms that eavesdrop on what we say.
A decade passed, and the publisher Betsy worked for went under. Cloud computing came for the company Mark worked for, and then for the storage business he started. In 2009, we lost our Carlsbad house.
Getting from Carlsbad to a city on the Portuguese coast took 10 more years and three continents worth of seeking. But that isn’t this story.
Today, the children are grown and our family is scattered across four countries. The household that once ran a 50-foot cord into a 7-Eleven backroom to send the day’s mail now talks on platforms that eavesdrop on what we say.
Our children’s dispatches still live where they filed them, and how they perceive the trip is not a question we have to ask in 2026. We see it in them. In their curiosity, courage, and adaptability that can partly be traced back to Cleveland. The older, wise man at the campground had predicted correctly. It has indeed become a part of each of us.
Recently, we went looking for who still visits the site. The statistics page is a dead link; it has outlived the instrument that measured it.
We both still write, and Betsy still edits, from a town on the Portuguese coast—a domain renewed annually, hosting billed monthly, a newsletter on a platform that takes its percentage. Every function we had for free in 1996, now itemized. The North Central Michigan College server had hosted our website and asked for nothing.
While the early web afforded us online advantages, the real-world experiences and connections we enjoyed would not have been possible without the human kindness and generosity we found along the way. Both human and online access made our adventure possible.
Our story is a record of an internet that no longer exists: the one with human editors, not algorithms, discovering and surfacing content worth seeing. The one that offered real access and possibility, resulting in a federal agency highlighting our work and an editor at a major publishing house discovering our project. The one that connected us to a host family for our dog and motorhome in rural Washington, no strings attached. That internet—serendipitous, kind, free, and open—is gone.
Nine months, 25,000 miles, 40 states. Three kids who were there for all of it. A golden retriever who died years later in Carlsbad. A motorhome that is long gone.
And a website that is, in the most literal sense, still on its way to Cleveland.
Mark and Betsy Blondin are living and writing in Vila do Conde, Portugal, currently at work on a memoir of the thirty years that followed Assignment America. Betsy is a longtime writer and editor atWordMetro.comwho compiled and published Migraine Expressions: A Creative Journey Through Life with Migraine. Together, they published At Home Abroad: Today’s Expats Tell Their Stories. Mark’s work has appeared inThe Humanist, and he writes atmarkblondin.comandMaterial Witness.
In 2022, medical CT scanners let Egyptologists peer inside sealed sarcophagi without ever lifting a lid. In 2026, the same basic technology — pointed not at a pharaoh’s mummy but at two silver brooches from a German field — has just done something similar for archaeology north of the Roman frontier. The brooches came out […]
Meta would rather pay out billions to teen mental health programs than risk losing teen addicts on Instagram.
The day before running full-page ads across the New York Times, Washington Post and LA Times calling on competitors TikTok and YouTube to adopt tougher child safety standards, Meta settled a landmark lawsuit brought by 52 state attorneys general accusing Instagram of intentionally addictive design. Community organizer and parent advocate Amanda Getty says Meta’s efforts to spin its predatory business model as a responsible parenting issue are meant to distract users: Big Tech’s bottom line depends on hooking teens as young as possible.
Meta denied knowingly exposing minors to serious harm and misleading the public, but agreed to pay up to $18 billion over 10 years – workable for a company that made $60 billion in profit last year alone. Getty points to Meta’s track record of failing to implement – and actively lobbying against – the kinds of guardrails this settlement ostensibly imposes, including a 2024 investigation that found only a fraction of Instagram Teen Account safety protocols were functional. Meanwhile teens are still being bullied and nudged toward features associated with predatory grooming. Getty cites a 2018 internal strategy memo instructing Meta employees to “win big with teens” by bringing them in “as tweens.”
Meta fears losing young users to less regulated platforms; Getty argues that’s why it’s begging Google and TikTok to get in line, all the while shifting responsibility onto parents for a business model built on addiction by design.
“There’s no version of reform here that leads to an actual win for parents,” Getty says, arguing the fight isn’t about better parental controls – it’s about confronting economic predation targeting kids at scale
Galileo Galilei is remembered for pointing a simple two-lens tube at the sky and changing astronomy forever. What he is not remembered for is a four-lens telescope built more than a decade before historians thought such instruments existed — and yet that is exactly what a manuscript unearthed in Spain’s National Library now suggests he […]
In this story for MIT Technology Review, Sara Harrison explores the field of social robotics and the growing use of robot companions as therapy for autistic and other neurodivergent kids. These playful machines show promise: Research suggests that they can help children practice social skills and offer something overworked therapists and exhausted parents can’t—a patient companion, available 24/7. But Harrison also reports on their limitations and risks. Does this approach truly work? What about all the data gathered on the child? And what happens when a robot friend suddenly stops working and “dies”? A fascinating and unsettling look at tech that has moved into the most intimate corners of a family’s home.
While Moxie found herself in more and more people’s homes, Embodied still struggled to make money. In 2024, the company announced it would cease operations. Its robots—which depended on external servers that the company could no longer pay for—would descend into a deep slumber.
Videos of bereft children who seemed to have become deeply attached to the blue bot began to circulate online. “I don’t want her to leave,” wailed one child in a TikTok video. Desperate parents posted on TikTok, Instagram, and Reddit looking for solutions. “My autistic child is devastated and I’m pissed,” wrote one parent. “Hope Embodied gives us a couple days to say goodbye,” wrote another.
Tim Cook moves to executive chairman as John Ternus takes the CEO role, putting Apple under new leadership at a crucial moment for artificial intelligence.
In the new print issue of Esses, a quarterly print magazine covering motorsports and the culture around it, Duncan Fyfe writes about the most bizarre Formula One video game ever made. Centered around Gerhard Berger, a former racing driver from Austria who competed in F1 from 1984 to 1997, Gerhard Berger’s Formula 1 Quiz is a quirky video game from 1993 that raises more questions than it asks. Fyfe digs into the mystery, investigating the quiz’s grammatically awkward questions and the game’s developer, Austria Soft, whose existence is questionable. (Esses subscription may be required—consider becoming a member.)
THE REAL QUIZ, it soon becomes clear, is not a test of one’s F1 knowledge, but figuring out what the game expects to hear. This only becomes more difficult, and even sinister. Question nine: FROM WHAT COUNTRY IS JEAN ALESI REALLY? The answer is not France, where Alesi was born and grew up, and under whose flag Alesi competed for over a decade. To progress in the quiz, the game forces one to submit that Alesi was born to Italian parents, and thus is “really” from Italy.
The game’s questions all have correct answers that cannot be submitted, and yet they are less difficult to answer than these ones: Who made this game? Why? And what was Gerhard Berger thinking?
This story first appeared as the cover story in Issue 4 of The Atlas, a new global publication by Coda Story and The Continent. Sign up to the newspaper here.
In late July, at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in Philadelphia, the mathematician Jacob Tsimerman was awarded one of four Fields Medals – the highest honour in mathematics.
A few hours later, Tsimerman announced that he was joining OpenAI.
Tsimerman’s departure from theoretical mathematics, while at the absolute peak of his powers, highlights the fault line in a debate that is upending the normally quiet world of higher mathematics. “What a dick move,” said one mathematics professor, speaking to The Atlas off the record.
Tsimerman, who has written extensively about his fear of “omnicidal futures involving artificial intelligence” – a fear that AI could wipe out humanity, closely associated with the AI “doomer” community – has said he will work on OpenAI’s safety team.
Tsimerman and OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.
In recent months, OpenAI has announced proofs of various longstanding mathematical problems, solved with one of the company’s latest large language models. Other companies have also made advancements: RedNote, a Chinese AI model, obtained a perfect score at the International Mathematical Olympiad in Shanghai in July.
Human mathematicians, at all levels of the profession, are reeling from the implications. Tim Gowers, a professor at the University of Cambridge who helped to verify one of OpenAI’s proofs, has written that even if AI models fail to progress further, “we have still probably entered an era where it will become very difficult for humans to compete with AI at solving mathematical problems”.
This is a startling assessment – and a marketing coup for the likes of OpenAI.
“Mathematicians actually have a special role in this,” said Joshua Grochow, an associate professor in Computer Science and (by courtesy)Mathematics at the University of Colorado Boulder. “The AI companies’ PR pitch is essentially to say, ‘Look, we have solved math. the intellectually hardest thing ever, therefore we can solve everything.’ ”
LLMs have not solved math – far from it. Nonetheless, Grochow added, recently some capabilities have improved. “They are legitimately able to produce real math, new math that they had not produced before. So you can’t deny that utility. You can deny the extent of that utility, but you can’t say it’s all BS.”
Miek Messerschmidt, a senior lecturer in mathematics at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, recently used Anthropic’s Claude to take a crack at a problem that had stumped him. Claude solved it within 30 minutes. “How did I feel? You mean emotionally? I was relieved, because I didn’t have to go down this dead end any more. But I was also disconcerted by what this entity could do in such a short amount of time.”
This year’s Fields medallists: mathematicians Yu Deng (China), John Pardon (US), Jacob Tsimerman (Canada) and Hong Wang (China). Photo: Erin Blewett / AFP.
NEW VARIABLES
Mathematics has been disrupted by technological leaps before. The abacus. The mechanical calculator. The blackboard, even, which played an instrumental role in standardising training and mathematical notation (“It’s hard to research, because most of what’s written on blackboards doesn’t stay there very long,” said mathematics historian Michael Barany).
But AI is a different kind of disruption. Where previous advances helped mathematicians expand the frontiers of their knowledge, large language models threaten the livelihoods, and purpose, of mathematicians themselves.
“Our place in society at developing new ideas has been quite unthreatened for quite some time,” said Tim Chartier, a Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Davidson College. “For a long time, the frontier of mathematics could only be expired by the mathematicians themselves. There were no tools that could push into that boundary, except the research mathematician…At this current time, it’s not like we don’t need research mathematicians – but the landscape has changed so quickly, it’s hard to know what that will look like a year from now, two years from now.”
This matters for everyone: for thousands of years, mathematics has been considered to be the foundation of scientific knowledge. There is no physics without mathematics. No astronomy without mathematics. And there is no computer science – or AI – without mathematics. What happens if there are cracks in the foundation?
“I think that LLMs pose an existential threat to the mathematical community,” wrote Tasmin Chu, a PhD student at the California Institute of Technology, in an essay published on 2 August – the day after OpenAI released a set of ten new mathematical results, resolving or making progress on various problems.
“This is a polemic, not a press release,” Chu continued. “I know that others feel the same way; I have spent today crashing out and learning that top mathematicians I know are crashing out.”
Some of what mathematicians are worried about is the same as what everyone else is worried about: that AI will take their jobs; that AI companies have absorbed everyone’s work, and are reproducing it without attribution or compensation; that students aren’t learning properly any more; and that there won’t be jobs for them when they graduate.
But some worries are more specific to the field. Like the fear that, if mathematics becomes too reliant on particular AI models, then AI companies will have the power to restrict access to a select few – or make it prohibitively expensive. That promising young mathematicians, instead of turning to research, will use their talents instead to refine proprietary algorithms, which may or may not be used for the common good. That there will be no one left to understand, let alone vouch for, the mathematics produced by the machines. That objective truth, or anything close to it, is going to be much harder to prove – a fear shared with journalists, incidentally, who find it increasingly difficult to verify whether a photograph is real or fake.
2nd Century relief of a merchant using an abacus. Photo: Musée de La Cour d’Or - Metz Métropole.
MATHEMATICIAN IN THE LOOP
After speaking with more than a dozen leading mathematicians from around the world, The Atlas can confirm that Chu is not alone with her fears: it’s all anyone is talking about. The crisis is existential – and mathematicians are looking to one man in particular to guide them through it.
There are no working mathematicians who are truly famous. The closest anyone gets is Terence Tao, a professor at UCLA, who is often referred to as the world’s greatest living mathematician. A prodigy, Tao skipped five grades of school, receiving his masters degree at age 16. By 21, he had earned a PhD from Princeton, and was awarded the Fields Medal just ten years later, in 2006, for his pioneering work with Ben Green on prime number theory.
But what sets Tao apart, in a field infamously incomprehensible to outsiders, is his ability to communicate to both mathematicians and laypeople alike. This has made him a de facto spokesperson for the mathematics community – and extremely influential in setting its norms. “From all accounts he’s a lovely man,” said one researcher, speaking anonymously.
“But the social pressure to agree with Terry Tao is really strong.”
On July 24, the day after Jacob Tsimerman joined OpenAI, Tao gave a public lecture at the ICM titled “Mathematics in the Age of AI”. In it, he presents his “working hypothesis”: that AI tools for mathematics, which he already uses in his own research, will keep getting better. This will allow for collaboration on a vastly greater scale than has ever been possible before, Tao argues, and speed up the pace of research – revealing new, previously unimagined frontiers.
But it will also change, fundamentally, the role of human mathematicians. There will be little point in problem-solving – the computers will handle that. But the humans will still have to do the really hard work: understanding why AI-generated proofs are correct, and explaining this to others. The sooner they embrace this and plan accordingly, Tao concludes, the better.
The Atlas reached out to Terence Tao to request an interview. His human assistant, UCLA media relations officer Holly Ober, declined the request, making a referral instead to a “living document” which is maintained by Tao’s Claude AI assistant, on his website. This document synthesises Tao’s current thinking on AI, based on his public writings and talks, even “interviewing” Tao with follow-up questions.
As per his AI assistant, Tao believes that the topic of AI in mathematics is too important to be left to just a small number of spokespeople – and that his own “influence on this discussion should diminish as the rest of the community steps up.”
Terence Tao, often referred to as the world’s greatest living mathematician. Photo: OpenAI Academy.
AN UNSOLVED EQUATION
Not everyone believes in the inevitability of AI defining the future of mathematics. According to several sources, both organisers and funders were disappointed with the turnout at the ICM in Philadelphia. Despite the gravity of the occasion, the congress was not at capacity.
Ila Varma and Tarik Aougab, associate professors at the University of Toronto and Haverford College respectively, may have had something to do with that. In March, they launched a petition to boycott the ICM due to the ongoing war in Iran, increasing authoritarianism in the United States and the risks faced by visiting academics – if they were even allowed in. “AI companies were invited, but most African mathematicians who tried to attend couldn’t get visas,” Varma said.
More than 2,600 people signed the petition. For Varma, this is evidence that mathematicians may yet use their status to resist the influence – and the cash – of the big AI companies.
“There’s an idea that the positionality of mathematics in society is to decide who’s smart, who’s worthy of the most lucrative career opportunities and the privileges that go along with it. And now we are being asked to take this technology that is likely to be extremely unhealthy for users, that’s bad for the environment, this thing built on unethical labour, and our discipline is being used against many of our wishes to tell society that this thing is intelligent, and that you should let it do your thinking for you.”
Michael Harris, a professor at the Institut de Mathématiques de Jussieu in Paris, was at the ICM in Philadelphia. “The talks I attended on AI, starting with Tao’s public lecture, took pains to insist on the need for human mathematicians to make sense of anything produced in the name of the discipline, by machines or by humans,” he said. “There is a growing resistance to any use of AI whatsoever in mathematics, especially among young people, and this will become evident over the next few months.”
One of the clearest voices of dissent belongs to Max Weinreich, Assistant Professor of Mathematics at the City University of New York.
In an essay published earlier this month, Weinreich makes the case against what he describes as “artificial mathematics”: “Mathematicians do not need to use AI, nor should we use AI; soon, I argue, you will not want to have your name associated with AI. Instead, we should use our intellectual authority to oppose its development.”
His opposition is about more than mathematics, he told The Atlas. In his view, the environmental and financial implications of the AI boom pose major societal risks – and mathematicians, given their privileged position, are one of the few groups of people who can do anything about it.
As John Fletcher, a theoretical physicist and mathematician, observed: “There is a lot of power in being perceived as the smartest people in the world.”
Po-Shen Loh, a professor at Carnegie Mellon and former coach of the US International Mathematical Olympiad team, backs mathematicians to figure it out – by treating it like a maths problem. “AI is making mathematicians engage with the real world. They are smart enough to realise they have an existential crisis. They’re quickly racing down to discover all the dead ends, to see what works and what doesn’t.”
And when they figure it out, maybe they’ll let the rest of us know.
A version of this story, edited for length, first appeared in The Atlas newspaper. Additional reporting by: Shougat Dasgupta, Masho Lomashvilli, Irina Matchavariani.
Login
