Terence Tao recently observed that AI tools are like taking a helicopter straight to the destination. You miss all the benefits and insights of the journey itself. You simply arrive at the endpoint, which captures only a fraction of the real value in solving hard problems. Yet this may be the future. Humans won't just skip the intermediate steps—they may no longer need to understand the AI's outputs at all. This marks a higher-order state of our symbolic systems, much like how we don't need to know whether the scientific theories operating under our current "scientific paradigm" are absolutely, fundamentally true. We just use them, they work, and we move forward. In the future, mathematicians will be replaced by AI on a massive scale—and this is an inevitable trend. AI is driving a profound civilizational paradigm shift. Just as hundreds of years ago vast numbers of Confucian scholars and priests were displaced by the scientific community, today's transition is even more fundamental: humanity's primary cognitive engine is moving from science to algorithms. I've been writing about this exact shift—"from science to algorithms" since 2017. In the Algorithm Age, the force shaping humanity's mainstream cognition will no longer be humans themselves.