Many fields spend enormous energy on prestige allocation. Judging prize winners, refereeing papers, organizing seminars, deciding who gets tenure. Mathematicians are not highly paid; their compensation is largely in prestige and in the intellectual enjoyment of the work. Prestige allocation is very important. I am not demeaning this. Poor prestige allocation leads to warped incentives and a field of work getting benchmaxxed away from its underlying social goal. (China's cash-for-publications policy, which was ended in 2020, was a classic case of this.) It is appropriate for a field to spend of energy getting prestige allocation right, the same way it's important for a company to spend extra time and energy to make sure that capable employees are recognized and rewarded. So why are people reacting badly to the mathematics letter? Put aside the Navier-Stokes drama, we all agree that was scandalous. That didn't need a letter. This letter is about much more than that: AI Labs, you are breaking our prestige allocation structures. Who do we give prizes to? Who should get tenure? Who will give the seminars? How do we continue to motivate young mathematicians? We carefully calibrated these systems, and you are breaking them in the search for glory in a different prestige system than our own. Show some respect for the way we do things. The reason why tech people are reacting badly to this, I suspect, is because programmers—the backbone of the tech industry—just went through this. The programming prestige allocation has already been toppled. 10x programmers got displaced by 20-year-old tokenmaxxers and agent orchestrators. If you spent your career memorizing the minutiae of SQL query planners, that is now an encyclopedic party trick. Everything is changing, and the answer has been a resounding: get the fuck over it. Nobody else cares. Programming serves human goals, not programmer prestige hierarchies. It is painful. But I think this is the right answer. Programmers will survive, and so will mathematicians. Mathematics does not exist for mathematicians. It exists for humanity. If mathematics needs to adapt to AI, and if that adaptation will be painful and chaotic, if it will force the field and its social structures to rapidly reassemble, then the sooner the better. It is not technology's job to genuflect to our existing social structures. It has always and forever been the job of social structures to adapt to technology. Any answer to the contrary—to the printing press, to industrialization, to television, to the internet, and now to AI—correctly resides in the dustbins of history.