I agree with that.
In the future, it would be best to derive everything from the axioms. (Using libraries where the frequently used theorems are already proved.) The problem is, the most simple theorems that we can derive from the axioms quickly are not important enough to pay for the development and use of the software.
So a better approach would be for the system to accept a few theorems as (temporary) axioms. Essentially, if it would be okay to use the Pythagorean theorem in a scientific paper without proving it, then in the first version of the program it would be okay to use the Pythagorean theorem as an axiom -- displaying a warning "I have used Pythagorean theorem without having a proof of it".
This first version would already be helpful at verifying current papers. And there is an option to provide the proof of the Pythagorean theorem from the first principles later. If you add it later, you can re-run the papers and get the results with less warnings. If the Pythagorean theorem happens to be wrong, as long as you have provided the warnings for all papers, you know which ones of them to retract.
Actually, I believe such systems would be super helpful e.g. in set theory, when you want to verify whether the proof you used does rely on the axiom of choice. Because even if you didn't use it directly, maybe one of them theorems you used was based on it. Generally, using different sets of axioms could become easier.
Yes that's an insightful way of looking at how computer verification could assist in real mathematics research.
Going back to the CS analogy, programmers started out by writing everything in machine language, then gradually people began to write commonly-used functions as libraries that you could just install and forget about (they didn't even have to be in the same language) and they wrote higher-level languages that could automatically compile to machine code. Higher and higher levels of abstraction were recognized and implemented over the years (for impl...
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