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Comment by selridge | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, this is good. We were already in a completely unsustainable system. Nobody had an alternative. We still don’t have one but at least now it’s not just merely unsustainable— it is completely fucked in half.

This kind of pattern is gonna get repeated in a lot of sectors when previous practices that were merely unsustainable become unsustained.

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This has been my optimistic take on the situation for the last two years. My pessimistic take is that social systems have an incredible ability to persist in a state of utter fuckedness much longer than seems reasonably possible.

Yeah and like…who knows if what is coming is better. Maybe big labs cartelize and withdraw from the global publication market (which is already unraveling). Maybe we ban theory and demand all papers be empirical, though that will amount to the same thing: seizure of publication by big actors.

As you point out, human systems are machines for making do. There is no guarantee that dramatic pressures produce dramatic change. But I think we’ll see something weird, soon.

Well, yes. "Accelerationists" of all philosophies think that heightening the contradictions and breaking the current system will bring about its replacement with a better one. But a new system requires work, while chaos doesn't. It's quite possible to just destroy the current system leaving us without the wherewithal to build a replacement any time soon.

Honestly, publication has been pretty meaningless for a long time, long before AI could generate complete paragraphs. "Publish or perish" meant that a lot of human-generated slop was being published by people who were put in a position of perverse incentives by a "well-meaning" (?) system. There will still be meaningful contributions, but they'll be as rare as they ever were.

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