Comment by avaer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by avaer | Hacker News Reader

A funny piece, but what if all of the following are true:

  - AI *is* how real research is done
  - Incentives are such that this is how researchers must work
  - Academia institution does not have a structure to accept this reality

Academia did this to itself. By hiring based on volume of output/citations, the way for researchers to win is to game the system better than the next person. AI just exposes that the old power structure doesn't serve much academic purpose.

Maybe we should take away the grants from the universities and put them into autoresearch loops + human reviewers?

The chalkboard test is useful despite textbooks existing. The point is if you can’t problem solve “in memory,” there is a latency and limit to creativity fundamentally enforced by your ability to make connections. And in the end, if all you need is ChatGPT, a grad student is cheaper.

In some fields, all of those statements are true already.

In a large number of few fields, all of those statements will be true in the near future (10 years maximum).

There's no reason that the Humboldtian model should be the right structure for the next century's universities, just as it wasn't the right structure for the 18th century's universities.

Wow, I can't wait to live in a world where nobody knows how anything works, some people are arbitrarily rich and some arbitrarily poor with no ability to change their standing in life, and, worst of all, people celebrate these developments, even if they may be in the poor cohort, as progress.

In other words, prepare to get medieval.

This is how you get Idiocracy instead of geniouses.

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