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Comment by gcatalfamo | Hacker News Reader

I have a PhD and I completely support AI disrupting the field.

If AI disrupts your field, the culprit is most likely not AI.

“If algorithmic targeting disrupts your society, the culprit is most likely not algorithmic targeting”

Or replace AI/algorithmic targeting with tech in general and the disruption target with whatever it targets and you’d realize the problem with the sentence.

Technological advances have disrupted plenty of fields. That doesn’t mean those fields were fundamentally flawed. Every arena has a certain degree of dysfunction. AI has its own massive share of issues already. But that doesn’t negate the whole field.

Take the classic example of the Travel Agent. They are all but extinct because of technology. Yet they did serve a legitimate purpose before. Yes, plenty of them were middlemen who didn’t care, but also plenty were passionate about organizing travel plans and helping people arrange their travels and vacations. Plenty of people using AI today are also middlemen between you and Claude who also don’t care

If tech is disrupting X, that’s a problem with X” tends to be said by people who have X comfortably sorted themselves (e.g., already have a PhD that counts as it’s from the pre-LLM days).

In the end it depends on whether one considers technological progress or human flourishing to be the end goal. Surprise—they are not always aligned, and sometimes are at odds with each other.

Agreed. It can also be people who have problems with X for other reasons and like to see X “disrupted” (e.g. a disgruntled grad student who got screwed over by a bad advisor or a hard working and capable office employee who got passed over for a less capable, less hardworking PhD holder).

Like I had many bad experiences in cabs in my younger years. It was just bad luck really, but I hated cabs for the longest time because of that and completely dreaded needing them. When Uber was first coming on the scene and cab drivers were protesting against it, I did think to my self something along the lines of “if an app can destroy your business, the problem was in your business” but I really just didn’t like cabs for other reasons. And the irony is now Uber is the same. When I land in my airport, I see crazy lines for rideshare with people waiting on cars to come pick them up, while there is a cab on the other side that is ~$15 cheaper somehow and ready to go with no lines. And I get to tip the driver those saved 15 bucks

Travel agents are not extinct AT ALL. They pivoted from selling margin-less flights to design more curated travel packages. Different and nichier market for sure, but not extinct.

Fair point. They also still exist for corporate and business travels. But it’s fair to say the field did get massively disrupted (god I hate that word) because of technology.

Could you expand on that?

In no way getting a PhD or doing published research is an act of science or human progress, and it's been like that for probably 20 years.

It's an act of coordinated methodology in showing respect to previous peers by acknowledging that you read what they wrote when they were acknowledging even more previous peers.

Every attempt to do something new is rejected unless you take 99% of something that has been done and try to add your 1% to it.

But the thing is that you don't even want to do that, you need to either have a publishable/defensible thesis, or if you already have a PhD, pursue a tenurable track and grants which never collides to productive human progress.

So yes, AI could very well run tenure track career more efficiently and with better results. It's not AI the problem: it is the checks and performance indicators that are in place that make it very easy for AI to dominate and very exhausting for a human to follow.

A good researcher with good AI knowledge would (and should) dominate their field.

* Medicine is luckily saved from this, with some exceptions.

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