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Comment by tern | Hacker News Reader

I love this question. If history is a guide, some version of that is what will happen (employment doesn't seem to go down, despite technological progress and population + economic growth).

I suspect the root cause is that it's harder and scarier to imagine good outcomes. It exposes us to disappointment, and when you do it publicly, it looks "crazy".

Another explanation is that there's no direct consumer for "more." Individuals, corporations and states are not in themselves interested in "a larger amount of science," or anything analogous, despite the fact that they would all benefit ambiently.

The net effect is that it's only "safe" to claim reduced risk (i.e. lower costs).

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I know some scientists and there's barely enough demand for them as it is

I suspect we’re at the stage of technological civilizational development where, especially with LLM-assisted gradient descent seeking upon the results, basic science, research and engineering for the pure sake of establishing search space beacons of what is found to be true and what is not, irrespective of immediate industrial applications payoff, are valuable economic inputs in and of themselves into ever-expanding training corpus. It has never been easier for people in different fields to now search knowledge spaces in LLM’s, for applicability to their problem spaces of discoveries in seemingly unrelated spaces.

From my perspective, we are desperately short of scientists, researchers and engineers, but we are using an outdated economic model to leverage their findings. LLM’s are a large part of Bush’s Memex and Jobs’ bicycle for the mind visions for intelligence amplification, and in some ways exceed them. I hope we trampoline from how we currently use basic seeking efforts for knowledge.

I hope the demand for average-skilled people goes down.

Or that the floor is raised, at least, and AI empowers average scientists to do substantial work.

Is the demand low because the capital requirements to perform the research aren't there? Excluding wages...granted, for an average research project I don't know what % goes to wages and admin overhead. Probably the bulk?

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