> For one, I can't even understand this part:

Let me explain. My belief was that research as a task is non-trivial and would have been relatively out of reach for AI. Given the advances, that doesn't seem to be true.

> And then there's the opinion that for some reason we should 'value' manual labor over using AI, which seems rather disagreeable.

Could you explain why? I'm specifically talking about research. Of course, I would value what a veteran in the field says higher than a probability machine.