> My physicist friend once asked me what the point of doing research was if someone like Terence Tao could have figured out everything in my dissertation in a tenth of the time. I answered by pointing out that Terence Tao didn’t. Terence Tao did not find a small open problem posited by my advisor and publish a bite sized result making incremental progress. He has only so much time and so many other fish to fry.

This reminds me of a post I saw recently, although I can't remember the platform. It said something along the lines of assessing the limits of AI by finding the dumbest questions it can't solve. I think that pairs well as an additional way to view meaning through one's work.

The linked post points out constrained attention as a way to bring meaning to novel work that no one else took on. With AI, this can still be applied to compute.

I'm just wondering if there are a class of problems that humans, at least in the short-term, where humans need to be in the loop to solve more efficiently.