alt Hacker NewsBut how do they expect to sustain on that?
One natural step of AI usage, the way I see it, is that even mediocre researchers can use AI as a harness to become prolific researchers.
So if you're part of a pure "human only" researchers that publish 1/10th of what the rest are doing, how are you going to survive?
The more prolific researchers will eat your grants for lunch.
This is exactly the same thing a lot of software devs are going through now. AI models have lifted up EVERYONES ability to produce code, so there's simply no premium anymore for those that will only code by hand. And the people paying their salary are asking why they aren't more productive, when even business analyst Joe is pumping out new products left and right.
People will pay good money for artisanal, hand-crafted clothing, or watches, or cars, or whatever, but I doubt that the market for artisanal mathematics is now or will ever be very large.
It's just stubbornness, in the end, that is manifesting as a kind of gatekeeping Luddism. I see the same thing in my Mastodon feed from folks in the software engineering world, particularly people who have a great love for writing code and hold it as a core part of their identities. I understand being irritated at a machine having been trained on (potentially, inter alia) your work with no compensation to you, and now it is perhaps better at (some of) what you do than you are; or maybe companies are now making a lot of money off of something that benefited from your contributions; but I find it extremely improbable that we will be able to refuse our way out of further progress now that so much money has been invested and so much momentum has been gathered.
I don't think I feel any discomfort about a machine being better at anything that I can do than I am at it. Maybe it's because I'm a mediocre person. I personally think that if there's something that I'm better at than a machine, then we need to build a better machine. Imagine what I'd be able to do if I used that machine!