AI boosts research careers but narrow the span of ideas explored: study
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Re: AI boosts research careers but narrow the span of ideas explored: study
#2This isn't a real surprise to anyone who knows how "AI" works.
Re: AI boosts research careers but narrow the span of ideas explored: study
#3“Technology that is based on everything humanity has already done, fails to do things that humanity has not yet done”
Re: AI boosts research careers but narrow the span of ideas explored: study
#4[dead]
Re: AI boosts research careers but narrow the span of ideas explored: study
#5Any flattening of discovery due to AI, but will be temporary.
We tend to think that obvious potential is the same as realized potential, for new technology.
For any specific context, there are generally innumerable smaller adaptations and capability thresholds that have to be crossed. And the price for that journey is often temporary loss off overt productivity.
Re: AI boosts research careers but narrow the span of ideas explored: study
#6> “It’s not about the architecture per se,” Evans says. “It’s about the incentives.”
It would have been useful to check whether less original work was already getting more citations before AI adoption. That could reflect broader trends and network effects: heavily cited research areas attract more authors optimizing for citations, so high-productivity researchers end up clustering on the same topics.
Re: AI boosts research careers but narrow the span of ideas explored: study
#7“Technology that is based on everything humanity has already done, fails to do things that humanity has not yet done”
This may seem so blatantly obvious to us that it need not be mentioned, but to a lot of people I bet it is not obvious at al, and in fact may even be counter-obvious.
Re: AI boosts research careers but narrow the span of ideas explored: study
#8“Technology that is based on everything humanity has already done, fails to do things that humanity has not yet done”
Are you following the news?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48863490
LLMs don't just 'average' their data.
Re: AI boosts research careers but narrow the span of ideas explored: study
#9As with other fields touched, AI is merely amplifying what was already there. The aim of many scientists isn't discovery in and of itself. Discovery is a side effect of their primary drive to publish and - hopefully - become well known. And establishments only make things worse, because it's the things that are most likely to produce tangible results (the papers, or economically valuable products) that get the most funding.
Re: AI boosts research careers but narrow the span of ideas explored: study
#10Any flattening of discovery due to AI, but will be temporary. We tend to think that obvious potential is the same as realized potential, for new technology. For any specific context, there are generally innumerable smaller adaptations and capability thresholds that have to be crossed. And the price for that journey is often temporary loss off overt productivity.
No, this is significantly more permanent. LLMs are autocomplete generators based off current context, and training generations of people to always ask the planet burners instead of learning to think for themselves - and never having the experience of having to slowly think over the same thing for an extended period - may well mean a permanent cap to human knowledge and a dramatic slowdown or end to new knowledge.