This comment totally misunderstands why scientists get into science. Let me tell you, it isn't the money. It is for the joy of exploring the frontier. LLM's are taking this from us. Maybe they will be better than us but I'm not sure how many scientists will get into science for the joy of being an understudy to an LLM.
Yes, exploration is exactly why I enjoy research. Knowledge is, after all, the final frontier.
(Space is NOT the final frontier; sorry Trekkies. The real barrier to space is the ability to traverse non-trivial expanses of space in human time, and that will only be solved by Science.)
And when it comes to AI in research, we have just been handed a relativistic starship to explore the boundaries of our knowledge, instead of the paddle boats we've been using all this time. I would choose to adapt and try to harness this new power rather than mourn the loss of paddling.
It doesn’t misunderstand, it just treats that as irrelevant, which it is.
If you could press a button and obliterate the joy experienced by every professional at their work, in exchange for a 1% boost in marginal productivity for the next 2 quarters, would you do it?
More to the point, what if the button gives a 10% quarterly boost in productivity for the next 100 quarters. But 80% of the professionals get fired and the other 20% have harder jobs that feel more managerial. Then, yeah I would press it.
What is your plan for the 80% of people losing their jobs in this scenario? Tough luck?
Do you think all those professionals are going to be grateful to finally know the secrets of the universe despite being jobless?
By the time we know the secrets of the universe, the concept of "jobs" would be an ancient, vestigial footnote in our evolutionary history. I mean, if I knew the secret to faster-than-light travel I'd not be hunched over here pecking away at computers! ;-)
In fact, I suspect most of the "jobs" left eventually would be around extracting those secrets out of the universe and making them work for humanity. Which is probably a much better use of human intellect than pretty much anything we do today.
That may be the future we want to end up in, but we'll only get there eventually. Unfortunately, in today's world we neither know the secrets of the universe nor can we survive without jobs. So until society reorients itself towards that future, we are going to have a lot of upheaval.
You already know about DNA, black holes, and the precise age of the universe, yet you still have a job. Do you think that would change if we knew more?
Nobody is going to pay human rates to do the stuff that AI can do for much cheaper either! The quip about jobs being vestigial was also a tongue-in-cheek indication that Economics as we know now also will not apply.
This leaves only one area for humans to expand into: towards the things machines cannot do, which often involve things that neither humans or machines currently understand.
Fortunately, that's basically everything. We know about black holes, but we still don't know enough to figure out FTL travel. We know DNA but we don't know enough to cure cancer, let alone how to reverse aging. We know a negligible fraction of the secrets of the universe, and it would be a much better use of human intellect to figure those out than filling out TPS reports.
Unfortunately, current society is not set up for that future -- essentially where everybody is either a scientist or an artist, both historically terribly-paying jobs requiring a very specific mindset and an appetite for abject uncertainty -- and that's where the upheaval happens.
I think more than you imagine while understanding that it’ll be detrimental to their living.
I'd do it in exchange for nothing, the sooner human labor is rendered obsolete the better.
I'm afraid this only serves to more vividly depict scientists as rent-seeking