Samiul Hasan

One of the biggest areas of AI hype right now is the notion that it will hyperaccelerate scientific progress. I understand why people think this — AI is already accelerating scientific production. But the big problem is that production seems to have gotten decoupled from any useful measure of progress a long time ago. There is a whole science-of-science literature hand wringing about the fact that scientific production has increased ~exponentially but progress has not accelerated and has even slowed down. Producing papers, for the most part, is a game researchers must play for status and career progress. It's value is relative. It's like thinking that AI is going to help traders make a lot more money. If everyone has access to the same capabilities, there is no alpha. There's also the fact that in many/most fields, there's a limit to AI's impact on production as well. It may be able to do the cognitive parts but the bottleneck may experiments on humans or some other form of real-world interaction that's hard to automate.