Post #924048
2026-04-03 15:45 UTC
Replies (5)
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@FMarquardtGroup@fediscience.org 2026-04-03 16:20
@UlrikeHahn Indeed, a very good piece, articulating aspects I've been chatting about with colleagues but could not express that well myself.
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(hello from Nostr) -- Thanks, this gets at a lot of important issues. One I think about a lot as an "applied" scientist is the question of, what is science "for"? In the example in the essay of astrophysics, the author rightly points out that the work has no intrinsic economic value or ability to improve the human condition today... So for disciplines where (say) one's trying to cure cancer, or make nuclear fusion work, the question has to arise: isn't all of this "grunt work" indeed actually wasteful in terms of solving urgent problems needed by humanity? I mean "what to do with all the graduate students" is still a reasonable question even in this context... But I think this gets at the larger problems of the institutional context of academic research and graduate education, where I think AI is much more highlighting intrinsic pre-existing conditions than being some fundamentally disruptive force...
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@leouieda@bertha.social 2026-04-03 17:16
@UlrikeHahn excellent! Thanks for sharing
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@Steve_Lindsay@fediscience.org 2026-04-03 18:12
@UlrikeHahn Very thought provoking. "The experiment succeeded because the human supervisor had done the grunt work, years ago, that the machine is now supposedly liberating us from....Making the models smarter doesn't solve the problem. It makes the problem harder to see. "
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@homohortus31@mastodon.social 2026-04-04 14:57
"What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking; there's the real danger." Frank Herbert in Dune