> In short, the indiscriminate use of powerful solution-extraction tools can achieve the immediate short-term goal of solving problems at hand, but at the cost of sustaining the ecosystem for the next wave of progress, or in understanding the progress already obtained.
It's not that the horizon is expanding because of this. It's more like a forest getting clear-cut.
People usually use these tools in math and science to find an answer. Then often they will work it back using more sane or human pathways. So it's shareable or even beautiful.
Knowing the answer has value. But, often in math the best thing was how someone got there.
> [I]t is now the identification of a promising problem which is the scarce and precious resource. We have now seen that even the rumor of someone working on a problem can trigger a massive amount of AI-powered effort to flatten it before the original research project has time to reach its full potential.
Sounds like they're going the way of the DoDo. better take that PhD, migrate to the new world and become a tuktuk driver.
And to reply to the sibling since I hit my comment limit and I'm going to probably forget about this conversation until tomorrow:
But our situation before 2023 was one in which we had an endless abundance of solutions and ideas. I understand that AI can generate bad ideas faster than we can discern them, but we already have tried and true mechanisms to filter good ideas from bad (e.g. the scientific process), why can't they be adapted?
Article arguing math is the next "human calculator".
Navier-Stokes is a bit different (because there's a prize attached, so "scooping" matters), but almost all interesting problems don't have any prizes attached.