Please don’t automate science
Link: https://togelius.blogspot.com/2025/12/please-dont-automate-science.html
Context
Boy, it takes courage to speak this! Well spoken. > They are here because they love research and want to contribute to advancing human knowledge. If you take the human out of the loop, meaning that humans no longer have any role in scientific research, you’re depriving them of the activity they love and a key source of meaning in their lives. And we all want to do something meaningful. Why, I asked, do you want to take the opportunity to contribute to science away from us? This hits it harder > Science automation is coming whether we want it or not, and we’d better get used to it. The train is coming, and we can get on it or stand in its way. > I think that is a remarkably cowardly argument. > It is up to us as a society to decide how we use the technology we develop. It’s not a train, it’s a truck, and we’d better grab the steering wheel. There are bangers after bangers > Making human intellectual or creative work redundant is something we should avoid when we can, and we should absolutely avoid it if there are no equally meaningful new roles for humans to transition into. I want to quote each and every paragraph it seems, this is so good, almost like it comes out of my mouth > You could further argue that working on cutting humans out of meaningful creative work such as scientific research is incredibly egoistic. You get the intellectual satisfaction of inventing new AI methods, but the next generation don’t get a chance to contribute. Why do you want to rob your children (academic and biological) of the chance to engage in the most meaningful activity in the world? So true, I have been here when there was model after model releases in a week, i think in August-September. It was a wild month. I was overwhelmed, I didn’t get a chance to slow down. AI can do a lot of things, can produce a lot of things, and I cannot handle it at that pace. I need time to absorb, it makes productive, true, but it quickly overshoots the danger productive bar. The moment where you are too much productive that you lose track of every context in your head.
