I genuinely don’t see scientific journals and conferences continuing to last in this new world of autonomous agents, at least the same way that they used to be.
As other top level posters have indicated the review portion of this is the limiting factor
unless journal reviewers decide to utilize entirely automated review process, then they’re not gonna be able to keep up with what will increasingly be the most and best research coming out of any lab.
So whoever figures out the automated reviewer that can actually tell fact from fiction, is going to win this game.
I expect over the longest period, that’s probably not going to be throwing more humans at the problem, but agreeing on some kind of constraint around autonomous reviewers.
If not that then labs will also produce products and science will stop being in public and the only artifacts will be whatever is produced in the market
If you think these types of tools are going to be generating "the most and best research coming out of any lab", then I have to assume you aren't actively doing any sort of research.
LLMs are undeniably great for interactive discussion with content IF you actually are up-to-date with the historical context of a field, the current "state-of-the-art", and have, at least, a subjective opinion on the likely trajectories for future experimentation and innovation.
But, agents, at best, will just regurgitate ideas and experiments that have already been performed (by sampling from a model trained on most existing research literature), and, at worst, inundate the literature with slop that lacks relevant context, and, as a negative to LLMs, pollute future training data. As of now, I am leaning towards "worst" case.
And, just to help with the facts, your last comment is unfortunately quite inaccurate. Science is one of the best government investments. For every $1.00 dollar given to the NIH in the US, $2.56 of economic activity is estimated to be generated. Plus, science isn't merely a public venture. The large tech labs have huge R&D because the output from research can lead to exponential returns on investment.
> Should it always assume bad data or potentially bad data? If so, that seems like it would defeat the point of having data at all as you could never draw any conclusions from it.
Yes. You, and every other reasoning system, should always challenge the data and assume it’s biased at a minimum.
This is better described as “critical thinking” in its formal form.
You could also call it skepticism.
That impossibility of drawing conclusions assumes there’s a correct answer and is called the “problem of induction.” I promise you a machine is better at avoiding it than a human.
Many people freeze up or fail with too much data - put someone with no experience in front of 500 ppl to give a speech if you want to watch this live.
I mostly agree with you, but I think it's important to consider what you're doing with the data. If we're doing rigorous science, or making life-or-death decisions on it, I would 100% agree. But if we're an AI chatbot trying to offer some insight, with a big disclaimer that "these results might be wrong, talk to your doctor" then I think that's quite overkill. The end result would be no (potential) insight at all and no chance for ever improving since we'll likely never get a to a point where we could fully trust the data. Not even the best medical labs are always perfect.
They have limited service because they can't afford anything better, and the USA prevents installing additional undersea cables, but only a small number of sites are blocked by Cuba itself, such as a few Spanish language news sites run by Cuban-Americans.
Many more sites are unavailable in Cuba because their USA owners refuse access to Cuba, but that's not Cuba's fault.
They could've easily invested more of that oil money they leeched from Venezuela into infrastructure. They built 1 optic fiber cable over a decade a ago, why didn't they build more all this time? It's always the imperialists fault, isn't it?
I am more powerful than you, and I come to you with a request to act against your own interests in order to serve me. You refuse. The harsh consequences for refusing me that I am about to unleash against you are your fault. I am going to starve you for resources for decades, and any bad outcomes for your economy are your fault. You should not have refused me.
Somewhat of an aside, but its odd to me that "communist government" is considered both unworkably unsustainable while also must be sanctioned in order to be stopped.
Depends where, I think. Where your neighbors are mostly honorable, it mostly works. There are plenty of nice neighborhoods, and no shortage of bad ones either, sadly.
Yeah, being unaffected by social pressure when philosophizing about what is moral and liberating is strongly related to being unaffected by social pressure regarding personal hygiene and social norms, unfortunately. Still I'd rather have the weirdos, especially this one particular weirdo, than not! Stallman has blazed the trail for us slightly-more-socially-aware types to follow, while we look/act just a little more reasonable.
There's a popular video on YouTube of him eating skin peeled from his foot during a lecture at a college. Not AI, very old, repellant to normal people.
I'm a bit awestruck. Was there any discussion about it among your peers? We might be a generation or two apart, I saw that video when I was not yet an adult and it might have been literally part of my introduction to the person that is Richard Stallman. It definitely wasn't a good first impression.
Hang on, this looks like classic Internet trolling:
//
Pathways: Navigating the Internet and Extremism is a simple multiple choice format game with basic animation. Its players are taken on a journey as characters at a college. They are invited to make decisions in scenarios including whether or download potentially extremist content or join an Amelia character on a rally organised by “a small political group” protesting against changes in society and the “erosion in British values”…
However, it is a subversion of the Amelia character that has exploded across social media channels …
Manga-style Amelia, a Wallace and Gromit version and AI-generated “real life” encounters between her and the characters of Father Ted or Harry Potter, accompanied by racist language and far-right messaging.
…We have seen the meme having a remarkable spread and proliferating among the far right and beyond, but what’s also been of note is how it is now international
//
So a bunch of trolls did classic troll things (which is to be expected because you’re on the internet) then the right wingers picked it up and ruined it and then it spread to become a meme coin
The article wants to make this as though there’s a hardcore group of right wing meme-lords in some giant conspiracy
"Classic internet trolling" is exactly what it is. You can find video of the original game on YouTube -- it's got a painful "hello, fellow kids" vibe to it that just invites ridicule.
And someone doing a meme coin isn't a "one of the most surreal twists" - people do that for everything these days as the cost of making one is ~$0 and they may may a few bob off suckers.
Your reaction makes me remember the "Angry Jack" videos about Gamergate, in particular the video discussing the fact that when some people (troll or not) were propagating racist or sexist things, they were reacting by saying "whaaaat, I'm not racist/sexist, how dare you". Who cares about them, and what they "are" really: for the society, if someone is spreading racist information "for the lols" or spreading it because they really believe in the content, the damage is exactly the same.
I, like you, don't believe the phenomenon was the result of an organised action (of course). The phenomenon was started as meme, resonnated with the far-right, and both far-right and people who don't see any problem with far-right ideology just amplified it. After all, the government has made a lot of stupid videos, and yet, the popularity explodes mainly when it's aligned with far-right.
But I don't have a problem with considering that the "bunch of trolls who did classic troll things" are considered as far-right. They indeed totally jumped in the opportunity to make racist things for the lols. How does that not make them racist themselves? If you create stuffs that racists find great and very aligned with their ideology, I'm sorry, even if you think you are not intrinsically racist, just be an adult and accept the consequences of your actions: you are part of the racist community, you are one of their "allies".
So, I'm perfectly fine with trolls being considered as racists. Trolling is a pain on society anyway and each time a kid thinks of themselves as "super smart" because they are trolling, the reality is rather that the world would be a better place if this version of them was not part of it. Why should we care about what trolls are feeling, they choose to put themselves at the top of the list of people who don't deserve any consideration for their feelings.
So the Hindus are racist because the Nazis appropriated the swastika, and nearly the entire western world doesn’t know the difference, yet they still use it?
Oooh, the poor little trolls, they were doing nice little videos full of flowers and kisses, and the big bad far-right came and stole their memes. Boohoohoo, it's so sad.
Come on, from the start, what the trolls were doing was to parody the initial video game (which is apparently shit) by taking the opposite stance: so, they were, on purpose, making it as much as opposed as the perceived wokeness of the video game. So, they were putting, on purpose, plenty of racist tropes.
The Hindus did not do that: their symbol was used in a totally different context. But the trolls were doing exactly that: the trolling itself consisted in putting plenty of racist things. They knew about it, they knew it was racist, they did it 100% on purpose.
Trolling is, by definition, behaving like an assh*le. I have absolutely no sympathy for those little kids who behave like assh*le and then come crying "boohoo, people say I'm an assh*le". What did you expect? Did you really think you were being smart, or edgy, or that somehow you can spit in people's faces and just say "it was a joke man" and not being accountable?
As a former intelligence officer with combat time I promise you there are A LOT of actions happening based on that data.
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