Bruce Sterling @bruces*Maybe AI is a really strong conservative force that only goes where the convenient Big Data already is
VoidZeroOne 
@bruces Remind me, when was the last time that the established mainstream in any scientific field made any breakthrough?
BloognooThere is a huge bias in paleontology towards T-Rex research as there's a lot of preexisting work to launch from and the people funding research have heard about TRexes. There is very little funding to classify lambeosaurus femurs into distinct sub-species by comparison, and the next year there is even less. It feels like a similar issue.
sus@bruces Alt-text: image is screenshot of article abstract -
Developments in artificial intelligence (AI) have accelerated scientific discovery! Alongside recent Al-oriented Nobel prizes, these trends establish the role of Al tools in science. This advancement raises questions about the influence of Al tools on scientists and science as a whole, and highlights a potential conflict between individual and collective benefits!!. To evaluate these questions, we used a pretrained language model to identify Al-augmented research, with an F1-score of 0.875 in validation against expert-labelled data. Using a dataset of 41.3 million research papers across the natural sciences and covering distinct eras of Al, here we show an accelerated adoption of Al tools among scientists and consistent professional advantages associated with Al usage, but a collective narrowing of scientific focus. Scientists who engage in Al-augmented research publish 3.02 times more papers, receive 4.84 times more citations and become research project leaders 1.37 years earlier than those who do not. By contrast, Al adoption shrinks the collective volume of scientific topics studied by 4.63% and decreases scientists' engagement with one another by 22%. By consequence, adoption of Al in science presents what seems to be a paradox: an expansion of individual scientists' impact but a contraction in collective science's reach, as Al-augmented work moves collectively towards areas richest in data. With reduced follow-on engagement, Al tools seem to automate established fields rather than explore new ones, highlighting a tension between personal advancement and collective scientific progress.
GrooveMD, Queer Time Machine@bruces An expert is someone who knows more and more about less and less until they know absolutely everything about nothing at all.
Ehay2k