Our jobs consist of many tasks. My job as a professor is not just one thing, it involves teaching, researching, writing, filling out annual reports, supporting my students, reading, administrative work and more. AI doing one or more of these tasks does not replace my entire job, it shifts what I do. And as long as AI is jagged in its abilities, and cannot substitute for all the complex work of human interaction, it cannot easily replace jobs as a whole… (View Highlight)
the revolutionary part is not that I saved a lot of time. It is that a crisis that has shaken entire academic fields could be partially resolved with a single task, replication, but doing so required painstaking and expensive human effort that was impossible to do at scale. Now it appears that AI could check many published papers, with implications for all of scientific research. There are still barriers to doing this, including benchmarking for accuracy and fairness, but it is now a real possibility. Replication may be an AI task, not a job, but it is also might change an entire field of human endeavor dramatically. What makes this possible? AI agents have gotten much better, very quickly. (View Highlight)
It turns out most of our assumptions about AI agents were wrong. Even small increases in accuracy (and new models are much less prone to errors) leads to huge increases in the number of tasks an AI can do. And the biggest and latest “thinking” models are actually self-correcting, so they don’t get stopped by errors. All of this means that AI agents can accomplish far more steps than they could before and can use tools (which basically include anything your computer can do) without substantial human intervention. (View Highlight)
If we don’t think hard about WHY we are doing work, and what work should look like, we are all going to drown in a wave of AI content. (View Highlight)
the same technology that can replicate academic papers in minutes can also generate 17 versions of a PowerPoint deck that nobody needs. The difference between these futures isn’t in the AI, it’s in how we choose to use it. By using our judgement in deciding what’s worth doing, not just what can be done, we can ensure these tools make us more capable, not just more productive. (View Highlight)