Finally an important and realistic application of economic theory to real life!
30 karma · joined December 9, 2025
I agree. A body of knowledge, mathematical knowledge being one of them, is a give-and-take between its producers and consumers; a market for ideas. It grows in that ecology of people with its pathfinders, specialists, generalists, historians, educators, etc. Committing to a body of knowledge is becoming part of its living culture.
Where I disagree: I believe some of the loss is inevitable. Keeping in mind the example of a body of knowledge above, as the scale of what's accumulated until now grows, the role each of us play in the sustenance of its culture shrink. This is a direct consequence of the modern developmental process (ie division of labour to the point where it feels like we are all modular parts of a much larger whole).
I can't say whether its better to focus on recovering what's lost, or, trust the process, as it were.
It is not so much that the "tells" of a poor quality work are vanishing, but that even careful scrutiny of a work done with AI is going to become too costly to be done only by humans. One only has so much time to read while, say, in economics journals, the appendices extend to hundreds of pages.
Would love to hear if other fields' journals are experiencing a similar pressure in not only at the extensive margin (no of new submission) but the intensive margin (effort needed to check each work).
Someone else being human, until now. That may change. That's the whole point!
But I concur with your general point on the upstream production of thinking and knowledge. Indeed, such elite thinkers are those in economic history referred to as the "upper-tail human capital". Terence Tao being one of them giving license to the kind of thinking that accepts AI as a simple tool that is not fundamentally breaking our relationship with technology is what exactly I am protesting.
> But it's equally true that those people who weren't doing much thinking due to access or language barriers can actually start doing some thinking now with the help of AI.
If only we keep thinking that thinking is a comparative advantage of our species, I suppose!
While nowhere in the paper this is actually asserted but the abstract, a whiggish narrative of a genuinely unprecedented technology --such that it can replace and supersede human "labour" altogether (one is reminded of The Evolution of Human Science by Ted Chiang)-- sounds naive at best, dangerous at worst.
Talking to AI might be the very thing that keeps those tendencies below the threshold of dangerous. Simply flagging long conversations would not be a way to deal with these problems, but AI learning how to talk to such users may be.
That said, I am less sympathetic to the concept of a "perfect cup", which seems to make coffee an exclusively competitive endeavour. I mean, why not enjoy coffee-brewing as one might enjoy thinkering?