Honestly, this is good. We were already in a completely unsustainable system. Nobody had an alternative. We still don’t have one but at least now it’s not just merely unsustainable— it is completely fucked in half.

This kind of pattern is gonna get repeated in a lot of sectors when previous practices that were merely unsustainable become unsustained.

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Certhas 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This has been my optimistic take on the situation for the last two years. My pessimistic take is that social systems have an incredible ability to persist in a state of utter fuckedness much longer than seems reasonably possible.

	▲	selridge 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah and like…who knows if what is coming is better. Maybe big labs cartelize and withdraw from the global publication market (which is already unraveling). Maybe we ban theory and demand all papers be empirical, though that will amount to the same thing: seizure of publication by big actors. As you point out, human systems are machines for making do. There is no guarantee that dramatic pressures produce dramatic change. But I think we’ll see something weird, soon.

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commandlinefan 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Honestly, publication has been pretty meaningless for a long time, long before AI could generate complete paragraphs. "Publish or perish" meant that a lot of human-generated slop was being published by people who were put in a position of perverse incentives by a "well-meaning" (?) system. There will still be meaningful contributions, but they'll be as rare as they ever were.