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lapcat 4 hours ago

> I'm simply claiming that not everyone needs to be Linux Kernel specialists.

This is an uninteresting and indeed silly claim, because nobody has ever asserted the opposite.

The point is that society needs some Linux kernel specialists, and some astrophysicists, but AI is undermining their production.

> This is precisely what AI is allowing: it automates things I don't need to know deeply so that I can focus on things I do need to understand deeply.

The submitted article is about how AI is automating the things that a specialist does need to understand deeply. It's about so-called astrophysicists using AI to produce astrophysics papers, not about how non-astrophysicists use AI to produce astrophysics papers so that they can focus on whatever their non-astrophysics specialty may be, if they have any specialty.

simianwords 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm responding to this quote

> Frank Herbert (yeah, I know I'm a nerd), in God Emperor of Dune, has a character observe: "What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking; there's the real danger." Herbert was writing science fiction. I'm writing about my office. The distance between those two things has gotten uncomfortably small.

If we both agree that an astrophysicist may not need to understand things (even in their own domain) to make progress then we are in agreement. Not all the things a researcher works on while writing their paper is useful or necessarily done by them manually. In such cases it becomes necessary to let LLM take over.

lapcat 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> I'm responding to this quote

> > Frank Herbert (yeah, I know I'm a nerd), in God Emperor of Dune, has a character observe

The article author and I share a love of Frank Herbert, God Emperor of Dune, and the quote in question. Nonetheless, it's a mistake to focus on this quote rather than on the rest of the article. The quote is nothing more than a nice literary reference; it's not central to the argument.

The character who spoke the quote is a magically prescient human-sandworm hybrid, thousands of years old, speaking to his distant relative who was specially bred by him to be invisible to the magical prescience, so let's take the quote with a grain of... sand. ;-)

> If we both agree that an astrophysicist may not need to understand things (even in their own domain) to make progress then we are in agreement.

Your parenthetical remark is actually the main problem!