I think we are about to see a whole new age of "citizen scientists", enabled by AI. This particular example was solved fast with a lot of compute, but it seems that this approach would have been possible with less equipment too.

The bottleneck will be data. Every possible signal out of publicly available datasets will be squeezed fast.

The people who have the training to be good citizen scientists enabled by AI are already working in technical fields, probably as scientists in formal name or not.

Your neighbor on the other hand has good odds that they read to a 6th grade level or worse, and believes the president at his word because he's signaled he also hates minorities.

As the famous quote goes, "You've got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land— the common clay of the new West. You know... morons."

I'm seeing people in some historical facebook groups already doing AI-powered "citizen history" that's complete bunk. And of course they fight back against anyone telling them it's all fabrication.

And not that this wasn't actually a new discovery like the engineer believed. Look at the other comments, it's discovery had been published last year.

I think especially the renegade science YouTubers who are purely hacking away for fun and content.

> The bottleneck will be data. Every possible signal out of publicly available datasets will be squeezed fast.

Exactly. The only blocker to us pulling this off ourselves is access to the LIDAR data.