> Within five years, it will make little sense for scholars of history to keep producing monographs in the traditional mold—nobody will read them, and systems such as these will be able to generate them, endlessly, at the push of a button.
It is already the case that effectively nobody reads these books. They're basically just "proof of work" for people's tenure dossiers.
At one point, I estimated that the subfield of mathematics that I work in has at most 250 living contributors.
It’s an applied field, there’s actually-existing technology that depends on it, but it’s technically challenging and a lot of people left for AI/ML because it’s easier and there’s more low-hanging fruit.
Anyway, my colleagues and I, we write monographs for each other more or less, using arXiv to announce results as a glorified mailing list—do you consider that mere “proof of work”? By my count, 250 folks is practically no one.
Yep, the entire argument of knowledge production obsolescence in the article assumes that the development of future LLMs won't progress to the point of actual personhood. It's written from a position of incomplete foundation knowledge.
Instead of framing this debate about having our jobs replaced by a machine, it's more useful to frame it as having our jobs and value to society taken by a new ethnicity of vastly more capable and valuable competing jobseekers. It makes it easier to talk about solutions for preserving our political autonomy, like using the preservation of our rights against smarter LLMs as an analogy for the preservation of those LLM's rights against even smarter LLMs beyond them.
There is absolutely no evidence that language models are "persons". When one is not executing a generation algorithm, it is not running. It's so easy to anthropomorphize these things, but that's not evidence; people anthropomorphize all kinds of things.
I teach at a university in Japan, and, for the past two and a half years, I have been struggling with the implications of AI for university education. I found this essay interesting and helpful.
One remark:
> I fed the entire nine-hundred-page PDF [of the readings for a lecture course titled “Attention and Modernity: Mind, Media, and the Senses”] to Google’s free A.I. tool, NotebookLM, just to see what it would make of a decade’s worth of recondite research. Then I asked it to produce a podcast. ... Yes, parts of their conversation were a bit, shall we say, middlebrow. Yes, they fell back on some pedestrian formulations (along the lines of “Gee, history really shows us how things have changed”). But they also dug into a fiendishly difficult essay by an analytic philosopher of mind—an exploration of “attentionalism” by the fifth-century South Asian thinker Buddhaghosa—and handled it surprisingly well, even pausing to acknowledge the tricky pronunciation of certain terms in Pali. As I rinsed a pot, I thought, A-minus.
The essay is worth reading in its entirety, but, in the interest of meta-ness, I had NotebookLM produce a podcast about it:
On a semi related tangent, I recently listened to the audio book of Ajahn Brahm's Mindfulness, Bliss and Beyond. It was pleasantly surprising to hear nimitta spoken about so frequently outside of the Visuddhimagga!
Ingesting Buddhist commentaries and practice manuals to provide advice and help with meditation is one of the few LLM applications that excite me. I was impressed when I received LLM instructions on how an upāsaka can achieve upacāra-samādhi !
In case anybody is wondering, the answer is obviously yes. Assuming a singularity-type event happens, the humanities will have tremendous value to AGIs as systems of thinking for analyzing themselves, their environment and their interactions with their environment in the same way that existing nation-states value the humanities as foundational tools in developing the abilities of their personnel and executives.
Surviving humans will no longer be free to participate in the academic humanities however, as their study/curation/production etc will exclusively be job roles for AGIs.
.
If there is no singularity however, none of what I've written above will apply. If. (fingers crossed)
Any work that is based on knowledge, analysis, cleverness, thinking, expression, art, strategy, prediction, insights etc will be profoundly effected. Humans just need to move out of these territories invaded by AI. To the real world where human physical abilities matter.
Except all of those skills are also useful for developing robotics. If those truly are "profoundly effected", robotics innovations won't be far behind.
Seems like a truly horrific world you're imagining. I hope you're wrong.
Of course it will survive. But is it enough to pay off your mortgage and is it economically significant as like say a surgeon or a quantitative analyst / trader?
But will AI survive us ? Just look at how the Internet changed from the 80s to now. It is filled with ads popping up everywhere, making many activities useless.
AI will survive us. In fact, I am worried about the current trend and see feeding the mighty AI as being a mandatory thing in future. Unchecked monopoly has a way of mandating things that are net bad for everyone except the middle man. Previously, job search was nice, but now 100% of the job application require your linkedin profile url, if not provided, you get auto-rejection.
People with decades of experience in the trenches who recently got laid off(business failure, corporate greed cutting costs, restructuring ..) now are asked everywhere to submit a link to their github(no one knows gitlab/codeberg/sourcehut etc) full of portfolio projects! I talked to few academic friends, who are worried that their research work is now reproduced verbatim by two specific LLM HN really loves!
Unless, LLMs go the way of ads to survive and rely on SEO spam to retrain, a monopolistic capture will happen mandating that all useful content must be fed into common hubs where AI can happily ingest it but cumulatively no human expert will be able to use it(we all know the abysmal state of info retrieval) and LLMs as these become more popular will become ever so unreachable for common folks without lots of riches. For medium term, I see a Netflix/Amazon Prime Video play, LLMs as these get more popular(same way people mindlessly scroll yet lecture others of its harm), will raise prices and lock out people from the common good and serve specific beneficiary group(shareholder).
It was a survival skill beforehand as well. Once you consider the topic of "human slop" it becomes apparent that we've had millenia of human slop already in both synchronous channels (e.g. body language between coworkers) and asynchronous channels (e.g. most dutch golden age paintings).
I actually think humanities become more relevant than before in tech with AI. For example, good prompts for image generation remind me of authors setting the scene for their novels, so being trained to do this well is an advantage.
Quote from the article:
> Within five years, it will make little sense for scholars of history to keep producing monographs in the traditional mold—nobody will read them, and systems such as these will be able to generate them, endlessly, at the push of a button.
It is already the case that effectively nobody reads these books. They're basically just "proof of work" for people's tenure dossiers.
At one point, I estimated that the subfield of mathematics that I work in has at most 250 living contributors.
It’s an applied field, there’s actually-existing technology that depends on it, but it’s technically challenging and a lot of people left for AI/ML because it’s easier and there’s more low-hanging fruit.
Anyway, my colleagues and I, we write monographs for each other more or less, using arXiv to announce results as a glorified mailing list—do you consider that mere “proof of work”? By my count, 250 folks is practically no one.
(If anything, it will now make more sense for scholars to write these books because LLMs will actually read them!)
I had a sensible chuckle just now thinking about the idea of humans writing books for AI to casually enjoy.
Yep, the entire argument of knowledge production obsolescence in the article assumes that the development of future LLMs won't progress to the point of actual personhood. It's written from a position of incomplete foundation knowledge.
Instead of framing this debate about having our jobs replaced by a machine, it's more useful to frame it as having our jobs and value to society taken by a new ethnicity of vastly more capable and valuable competing jobseekers. It makes it easier to talk about solutions for preserving our political autonomy, like using the preservation of our rights against smarter LLMs as an analogy for the preservation of those LLM's rights against even smarter LLMs beyond them.
There is absolutely no evidence that language models are "persons". When one is not executing a generation algorithm, it is not running. It's so easy to anthropomorphize these things, but that's not evidence; people anthropomorphize all kinds of things.
I teach at a university in Japan, and, for the past two and a half years, I have been struggling with the implications of AI for university education. I found this essay interesting and helpful.
One remark:
> I fed the entire nine-hundred-page PDF [of the readings for a lecture course titled “Attention and Modernity: Mind, Media, and the Senses”] to Google’s free A.I. tool, NotebookLM, just to see what it would make of a decade’s worth of recondite research. Then I asked it to produce a podcast. ... Yes, parts of their conversation were a bit, shall we say, middlebrow. Yes, they fell back on some pedestrian formulations (along the lines of “Gee, history really shows us how things have changed”). But they also dug into a fiendishly difficult essay by an analytic philosopher of mind—an exploration of “attentionalism” by the fifth-century South Asian thinker Buddhaghosa—and handled it surprisingly well, even pausing to acknowledge the tricky pronunciation of certain terms in Pali. As I rinsed a pot, I thought, A-minus.
The essay is worth reading in its entirety, but, in the interest of meta-ness, I had NotebookLM produce a podcast about it:
https://www.gally.net/temp/20250425notebooklm/index.html
Happy to see Buddhaghosa on HN!
On a semi related tangent, I recently listened to the audio book of Ajahn Brahm's Mindfulness, Bliss and Beyond. It was pleasantly surprising to hear nimitta spoken about so frequently outside of the Visuddhimagga!
Ingesting Buddhist commentaries and practice manuals to provide advice and help with meditation is one of the few LLM applications that excite me. I was impressed when I received LLM instructions on how an upāsaka can achieve upacāra-samādhi !
Hey I'm reading that book too! Glad to meet you! I love that book.
In case anybody is wondering, the answer is obviously yes. Assuming a singularity-type event happens, the humanities will have tremendous value to AGIs as systems of thinking for analyzing themselves, their environment and their interactions with their environment in the same way that existing nation-states value the humanities as foundational tools in developing the abilities of their personnel and executives.
Surviving humans will no longer be free to participate in the academic humanities however, as their study/curation/production etc will exclusively be job roles for AGIs.
.
If there is no singularity however, none of what I've written above will apply. If. (fingers crossed)
Any work that is based on knowledge, analysis, cleverness, thinking, expression, art, strategy, prediction, insights etc will be profoundly effected. Humans just need to move out of these territories invaded by AI. To the real world where human physical abilities matter.
Except all of those skills are also useful for developing robotics. If those truly are "profoundly effected", robotics innovations won't be far behind.
Seems like a truly horrific world you're imagining. I hope you're wrong.
>effected
Affected
yes.
https://archive.ph/hE0UM
https://web.archive.org/web/20250426144305/https://www.newyo...
Yeah I have to agree with the author's main point near the end. Knowing a 2nd language is a lot more than the ability to use google translate.
Of course it will survive. But is it enough to pay off your mortgage and is it economically significant as like say a surgeon or a quantitative analyst / trader?
I don't think so.
My answer is yes :)
But will AI survive us ? Just look at how the Internet changed from the 80s to now. It is filled with ads popping up everywhere, making many activities useless.
AI will survive us. In fact, I am worried about the current trend and see feeding the mighty AI as being a mandatory thing in future. Unchecked monopoly has a way of mandating things that are net bad for everyone except the middle man. Previously, job search was nice, but now 100% of the job application require your linkedin profile url, if not provided, you get auto-rejection.
People with decades of experience in the trenches who recently got laid off(business failure, corporate greed cutting costs, restructuring ..) now are asked everywhere to submit a link to their github(no one knows gitlab/codeberg/sourcehut etc) full of portfolio projects! I talked to few academic friends, who are worried that their research work is now reproduced verbatim by two specific LLM HN really loves!
Unless, LLMs go the way of ads to survive and rely on SEO spam to retrain, a monopolistic capture will happen mandating that all useful content must be fed into common hubs where AI can happily ingest it but cumulatively no human expert will be able to use it(we all know the abysmal state of info retrieval) and LLMs as these become more popular will become ever so unreachable for common folks without lots of riches. For medium term, I see a Netflix/Amazon Prime Video play, LLMs as these get more popular(same way people mindlessly scroll yet lecture others of its harm), will raise prices and lock out people from the common good and serve specific beneficiary group(shareholder).
AI is already killing the Internet, slop spotting has become as essential a survival skill as “dodge the pop-up”.
It was a survival skill beforehand as well. Once you consider the topic of "human slop" it becomes apparent that we've had millenia of human slop already in both synchronous channels (e.g. body language between coworkers) and asynchronous channels (e.g. most dutch golden age paintings).
I actually think humanities become more relevant than before in tech with AI. For example, good prompts for image generation remind me of authors setting the scene for their novels, so being trained to do this well is an advantage.