> 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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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).
I don't think so.
Seems like a truly horrific world you're imagining. I hope you're wrong.
Affected
tkgally•4h ago
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
echelon_musk•23s ago
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 !