I am trying my best not to be too pessimistic about the state of academia, but then there are mornings like today when I see that the Deutscher Hochschulverband [the German association of university professors] is offering a further training course entitled "Der Weg zum Forschungsantrag mit Multi-Agenten: Forschung mit KI neu denken" [Roadmap to a multi-agent research proposal: Rethinking research with AI]. This four-hour practical workshop demonstrates how to make use of multiple "AI agents" to review the literature, develop research questions and hypotheses, and write grant proposals. At a mere 250 € for members, the course is (of course) already sold out: https://www.dhvseminare.de/forschungsantrag_mit_multi-agenten_online-workshop. If, two years ago, someone had told me that it would be academics themselves that would make universities redundant, I wouldn't have believed them. Now I'm not so sure...
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So Mastodon bubble, what do we do? Carry on as if everything was fine? Call this out? (if so, how?)... I am honestly at a loss...
@ElenLeFoll In my current thinking, there are two core problems:
(a) temporal discounting: Individuals can have short term benefits, but the long-term consequences will aggravate dramatically (both collectively, e.g. environmentally and dependency on big tech; and individually, e.g. the cognitive debt)
(b) a connected social dilemma: Individual benefits (e.g. faster writing of grants) leads collectively to a collapse of the system.
Solution? No idea. Typical solution in social dilemmas are "institutional control" or „peer punishment“.
@nicebread @ElenLeFoll the only thing I can hope for is that it will be noticeable.
The thing is that it won't be better outside of academia. I have friends who were programmers and have become babysitters of AI.
It feels like more of a societal question. How do we turn this into something good? Because I don't think we can (should?) turn this shift back/away.
