Dalibor Bobr

The profzi scheme is a famous comic from Jorge Cham. It compares academia to a Ponzi scheme: many students work for a professor to produce more papers. The professor takes credit for all the paper, but few of the advisee will have a great academic career because... the whole thing is pyramidal... the numbers don't add up. The whole operation is largely sterile and only works due to the pretence that producing peer reviewed research papers is equivalent (synonymous) to producing new, valuable, knowledge. What happens if AI can produce the papers? The scheme is exposed. We see it in mathematics right now. The AIs sidestep the entire peer-review process... and provide correct proofs to what was considered by the math establishment as the important problems. These people are very angry. It is the great AI debunking. So what is the solution? Go back to what should always have been. The purpose of research should never have been to produce peer-reviewed papers. This was always a perversion. (For people who do not read me regularly, the peer-review model became dominant in the 1970, it is a recent addition.) The purpose, of course, is to solve problems that people care about. That's much more difficult than producing papers... so it puts the bar much higher for scientists and researchers. But the bar should never have been lowered in the first place. What happens to the 'profzi scheme'? I predict, I hope, that it will fall. Not all of a sudden, but once the system come to the realization that the production of papers is a solved problem, AI can do it better than us... then it won't be decades before students start worrying about where the train is headed. (The comic attached is AI generated. Obviously.)