Comment by koliber
14 hours ago
I cook because I like to tinker, understand how variation in recipes affect flavor, and occasionally stumble upon something novel and tasty. The journey is most important but the goal is nice.
My wife cooks to produce a meal and feed our family. The journey is a necessary evil to achieve a goal.
We are aware of this difference in style and have learned to appreciate what each has to offer. At the same time, we sometimes annoy each other in the kitchen.
There is an analogy here to what this essay says.
It's a great analogy.
In short: explore versus exploit. Both are necessary, both are valuable.
I largely agree with the OP, because I can only see an explosion in both camps.
The explore side might be automated by compute, and that breaks the social contract of the existing academic incentive structure.
But people who are inherently curious will continue to be inherently curious. Nothing will stop anyone from exploring their curiosity, and the speed and depth at which they explore will only increase. We will build tools that enhance and automate our pedagogical compression.
And for the people who want to cook to feed the family, that automation is coming too.
Or perhaps we'll find a new ceiling: the frontier failure modes that still require a human mathematician in the loop, because discovering some class of novel insight doesn't scale with current AI architecture.
Err... society will pay your wife reliably because it needs to eat while you need rich benefactors to indulge your experiments?
Progress is more about the destination with the experience of the journey being a luxury. Enjoy your luxuries while they still last.