Comment by analog31

To me, "domain knowledge" seems to resemble a primitive form of "slop filter" to use the modern parlance. In any field, the majority of possible ideas are slop. This has always been the case. People somehow learn to navigate through the slop, to find things that are worth working on.

Even before the AI era, we were flooded with a veritable DDOS attack of slop, in our in-boxes, meetings, etc. Managers believed that innovation was held back by quantity of ideas, or by the domain experts being "resistant to change." This led to day-long group brainstorming sessions that yielded nothing. Part of the transition from student to junior to senior is learning to filter your own ideas, and to guide others in the search for ideas that are likely to be fruitful.

The criteria for slop filtering have always been subjective, arbitrary, or driven by institutional culture. That's what we've got. Any means of generating ideas produces slop in the absence of filtering.

What will slop filtering look like when the AI can generate tera-proofs per second? What does it look like already for our e-mail inboxes? We are asymptotically trending towards slop filters that look more and more like "ignore everything." I already read none of the business memoranda that I receive. I don't answer my phone. The number of workers needed to read and assess business memoranda is zero.

The slop filter still functions in math. Problems are pre-filtered for being of interest. Somebody expressed enough interest in the Navier-Stokes problem to give it a name and attach a prize to it. There are still plenty of "prize problems." Here are some:

* Quantum gravity

* Improvement of superconductors that don't need helium

* Practical generation of power from fusion