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AI and the Enclosure of the Scientific Commons

51 points jrepinc 2 hours ago 21 comments

bennettnate5 2 hours ago | parent

> The scientific literature can be viewed as an "information commons:" an intangible resource that "no one owns

Springer would like a word

contemporary343 1 hour ago | parent

One simple way to understand how this is currently manifesting is the administration's severe, and really unprecedented, defunding of basic science at NSF (likely in unconstitutional defiance of Congress' appropriations to specific NSF directorates). Instead the way the funding has been redirected (by the White House OSTP) is based on the assumption that future knowledge will be exclusively AI (sorry SI) generated, so humans not needed.

China, on the other hand, seems to be doubling down on fundamental research, including announcing these changes:

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202609/1371583.shtml

and this: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3368750/chin...

10111001 1 hour ago | parent

> Instead the way the funding has been redirected (by the White House OSTP) is based on the assumption that future knowledge will be exclusively AI (sorry SI) generated, so humans not needed.

Can you go into more detail about that? My impression is the real reason the Trump administration has defunded basic science (and so much else) is an unholy combination of "government bad" libertarianism and the belief the funding was going to their ideological opponents.

I feel that and use of AI to justify the redirection is most likely post-hoc.

whatshisface 1 hour ago | parent

Going by the public announcements, the original plan was to cut science funding but once Congress said "no," the backup plan became directing it towards non - human - scientist items like facilities operations and the Genesis program.

contemporary343 31 minutes ago | parent

Echoing what the other reply to your question said, I don't disagree that much of this post-hoc, but I think the thinking has evolved such that this post-hoc reasoning is now truly believed. I'm primarily speaking of it as an observer of how and where funds are being directed and to what ends: often big, non-university-centered programs to build labs or generate datasets for AI discovery. While some of the ideas may have merit, there is no free lunch unfortunately, as that was money that would have supported individual PIs and their trainees.

Legend2440 1 hour ago | parent

I think this is completely unrelated.

This administration thinks science is 'woke' because it says things that disagree with him. Many of these funding cuts were explicitly politically motivated, e.g. they specifically targeted research about diversity, gender, or vaccines.

It's not about AI, it's about removing funding from liberal causes and giving it to conservative causes.

asdff 1 hour ago | parent

No it is about AI too. Trump et al want there to be no dispensing of federal grants to academics in the future. They want the government to instead cut checks directly to xAI et al who will do all our research for us in the future and will for certain represent our best interests and not those of shareholders exclusively.

Legend2440 51 minutes ago | parent

If AI didn't exist, he'd find some other excuse to do the exact same thing.

The real reason for this is that Elon Musk is a conservative megadonor, while academics are vocally opposed to Trump. He takes from his enemies and gives to his friends; that's how he operates.

ar813 54 minutes ago | parent

Unfortunately it is entirely related. The initial wave of cancelations were about those topics, but the more structural thing they are attempting now is to focus funds on tool development for AI models as opposed to human capital development as NSF does.

Herring 1 hour ago | parent

This is not that difficult. It's just like what happened to physical fitness/obesity after the invention of the car. Go look at countries that do it reasonably well (ie not the US). Copy exactly what they do, wholesale.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPUlgSRn6e0 [Not Just Bikes]

Glyptodon 1 hour ago | parent

Admin, maybe merge with submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50187248

daishi55 45 minutes ago | parent

When you can equally reasonably make the opposite argument - that AI is going to open up scientific exploration and contribution to a wider range of participants than ever before - then I think it’s a sign that nobody has any idea what’s going to happen and spending time making either claim is probably pointless until we have more data.

solomonb 44 minutes ago | parent

Its pretty clear that there are significant limitations on who has access to the compute needed to drive LLM based scientific research.

jonhohle 39 minutes ago | parent

Not only resources being controlled by a few organizations, but the noise of all of the people who have used AI to “discover” something novel, when they don’t understand the domain in the first place. When everyone is discovering something, but what they are publishing is either incorrect or already known, how do you wade through the slop to find the gems (maybe academic publishing was already filled with human slop, though).

nicce 31 minutes ago | parent

All journals will be brute-forced to death. Not the greatest time to be Phd student. And many people have no shame. They just use agents to make whole papers. Those who don’t, will double-guess their life choices.

reasonableklout 23 minutes ago | parent

Even generation of plausible human slop took time and required skills correlated with domain understanding. So the scale is not at all the same.

hadlock 11 minutes ago | parent

Only for about five more years. In 7-10 years the price of memory and compute should drop by 80-90%. In ten years the bleeding edge 14,000 token/s machines and 4TB memory is going to look quaint, "that stuff can't even bootstrap a kernel and entire (usable) posix-compliant OS in less than a week" vs the future of "the computer updates it's firmware in real time to meet the needs of the current task"

watwut 23 minutes ago | parent

I dont find that argument plausible at all. You can say the sky has little ponies on it and it wont be true either.

cadamsdotcom 15 minutes ago | parent

"all knowledge so far" (ie. the data needed for LLM training) is only a grain of sand on a beach compared to the return on making it all regurgitatable on demand.

We are at the bottom of a science, knowledge & art hockey stick chart, we're staring up at it and the steep bit is labeled "the future".

Pulling the wool over your eyes by labeling it destruction will prevent you engaging your creativity and cause you to miss your opportunity, deny yourself the leverage, and deny us what the combination of modern tools plus your wonderful unique talents can yield.

hungryhobbit 7 minutes ago | parent

" an intangible resource that "no one owns and is shared by everyone."" ... but if you try to share this "un-owned" intangible resource with others you will have police all over the globe harassing and maybe even imprisoning you (see: Anna's Archive).

So ... "no one owns" is doing some pretty heavy lifting there ... and it's kind of the foundation of the entire article.