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Not even wrong. Real scientists say "yes" to the genie with all the answers? And artists and crafts people don't? The entire statement is nonsense, and offers no insight into art or science. It's almost like a language model generated a plausible sentence that is grammatically correct but has no relation to the real world.

Perhaps if the analogy was between science and engineering.. A plumber would say "yes" to the genie that solves the problem immediately, if he/she got paid for the work instead of the genie (or the corporation providing the genie service). In that case the plumber is redundant and unnecessary, the customer can just ask the genie directly. A scientist would say "no" because the whole point of science is the knowledge and understanding, which is gained by the process of discovery and not given on a silver platter.

3 comments

One should differentiate between "working in academia" and "doing science" here. Science is fundamentally about the curiosity, the desire to know, not the process of getting there.

If we can now know anything we want, we have an age of unimaginable abundance before us. I think it's more likely though that we will just be able to know more things than before and/or maybe learning new things faster - which is a good thing too, but there is still work for human scientists to do

No way. Science is not just about the desire to know. Almost all scientists I know (and I've met hundreds) care deeply about the joy of working out the problems themselves rather than just knowing the answers. The joy of finding that mental spark on your own to solve a problem - that's what makes it worthwhile. Just knowing everything right away is boring. If it were not, I'd just spend all the time in a library reading the work of others.

No, I think you're pretty overconfident here. A plumber is not in fact thrilled by the genie who permanently resolves all the world's plumbing problems.

I also kind of love the subtext in these responses that there is something suspect about crafts.

That thought experiment says more about your thoughts on plumbers than anything else.

I live in Chicagoland, which has the largest water reclamation facility on Earth in order to prevent the entire region's basements from flooding under storm water pressure. It doesn't work, and I have multiple times had the pleasure of watching from my basement stairs as plumbers waded through raw sewage to clear obstructions in the lines at my house. It's a tough job that requires a lot of skill and nobody is doing that for love.

Thank you for proving my point by fixating on the raw sewage part.

Contrary to what you think, no plumber would abstain from fixing plumbing permanently, even if it meant no more wading through said sewage.

I gotta admit here I'm completely lost on what we're debating.

Sorry for the harsh tone in a comment above, reading it over I see that was unnecessary and rude. I did enjoy the story of the plumbers during the regular flooding in Chicago, much respect to their hard work.

While we may not agree on the question of the magical genie of all knowledge, whether an artist or scientist would/should welcome its gift (or bargain with the devil) for an instant answer - it was interesting to note that we implicitly knew the genie is not just a theoretical thought experiment, but a real thing that is happening.

The genie's out of the bottle, that much we can agree on, I think. Sooner or later it has the potential to become a better plumber, artist, and scientist, more skilled and knowledgeable than any living person. A day may come when a magnificent AI artist will wow the world with its creations, and even skeptics will have to admit that, damn, that is impressive. But then again, so what? I'd rather have the genie wading through sewage to fix plumbing, so that a plumber could spend more time with their family and pursue that novel they've been dreaming of writing, or painting in the backyard, or working on a mad science project in the basement.

I believe this too: that the current moment with LLMs is destabilizing to all sorts of knowledge work, and especially to non-bench-work sciences, but that over the long run it's just going to raise the game. I'm not a person who thinks LLMs are going to moot all human scientific endeavor. I know those people exist (both on the anti-AI and especially pro-AI side). That's not where I'm coming from.

I just think knocking out unsolved problems in mathematics is an absolute good. Imagine, in a more grounded analogy, a whole family of neo-Ramanujans discovered somewhere in Namibia, and then tearing through all the open problems, upturning a bunch of careers in the west in the process. It's hard to argue that would be a bad thing (I think we'd call it miraculous). But AI has a partisan valence that sometimes obscures what's happening.

I appreciate the generous response. My tone couldn't have been any better (and I didn't really read yours as harsh, just spirited). Way to be an excellent HN'er! :)

Their sentence makes perfect sense to me. Science is about knowledge, art is about the process of creation. Conflating the two is just doing a hobby at that point.

I think "being concerned with knowledge" and "being invested in the process of creation/discovery" can occur at the same time. There isn't a singular "scientific mindset" or set of values that differentiates what is and isn't science. It's just silly.