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Benjamin Riley's avatar

Thought provoking as always Sean. My immediate, cheeky thought -- if LLMs could somehow help me to sort through the bevy of research being produced on AI and human cognition that would be super freakin' helpful, as I feel like I'm bookmarking six studies a day that I'll never get around to reading.

Slightly more substantively, your post has me pondering the nature of scientific inquiry and in particular, scientific revolutions in the Kuhnian sense, the moments when our paradigms shift. The approach you sketch out here is highly empirical, and no shame in that. But Kuhn observed that "what occurs during a scientific revolution is not fully reducible to a reinterpretation of individual and stable data." He suggested, with some force I think, that revolutions come when scientists engage in "thought experiments" that create new metaphors for understanding the world differently.

Can LLMs help with this? Maybe! I certainly can imagine them helping spur new "thought experiments" in scientists. But just as I'm concerned that art and literature may be impoverished by the creation of this new tool that is built to generate something that "looks like" a sort of averaging of what's already been created, in my darker imaginings I can envision a future where this technology locks us into the scientific paradigm of the present.

But hopefully you prove me wrong and become the modern Einstein of the mind.

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