Tyler Cowen is imagining that AI will kill the research papers

Here’s roughly the first half of his post:

Imagine taking a macroeconomics paper and adding a little button at the end “Press this button to update this paper with the latest macro data.”

All of a sudden you have multiple papers rather than one, and no single canonical version. It is the latter versions, not created directly by the authors, that people will look at.

Imagine adding another button, to either micro or macro papers “Please rerun these results using what the AI thinks might be five other different yet still plausible specifications.”

Then you have more papers yet.

Ultimately, why not just build a “meta-paper,” using AI, to answer any possible question about the subject area under consideration. This meta-paper would allow the reader, using AI, to make many sorts of modifications and additions to the basic work.

It goes on in that vein. Cowen’s final line:

It is funny, and tragic, how much some of you are still obsessed with writing and publishing “papers.”

And it’s funny how Cowen imagines that future research in economics and “many of the other sciences” will be just like current research, but more, more, more! And be produced by a different mechanism, perhaps, ultimately, by a mechanism without any humans in it whatsoever.

Cowen can’t seem to imagine that the future, aided by AI to be sure, will bring new questions, new theories, new models, that it may bring a whole new intellectual world in comparison to which the current intellectual world will look like the 19th century, if not the 12th. It’s amazing that, despite his knowledge of intellectual history, the history of economics in particular, and his recent historically-oriented books about the great economists and about marginalism, that despite this he has no sense of what future ideas might be. But then he seems to have little sense of what ideas are except lumps of “stuff” falling from otherwise mysterious trees.

In this he’s pretty much like the rest of the Silicon Valley AI Mob. So many thoughts, all sprung from the same repertoire of ideas with no hint of a new repertoire in the offering. It’s all in the hands of the machines.