The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative

qoez

Collaborative research is a dual purpose existensial safety hazard, it's better to keep all results locked up away from public use for the public's own benefit.

mosura

There's a general point here which is that the primary use and appeal of AI is to use it to avoid the negative side effects imposed on you by other people. The flip side is the people with the biggest problems with AI are those that survive by imposing themselves on others in unnecessary ways, which is why so many bureaucrats are so enthused about regulating it.

meowface

This article is written by an LLM, by the way. ("Quietly" is... as Claude might put it... "often the quiet tell".)

fithisux

The social content or science of development vanish. People become islands working on something without the bigger picture. This is very dangerous.

chrisjj

> the Waymo effect is what happens when a technology removes the friction of dealing with another human being Some mistake, I think. Removing that friction would ease the interaction. This effect eliminates it.

wazoox

I'm pretty baffled by people I hear here and there saying that AI is great because it saves them the hassle of human interaction. "I love Waymo, I don't have to chit-chat with the driver and bear his horrible music". Apparently people didn't get the memo : humans are social animals. Autonomous individuals simply don't exist. Nothing is entirely yours... And AI precisely builds upon that large availability of our common data. That's a modern enclosure movement, at least it would be but fortunately, the Communist Chinese are there to enforce sharing.

spongebobstoes

with AI, one person can accomplish much more collaboration adds overhead, but expands what's possible. need to think bigger to continue to see the benefits

maddiaa0

This is the exact same thing that we have been seeing in open source software. The amount of OSS is exploding, but the community part of it is not

skybrian

For software developers, the equivalent is writing software without beta testers. If you don’t seek out users, you will likely build something nobody else wants. And, that’s what I do. I’m retired and I use AI to build websites for myself. If anyone else ends up using it, that will be a happy side-effect. If we want to do collaboration, we are going to need to do it intentionally rather than relying on side effects like conversations with cab drivers.

Frost1x

I work at an intersection of tech, applied research, and science. Something I’ve noticed in collaboration that does occur is an increased confidence in people outside their domains to say things with conviction. I have people who have limited experience with software pushing out layers and layers of abstracted code that’s fairly sophisticated but often misguided in intent who will say what they’re doing is correct, with conviction. I also hear a lot more questioning people in their domains and challenging opinions, then hearing what I can only imagine are fragmented pieces of conversations they had with an LLM thinking through some argument. Then there’s silence when you discuss shortcomings, then they come back later with their memorized fragments of what you said, combined with memorized fragments of the LLM response to the argument. It’s occurring, a lot more. People are treating their LLMs in collaboration as a source of truth and using then to focus on their specific path or goals they think or have bias towards going down, vs just opening discussing things, considering tradeoffs from experts multiple disciplines weigh in on and then taking an approach that everyone finds most agreeable. It’s making me want to be a lot less collaborative with such individuals. I don’t want to sit around and refute Claude text outputs all day.

ricardobayes

How come self-driving came years before LLMs which seems to me an easier problem? Self-driving seems insanely hard compared to text generation.

mccoyb

AI is extremely useful, but it’s also extremely easy to fool yourself into thinking you understand what is going on without really understanding. This is often true with the code, but also for math and science concepts, etc. Not many professions are formally trained to be cognizant of this lack of understanding, and how to confront it. Usage of AI in collaborative settings is an amplifier of these issues, especially if someone doesn’t realize they don’t understand: they couldn’t teach or explain the concepts they use, or be forced to work with them malleably in a way that an expert or researcher would. If you are cognizant of your lack of understanding, you can remedy it by slowing down and teaching yourself. This is required to make better use of AI in the domain of interest! But you can’t have all things at once: you can’t move at speed with AI, collaborate effectively, and understand what is going on as an expert would. It is not physically possible for a human brain.

addag

Well not only research, but also a lot of other aspects of life; it is way easier to interact with something that has always an answer is polite whatever tell them.

chairleader

I think this notion of friction vs frictionless is one of the key features of this time in history. To my eye, the whole line from personal technology in the 80s -> through UX on the internet -> through app platform lock-in -> through subscription-centric "ownership" have been providing us all with the promise that we can buy our way into less friction. The next device or subscription solves problems or enables us one way or another. We see this line of history, draw it into the future and see a utopian future with zero friction. Zero friction meaning zero difference between how you want to feel about the world and what you get out of it. More feeling empowered or satisfied or comfortable or right. The parts of our culture that embrace friction are the slow parts - grousing with neighbors, weeding a garden, letting the other car go first. These are the parts where we meet with the reality of other people or nature. Maybe there's a tool or framework or gadget that could help, but we know and accept that there is something immutable outside of ourselves and we have to find a way to flow with it. I'm getting older, I'm finally starting to see the limits of pursuing a frictionless life.

conductr

FWIW, this same thing is happening in regular corporate America too. I have all kinds of non-CPA, non-finance background people telling me how I should treat financial transactions, without the nuance of GAAP or how an auditor would handle their reasoning. Everyone has an opinion on what our tech teams should/could allow or enable or create, without understanding the security implications and support it would require or what other projects are already working on. It’s good in a way, because you can certainly challenge people’s answer when an idea gets shot down. But it’s also a bit exhausting that everyone is challenging everything all the time.

Cribalis

I think the problem is the same as with any technology: used correctly it adds value, used incorrectly it subtracts from it. LLMs can massively speed up a process, but without control they can turn into social "sources of truth." A research process has well-defined, well-founded phases: you delimit the topic, search for sources, evaluate whether they're suitable, review their content, and place them on the map of the subject. The more sources, the greater the knowledge, and the better the final result — mental, or in the form of a report — is built. For that you have to read, and reread, and think, connect, relate, and conclude. AI can do all of those steps faster than a human. But if we let it do the entire job on its own, its own way, with no checks at each stage, the conclusions can end up distorted. If we know what we want it to do and how we want it done, and we put the mechanisms in place to enforce that, the result is different — better, more reliable. It's worth remembering: it's just a tool, nothing more. The wording of this comment in English has been corrected with AI, I don't have enough fluency to express myself clearly, but I do review the final result. In this case it got the verb tenses wrong, I saw it clearly, but the AI didn't understand it, it took me several instructions to explain it so it would understand. It's a tool, without supervision it can lead to problems, but it has expanded the world for a lot of people.

khalic

Ah, the ai panic has reached scientists, queue in the 1000s of articles about how it was about people all along and doom is coming to our civilisation because of it.

gradus_ad

If people want to collaborate, they will. If collaboration makes people more effective, they will want to collaborate. The novelty of any new technology is exciting and disrupting to existing habits but as the years pass we will reflect on what works and what doesn't. At least, those who are willing to reflect and adapt. Humans have a knack for this sort of thing...

claiir

Was almost going to praise this article for not overtly sounding like Claude, but then I read this: > and the incentive structures we have built are the experimental apparatus. So close!

foolinaround

Beautifully written essay. The benefits of serendipity are intractable by design whereas throughput gains can be readily measured (or at least we think so). The OP notes a point - "who did you think with?" -- maybe there are points based on some social graph, that adds weightage to a particular output? Edit : Other posters have said it is AI generated, I did not catch it, but felt the point was well-made. I dont know the author, but lets assume that he is not a good writer but had these valuable insights, did this AI generation not add value here?