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

#we have built an incentive system that makes decollaboration the rational choice

#High-quality ideas are slow to generate, and historically much of that slow generation happened between people: at the whiteboard, in the corridor

#the output is becoming cheap, and it is the thinking together that is becoming precious

#certain frictions in learning and thinking, effortful retrieval, delayed feedback, the struggle to get an idea onto the page in your own words, are not obstacles to durable understanding but the mechanism of it. Remove the difficulty for the sake of comfort, and you do not get the same understanding faster. You get less of it, delivered more smoothly.

#trading serendipity for throughput

#individual productivity rises while the diversity of ideas narrows, everyone moving faster along increasingly similar paths

#The value of another mind lies exactly in the ways it refuses to be an extension of your own

#A collaborator must be persuaded; an LLM must merely be prompted

#Large language models are the Waymo of intellectual life

#AI agents are aeroplanes for the mind: faster and more powerful than the bicycle, harder to control, costlier when they crash