OK. As well as the white supremacy, this guy is a fucking idiot with no scientific training or experience in doing actual research in actual research institutions funded by taxpayer grant funds.
1. AI doesn't come up with "new" ideas. He clearly has no fucking clue how any of that works. For example AlphaFold doesn't spontaneously decide to research new toxin proteins sampled from some random frog from Equador with the hope they might lead to new migraine treatments. I mean fuck!
2. This dickhead has no fucking concept of how soul crushing life has become for researchers and how much of their time is spent NOT doing research but preparing grant proposals for next year's grant round, which only has a national success rate of 5%. And if they don't succeed, they lose their job. Then there are the perverse incentives to "publish or perish". To publish anything, fast and often, as the ONLY metric by which you can advance in your academic career. This means that rather than trying longer term "blue sky" big idea research that might never work, but if it does it'll be really ground breaking, they'll do what's safe, incremental and far more likely to pay off in the short term with publications. Otherwise they'll be unemployed.
Just to highlight how bad things have become. One of this year's Nobel prize in chemistry recipients (Prof Richard Robson) was my post-doc boss some 20 or more years ago. He was awarded the Nobel for inventing an entire field of chemistry in the 1980s-90s and onwards. I caught up with his long time collaborator and also my former colleague for coffee a while ago and he basically said that if Richard of then was to apply for the same position now, he wouldn't get it. There's just not as much incentive given or freedom and funding allowed for creative, truly new ideas or "disruptive" research now.
OK. End bitter and personal rant.
