Everyone seems to be consumed with AI anxiety. Graduate students are wondering if they will be replaced by assistants, or if they themselves are using AI enough or using it "right". Researchers are wondering what it means to produce research if agents can write whole papers. Everyone is wondering how we will keep up with a literature that is moving ever faster.
Everyone is feeling the pressure to do *more*: do more projects, produce more papers, review more papers. This has already resulted in negative impacts on the research space, for example the problems that conferences have in getting quality, non-automated reviewing for the huge volume of submissions they receive.
We should think about what we can do that is *different.* We should try to use automation to be more efficient at the annoying parts of our jobs while leaving more time for discovering new knowledge. The key (fast-evolving, unresolved) issue is how AI models will change the frontier of what is scientifically possible. This varies from field to field and changes day by day, but my sense is that the rise of semi-autonomous agents will be very interesting for scaling up social and behavioral science.
