11:17
11d ago
→The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative
Daniel Hook names the 'Waymo effect': when tech removes human friction, we treat the removal as pure gain because the costs were visible but the benefits weren't. He uses driverless cars as a metaphor—no small talk is a relief, but unchosen cross-bubble conversations vanish too. In research, LLMs are becoming the frictionless colleague: available at 2am, agenda-free, and never telling you that you're solving the wrong problem. A collaborator's inconvenience is the collaboration. Hook worries researchers will default to AI over humans, quietly eroding the social fabric of science. The post is a conceptual essay; it does not cite empirical data on the trend.
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