How is advanced artificial intelligence forcing a rethink of the value of human intellectual labor? From the Future of Being Human Substack.
I must confess that, since getting my hands on OpenAI’s Deep Research (not to be confused with the just-released Deep Research feature on Perplexity), I’ve been intrigued by how it’s forcing me to rethink what it means to be someone who makes a living by thinking.
Last week that led to me exploring Deep Research’s ability to research and write a complete PhD dissertation — unaided, apart from some final formatting. While the resulting ~400 page document fell short of matching up to a true scholarly dissertation it was, nevertheless, impressive.
But AI-only “intellectual labor” is — at least at the moment — less interesting to me than what a person and a powerful reasoning/research AI might be able to achieve together.
And so I set myself the task this week of seeing what’s possible when I combine my own “intellectual labor” with OpenAI’s Deep Research.
The result — and my notes on the process — can be found below, along with an intriguing extra if you get to the end of the notes.
Of course, people have been augmenting their own abilities with generative AI for ages now, so you might be thinking there’s nothing new here. But I would beg to disagree.
For the first time in my experience as a pretty well established and respected academic, it feels like AI is capable of extending what researchers, academics and scholars can achieve beyond anything we’ve seen before. And this is what I was interested in exploring.
Building on last week’s article, I decided — somewhat ironically — to focus on a concept I touched on in the footnotes of last week’s article: that of the “artisanal intellectual.” …