Random

I am very happy to be introduced to slow and honest research at a very early stage of my research career. However, while I am currently applying for PhD/research position it is certainly true that practicing slow science is surely a career option in CS atleast at the moment. Only a tiny fraction of people can really practice this.

Why?

I was fascinated by the field of AI and representation learning in particular very late in my masters which already sets me in a disadvantaged stage. I always from the past few years that I loved research and most certainly chose a domain to continue from a year or so. However, now that I look back I was unknowingly was part of a rat race I didn’t want to be. It was simple for me. I love science. I loved the cool stuff modern AI could do. I wanted to learn why things worked like they do. I wanted to dive deep in representations and make something for social good. It was and is still a simple goal.

I was and still am flabbergasted by the amount of expectations and the fast pace of the field of CS or AI in general. Nothing seems enough. I was having a chat with my mentor the other day (he is a CS professor with quite some academic experience ;)) about this and he had similar concerns about how much slow science is now acceptable and how this system will be in future when the throughput of science is even higher. Will real science experiments be faster? Will learning to program no longer be necessary? Fundamentally is it weird to think that how this would even work for the new generation. I use AI assisted tools all the time and adapt to whichever new framework of agentic tools come up, however I also admit that back in 2023 or before I took time to learn the fundamentals of these things slowly and carefully. I was telling him about the expectations nowadays compared to two years back and how everything is moving so fast and we should have to adopt it fast as well to catch up, but then what about the new generation who are grinding publications and giving talks since high school. Is that sustainable in the long term? This has been a thing in all the scientific revolutions and the transition is always uncomfortable.

However, I am optimistic about this revolution in general and we should catch up and find the right balance of slow science yet fast developments. The scientists and the researchers should and will definitely come up with better ways of evaluating or rewarding science which might be the only way out for the betterment of mankind and to get the best out of this immensely impressive yet fast revolution.