Bay Area Tech Economics Seminar with Ben Golub, Northwestern University

Talk Title: AI and the Future of (Social) Science

Abstract: AI is beginning to inject vast cognitive labor into the scientific process, and one of the first places this is making an impact is verification: checking whether scientific artifacts actually hold together. Drawing on experience building Refine — a tool that is already identifying significant issues in highly-vetted technical papers — this talk asks how AI-assisted verification will reshape refereeing, journals, and the certification of research. If technical assessment can be unbundled from judgments of importance, what becomes of the institutions currently tasked with both, and the coordinations that those institutions create? Shifting from the “verification sector” of the knowledge economy to broader questions, how does abundant verification change discovery itself? Social science poses a particular challenge here, since it lacks the well-defined success criteria that have made AI so powerful in other fields. I draw on some examples from my own research to think about how we might respond to that.

Speaker: Ben Golub, Professor in the Department of Economics and in the Department of Computer Science (by courtesy), Northwestern University

Speaker Bio: Benjamin Golub is a Professor of Economics and (by courtesy) Computer Science at Northwestern University whose research focuses on economic networks, information diffusion, and social learning. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University and previously held faculty appointments at Harvard University. His work explores how networks shape economic behavior, collaboration, and the spread of information. Golub is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory and received the Calvó-Armengol International Prize in Economics.

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This talk is co-sponsored by USF's Master's in Applied Economics and the Stanford Causal Science Center. For additional information and abstracts from past talks, please click here.