AI-Augmented Science and the New Institutional Scarcities

Fuente: arXiv
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Autore principale: Lovén, Lauri
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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_version_ 1866916042110926848
author Lovén, Lauri
author_facet Lovén, Lauri
contents Competent-looking judgment, including selecting, ranking, attributing, and certifying, is now produced at scale at marginal cost approaching zero, inverting the dominant economics-of-AI reading that treats judgment as the scarce complement to cheap prediction. Scientific institutions are among those most exposed, because manufacturing legitimate judgment is their primary product rather than one input among many, so they do not merely adapt to AI; they compete with it for the same functional role. Four complements then become scarce and load-bearing for AI-augmented science: verified signal, legitimacy, authentic provenance, and integration capacity (the community's tolerance for delegated cognition). Of these four, integration capacity is the least developed for scientific institutions and the most binding: no improvement in AI tooling can buy it. The frontier for AI-augmented science is not acceleration; it is the redesign of the certifying infrastructure around these new scarcities.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_02566
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle AI-Augmented Science and the New Institutional Scarcities
Lovén, Lauri
Computers and Society
K.4.1; K.4.2; I.2.0
Competent-looking judgment, including selecting, ranking, attributing, and certifying, is now produced at scale at marginal cost approaching zero, inverting the dominant economics-of-AI reading that treats judgment as the scarce complement to cheap prediction. Scientific institutions are among those most exposed, because manufacturing legitimate judgment is their primary product rather than one input among many, so they do not merely adapt to AI; they compete with it for the same functional role. Four complements then become scarce and load-bearing for AI-augmented science: verified signal, legitimacy, authentic provenance, and integration capacity (the community's tolerance for delegated cognition). Of these four, integration capacity is the least developed for scientific institutions and the most binding: no improvement in AI tooling can buy it. The frontier for AI-augmented science is not acceleration; it is the redesign of the certifying infrastructure around these new scarcities.
title AI-Augmented Science and the New Institutional Scarcities
topic Computers and Society
K.4.1; K.4.2; I.2.0
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.02566