When will “the research paper” disappear in economics?

Soon enough you will be able to take any published research paper and tweak it, or improve it, any way you want.  Just apply a dose of AI.

Using Refine, you already can judge the quality of all past papers, once you get them in uploadable form.  We now can rewrite the entire history of modern economics with the mere investment of tokens.  Which papers in the 1993 AER were really the good ones?  Which are simply false and do not replicate?

Refine, or some service like it, will only get better, and cheaper.

Do we even need the AER any more to certify which are the best papers?  Just ask the AIs, including about influence not just quality.

Why not write a program, or have an AI write it for you, that will take your favorite papers and improve them, and change their evaluations over time, as new results come in?  Of course people will do this, at least to the extent they care.  These papers will keep on morphing.

Will economics become a branch of software engineering?  There are important papers in software engineering, but very often the most important advances are embodied in actual software, AI included.

Will the future advances in economics come from producing evaluative systems and producing systems, rather than papers?

What if you submit to a journal a data set and some code?  Who needs “the paper” per se?  Just issue some commands to the “data set plus code” and get the paper you want.  How about “I am Tyler Cowen, what is it you think I will find interesting in this data set?”

Or publish a method for simulating human behavior, to run AI-simulated experimental economics, a’la Horton and Manning?  Publish “the box,” and do not worry so much about the individual paper.

Will highly productive researchers, who publish a lot of papers, become far less valuable?  The individual paper no longer seems scarce, or will not be in another year or two.

Give tenure to people who build capabilities and who build “boxes”?

How about an economics Nobel Prize for Anthropic and Open AI?

I thank Alex T. for useful discussions on this point.