A Really Terrible Proposition
A blatantly techno-utopian idea about peer-review emerges — and it's straight out of 1998
In a recent post on the “Scholarly Kitchen,” Haseeb Irfanullah argued this:
. . . we should end the human-dependent peer-review system and move to a completely AI-based one . . . [because] human-dependent peer review is inequitable, suffers from injustice, and is potentially unsustainable.
This is the worst kind of techno-utopianism, in that it is painfully naïve at almost every level, while eliding the fact that any system — computerized or not — is human-designed and human-enabled.
There is no technology God, no computerized Flying Spaghetti Monster.
It’s just us, and computers are just tools we’ve made.