STEM academia serves two closely intertwined purposes: the production of high quality science and the production of human capital. These two purposes feed into each other. The obvious direction is that we develop human capital by paying people to produce science. What is perhaps less obvious is that the very fact that human labor is used to produce science has historically been an important input to its quality. The goal of science is not simply to produce papers, but rather to produce good work--that a person is willing to spend months working on a paper is a (weak) witness to the fact that it has some minimum quality. If someone has a record of producing high quality work, that they wrote a paper is a stronger witness, since it was worth the opportunity cost to write it. If many people engage with it substantially, that is even stronger evidence. This is not to say that there isn't lots of low-quality work--there is, in fact a huge amount--but we have strong sorting mechanisms, admittedly using imperfect proxies (all depending on costly human labor!), to find high-quality stuff. Arguably the paper itself is not the primary product here; in many cases the primary product is actually the expertise developed over the course of producing it, which can then be applied to other questions. If you believe, as I do, that producing high quality science should be one of our fundamental goals, I think you’re obligated to embrace new tools that help one do so. Refusing to is a declaration that these outputs are not important. But I worry that we are not on track to automate the production of good work; rather, we are on track to automate the production of papers. We need new mechanisms to ensure that we are also producing good work, and to ensure that we are developing the human capital to engage with it.