Why US is destroying its own science

It is hard to understand why the US is putting an end to its multi-decade long world dominance in science. At first sight, this doesn't seem to make any sense. I tried to understand the logic behind this and have found a possible explanation.

The librarians, and other living encyclopaedists started to lose their prestige when Google offered to search the Internet, for free. Just like that, anybody could get access to the world knowledge treasures, without having to go to special places and ask special people for help. This trend went one big step further when AI engines returned compiled information written in ways that rival what experts would produce. These experts had accumulated a big amount of specialized knowledge across the course of their long academic studies.

While companies started to look with great interest into replace experts with AI bots, knowledge workers, as they were started to be called, were relegated to low-paid jobs where they have been asked to correct the most flagrant errors returned by the large language models based algorithms. The actual experts started to face serious challenges to find respectable jobs.

For those who are in charge, and are not that sophisticated, science is just another facet of expertise. Both share common features, i.e. the fact that they are based on well established facts, theories and methods.

However, and this is where the big problem lies, this belief is based on a complete misunderstand of what science is. The only think that scientists have in common and know for sure, is how ridiculously small is the amount of things that they know. Scientific activity relies on pushing the boundaries of the unknown, discovering things that not only did not exist, but were not thinkable. The new knowledge that scientists are creating is subject to review, criticism, temporary adoption, or immediate or delayed rejection. The part that is incorporated into the corpus of common knowledge is the science that results from agreements and consensus among the scientific community, and, according to Karl Popper, for the lack of a better solution yet to come. Unfortunately for authoritarian dictators, scientists need freedom to think, and that may be the real reason why they are considered dangerous.

In other words, scientific knowledge never pre-exists. It's a constantly changing landscape. No matter how deep algorithms will be digging into the corpus of existing knowledge, they won't be able to capture things that have not yet seen the light of day. Scientific discoveries result because of original thinking, sometimes accidental luck, heuristic connections between things that pre-existed in different worlds.

It's time to denounce the hypocrisy that tends to make people believe that science should be terminated because it's going to be replaced by AI. The reality is that science can not flourish in societies where freedom is restricted.