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US scientists brain drain

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By scooby



75% of US scientists considering leaving the country in poll:

https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/5218404-scientists-poll-leaving-us-poll/

https://eos.org/research-and-developments/majority-of-polled-scientists-considering-leaving-united-states-signaling-brain-drain

Comments

Anonymous said…
I'd be far more concerned by the problems in the "pipeline" with the absolutely vile US K-12 education system than any "brain drain". We're losing, and indeed may have already lost the ability to "grow our own" with the overly expensive race to the bottom called "education" these days! It's firmly entrenched now and doesn't appear to be dislodged at this point!

Probably should just learn Mandarin now! It will enhance your chances to be a gardener or nanny for a wealthy Chinese family!
4/03/2025 7:47 AM
Anonymous said…
Well considering that 75% of the scientists in the US are foreign I am not sure this number means anything more than " I am thinking about returning to my home country".

I have to meet a single US scientists talking about leaving, but most of the foreign born science said they are considering leaving.

Another news story that none actually read to see what it is really saying. Sigh
4/03/2025 8:00 PM
Anonymous said…
I would suppose that in a few short years, AI could surpass human intelligence, and humanoid robots will be far more capable of doing laboratory work. It will also be possible to be taught be AI systems and robots far more efficiently than the current university system. And companies will have less need or desire to hire STEM graduates. Some foreign countries may significantly lag the US in these trends, for example Latin America or Africa, so it might be a way to prolong your career a few years and still do something meaningful with your life.
4/04/2025 6:13 PM
Anonymous said…
4/04/2025 6:13 PM

This sounds like an AI wrote it. Maybe it is telling us what will happen. Just looking at current AI, I do not see it replacing scientists, particularly in lab scientists. One could argue that AI will allow the scientific workforce to grow, since it will made certain things cheaper or easier. It is like saying in 1985 that the rise of computer will replace scientists, when in fact did the opposite.

Now with that being said I think could replace some the tech workforce in STEM. This by the way is one of the issues I have with STEM, which is the "T".
Science and Tech are rather different and even Tech itself is varied. I get it sounds good to say STEM but it is way to simplistic a way to say things. I agree that AI can and would reduce the T, some the E, but will I think it will increase S.
Of course of the workers the T in STEM is 10 times larger than everything else, so it could still be loss of jobs.

Maybe AI could get there some day but right now AI cannot do S on its own, It needs humans, and I do not see it really reducing the scientific workforce.

Now at LANL at least the managers really want AI to replace scientists, in particular coders. It could replace simple codes but for more complex codes it cannot replace the humans, it can help them right now but not replace them.

On the other hand AI can replace what I call the "BS"jobs and do that rather easily. Sure maybe it cannot get rid of the bureaucracy but it could reduce the number of people that do it. If anything It could replace a good portion of the LANL/LLNL management paper pushers.

I have had some crazy conversations with managers who say they used ChatGP to right a simple code to sort numbers or do budgets. That is fine but
they make the leap that means it can do complex codes that you can trust. It shows how little they know about real scientific coding or how complex such codes are. What is also odd is that they could not even write the number sort code on their own which would take less than 5 mins or even 2 mins if you really fast. The do not understand that this code complexity does not linearly scale.

4/05/2025 5:06 AM
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