If this administration had an actual plan for priorities in science, I suppose I could understand shuffling grant funding among them. But there is no plan other than to destroy.

While I no longer live in the U.S. and would never return, I grew up there & did benefit enormously from access to public academic institutions and to the Federal grants in science research that allowed them to thrive. Seeing this whole apparatus dismantled and sold-off for scrap is beyond sad. Finally the party that has striven for so long, since at least the late 1950s, to eliminate public education - and perhaps the whole academic enterprise is on the verge of achieving results beyond its wildest imagination. I hope that they are satisfied now; but doubt they are.

At least for the moment, AI still needs knowledge workers to spec and prompt and check. AI makes knowledge workers more productive, but it doesn't eliminate the need for them.

And if knowledge workers are more productive, then knowledge work is cheaper. Cheaper knowledge work increases demand for knowledge work. So the number of workers required might actually increase. It also might not, but first order analysis that assumes decreased knowledge workers is not sufficient.

C.f. garment makers. Partial automation of clothes making made clothes cheaper, so now people have closets full of hundreds of garments rather than the 2 sets our great-grandparents likely had. There are now more people making garments now than there was 100 years ago.

We don't need more PhDs. People foolish enough to have sought a PhD will benefit as they are now limited to a master's degree, with which their career will be much better.