[b_emery]

I slightly disagree - it's the verification and integration of knowledge. The integration part - that is, reading papers and assessing them compared to all the others you've read, is quite hard, but it performs the useful function of creating a weighted average in your mind of what is real, and where the boundary is. This is part of graduate training, but it's basically what review papers do, so there is a time lag built in. AI for this would be huge, and it seems like it's not far off. And I want it to cite sources and point me to the real references, please.

[genmud]

While I totally get where you are coming from, I don’t think integration is necessary in 99% of usage. Sure, it helps people build intuition in the field they are specializing in, and for those people it can be invaluable, but having a better way to recall things would solve most use cases.

IMHO the biggest disservice to students in much of the education system in the US (including some colleges and universities ) is the focus on memorization vs focusing on problem solving. The older I get, the more I reflect on how much opportunity was wasted with poor quality teachers who just wanted us to memorize facts and be able to reproduce those facts in tests.

I don’t need to memorize maxwells equations to know that they exist, what they focus on, or how they can be applied to certain problem sets.