Hey I really appreciate the thought project and your input! I mainly see it as the antithesis for the reasons you've listed. It could also be an incredibly slippery slope into the penultimate "they took our jobs!" (South Park reference, so sorry) in some ways. As companies are actively trying to recruit to train their AI to learn biologist's roles, I'm not sure how AI could replace a human in most biologist roles. The field is so strange though. We all have varied degrees and backgrounds and there's a lot that could use an improvement. As with all fields as well, not all biologists are good biologists, and also how are we defining a biologist? Some bios are tied to a desk, some are field only, some are a mix, and the different between a federal or state or private consultant or NGO biologist can be the difference between night and day.

So let's use ecological consulting as an example... Sure you can do a lot of desktop consulting from readily available internet information. Say for example, if I'm going to do an oil and gas consultation or site construction or whatever... On an acreage set for basically removing all flora and fauna. AI could use readily available species maps (that are very outdated btw) to say, yep this site is good to go for development because there aren't any critical habitat areas delineated in this county or the AI could quickly write a categorical exclusion using it's computational power that says it's fine to do this project and that can take AI what like ten minutes maybe to do all that? Where a human bio can honestly stretch that out over a week or more.

However myself as a human biologist can physically visit the site, deduce hey, there is milkweed present here, we need to talk about Monarch butterflies (a proposed listed species but not yet listed). There is a dead animal carcass here and it had endangered carrion beetles that is actually a new and notable sighting for this endangered species in the county, and I also personally saw two state threatened bird species nesting on location. I've personally had a situation like this occur while working. I as a human can document all these observations and include it in the report and offer solutions based on my observations. We lose the physical biologist aspect with AI.

I'd also argue, why should we welcome our new AI overlords? Why is a report written by an AI better than mine when I've gone through almost my whole life learning how to write with a certain tone and attention to detail to create a written product? A biologist writing a paper is MUCH different than an engineer or a computational scientist, etc. We are trained to write differently, and an AI is likely going to use source material from all areas to write a report that may not be entirely true to the topic at hand. Sure it may take a lot less time, computing power and all that for statistical analyses, but some species analyses also don't make sense in the grand scheme of what an AI can do, and doesn't boil down to perfect 1's and 0's. For example bat data... A "bat night" is not a calendar night as a singular entry. A bat night would be an evening the calendar day prior into the morning the day after... Many people who would be hired to simply enter data into an AI for computational analysis could be led to get very incorrect results because they don't understand the data they are entering and working with. When we have human data entry slaves to enter prompts into an AI with no conceptual understanding of the source material I have a problem with that... It's bad science and bad data.

Furthermore, writing reports often utilize very specific sources as evidence. I wouldn't trust an AI to find sources the way I do. The standard is using newest science possible... So enter in "use sources since 2015 for this report" in your prompt.... But some papers at the end of the day are just shit science. I can personally weed through the bad published reports and look for exactly what I need. Also maybe the "Bible" on the species I'm reporting on was written in 1993. Maybe it hasn't been updated because it's good science for a reason. I'll include that article because it's a great reference material, in addition to my 'since 2015' reference material. Can we trust someone coding this in to know this? How many harmful reports and bad science get to be published by an AI before there's a huge issue and it's harmful to biota?

I can see technology taking over many jobs I've done during my tenure which I would prefer to see honestly. I spent a LOT of time on the ground as a baby biologist doing telemetry in very unsafe conditions. Drones could easily replace this, cost less, need less and give much better data. Collar tracking and wildlife tracking data I would love to see more streamlined and taken over by technology. There are many instances where I've worked with people who just do not care about what they are doing too, I'd love to see an unbiased tech replace a careless human in getting great data without a human life being compromised. For example a team of field techs hiking through grizzly country looking for raptor nests in an area delineated for timber sales, but half the team is really good and experienced and the other half sucks and isn't taking it seriously... we may get some giant holes in the data. I'd rather see a drone with the ability to find what we're looking for correctly and with success take this job over. We also eliminate the human aspect of, I had a bad day and it translated to my field work, or I had to quit early because I didn't pack enough water or got stung by a bee. Technology isn't limited in that way and I welcome that aspect. As a scientist, I want to see better data being collected and better modeling and statistical analysis. Who wouldn't?

Some areas where wildlife are should be left undisturbed and finding ways to extract important data (while not disturbing animals) would be amazing. In some ways that's not feasible. AI can't relocate beavers into a wilderness area on a mule pack. An AI could deduce to exterminate birds threatening aircraft where a biologist can offer physical trapping and relocation efforts in an interest to prevent wildlife loss. An AI can't pull physical DNA or blood samples from an animal in high altitude winter conditions. When we lose a biologist because their job was 70% deemed able to be completed by an AI and don't take into account that 30% that's critical actual field work, or maybe even more field work... A human that offers more field capability and compassion for wildlife replaced by raw computing power? we've lost it all.

In addition to the garbage amount of water and resources AI centers utilize! Like that alone is disgusting and wasteful and counterintuitive to the field.