The One-Person Laboratory Should Be a First-Class Unit of Evaluation in Dry-Lab AI Research
This position paper argues that in software-defined dry-lab AI research, the one-person laboratory (OPL) is the relevant minimum accountable unit under compressed coordination and should be treated as a first-class unit of evaluation wherever bounded verification and public contestability hold. We develop three propositions. P1 (descriptive): public research-agent systems and laboratory-shaped benchmarks suggest that the minimum efficient research unit is moving downward in parts of AI research. P2 (causal, conditional): the relevant gains are narrower than common “AI […]