Thanks! Although in light of Neel's comment I'm uncertain about how to make this work without it becoming a significant burden on the researchers. I think this idea would reduce/not increase the burden on operational roles (since each person attempting the bounty would not require visas, funding, housing, etc) but it would likely increase the burden on research roles (since it would incentivize more people to write more papers that need reviewers).

I do think there's something here though. I will keep thinking/discussing the idea.

the bad people apply over and over again everywhere

In general I'd agree that this is the case, but many fellowship mentors are publicly talking about the high standard of the applicants, which is evidence against the fellowship applicants just being the bad people cycling through the process over and over again.

I'm sure there's some non-zero number of applicants who should not be accepted because they don't meet the bar, but I still believe there's some number of applicants who are turned away not because they're bad, but because the fellowship has limited capacity and they weren't in the top-k of applicants.

I don't like to self-publicize, but I think you'd really resonate with a piece I wrote a while back, it went semi-viral and resulted in some very interesting discussion. It's about the systematic biases that expertise invokes, and what that's like as a novice: https://boydkane.com/essays/experts

I am less convinced by the prediction market style of verification

I'm also not super convinced, but I do think the problem of verifying solutions is a big one, so I wanted to put out some alternate answer out there.

the role AI tools themselves can play in easing the mentorship bottleneck

For guiding up-and-coming researchers I definitely agree that existing AIs can help, although I also feel that each person should find something that works for them.

For using AIs to review submissions, I'm not sure the AIs are good enough yet to do a full review, but maybe they can significantly reduce the number of low-effort papers that a researcher has to review. E.g. use an LLM to check for typos, style, prior work, whether the paper actually answers the question, etc.

The ability to draft your own contracts, mediate disputes through arbitration, and represent yourself in court all derive from legal rights which would be very hard to overturn.

Strongly agree. However I believe lawyers to be adept at the legal system, so they'd likely bundle job protections for lawyers alongside job protections for other more empathetic jobs such as teachers or 911 call agents or others. In general, I predict that lawyers see AI job automation as a valid threat, that they take actions against this threat, and also that they are much more competent at legal manoeuvring and politics than I am, so would come up with competent ways to achieve their goals.

I agree with your point. But what I think is interesting about legal work is not that they could/couldn't be automated or that AI usage could be detected. I think that lawyers will see the job automation coming and take legal action to protect themselves such that AI is not legally allowed to be used for some key legal tasks, such that they ~all keep their jobs

It seems likely to me that (at least some) lawyers will have the foresight to see AI getting better and better, and that AI automation won't just stop at the grunt work and will eventually come from the more high profile jobs.

thus making it less valuable to hire juniors; thus making it harder for juniors to gain job experience.

Yes this seems very likely, I don't see why this would be limited to SWEs

Nobody wants grandma to get scammed. But I feel this is a false comparison, the real comparison would be against the grandma's who are today paying for multiple $20/month subscriptions because they got signed up and can't figure out how to unsubscribe.

I agree with Brendan Long below, and while there are always horror stories, I don't think most banks want the bad press of bankrupting grandma.

It might feel like extra costs in the moment, but I doubt it would end up being more expensive, since you're more able to "fine-tune" what you're paying for.

I think most humans prefer a subscription to not have a marginal cost to use what they enjoy / find useful

I disagree here, I feel like I regularly see people online complaining about needing a subscription for everything nowadays, and also about the price of those subscriptions quickly adding up to large amounts.

Oh this looks cool, thanks for the link! Interesting to see something similar and how that worked out.

Jamba! had drawn criticism for allegedly misleading customers in its service advertisements. In general, Jamba! services were sold as a subscription, despite advertising that seems to imply that customers are buying a one-off phone ringtone.

I couldn't find anything about purchases/subscriptions in the WAP Wikipedia page?