PhD students and postdocs are mostly fungible, though. PIs are not, if only by the virtue of their position in the system.

The same reason why menial workers earn so little relative to how hard they work.

It would appear that both credit and money flow to those who enable things to happen rather than those who execute.

Interestingly, that's probably another area where a language model could be put into service. Consider, every workman with access to say GPT-6 now has an expert lawyer, MBA, secretary, manager, etc. at his beck and call. What happens when every individual can navigate the system as well as an entire team of professionals? I'm imagining headless corporations where the only humans involved are those engaged in physical interface with the world.

That sounds like a playfield leveller but most likely won’t happen. But it surely would be nice

I think the claim that PhDs and postdocs are fungible is what enables credit to be concentrated to the PI.

In top places though, it’s often the case that trainees have an idea, get shut down by PI, trainee demonstrates project can work, then PI changes mind.

Also in science, the usual progress of a project is often PI has an idea, trainees explores the idea, finds an even better idea, PI says great now write the paper.

But I agree with you in the sense that PIs act as the “quality control” or “selection process” whereby ideas get culled and refined. And their scientific taste is non fungible.

Yeah it seems natural to divide the credit evenly, just as midfielders and strikers and coaches get equal credit for winning a game.