@random_walker
At first glance this is a totally reasonable perspective. Training PhD students is a duty! But consider this — *effectively* advising a PhD student over a 5-year period is well over 1,000 hours of work, not to mention bringing in hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants. Professors will do some things for mostly altruistic reasons (peer review) but the time commitment for advising is not something that's reasonable to ask of someone without some form of compensation. So there are two options. One is to make advising a job requirement. Unfortunately this doesn't work, because the *quality* of advising is unobservable and can't be quantified by metrics, leading to a race to the bottom. The other option is the current system — advising helps advance the professor's research agenda because PhD students do most of the work, so they take on students voluntarily. Which means it's important to ask if this subtle alignment of incentives will continue despite advancing AI capabilities. Academia has many such "subtle alignments of incentives" that the system relies on in order to function — rarely articulated, poorly understood, and fragile. Maybe the advisor-advisee relationship in CS will survive the AI transition, as @sayashk predicts, but many processes and structures will surely break. Best to rethink the system now, before it's too late.