Disembedded — a live experiment in economic geography

23–28 August 2026 · Chi Ma Wan Peninsula, Lantau Island, Hong Kong<br>A live experiment in economic geography.

Writing an entire paper in six days from an island in the South China Sea, with no one but machines to ask for help (and no one else to blame).

Come on stream<br>Watch live · from 23 Aug

Patrick Adler is an economic geographer at the University of Hong Kong.

Next stream Kickoff · Sun 23 Aug · 21:00 HKT<br>YouTube link and reminder go up 11 August

Email me with updates on the project<br>Two emails. One when the paper is finished, one when it is published or rejected. Nothing else.

Follow along ·<br>Bluesky<br>YouTube

AThe project in brief

The experimentI will write a quantitative economic geography paper over six days from Lantau Island in the South China Sea, without human collaborators, working entirely online.

The paperTentatively titled AI Exposure and Labor Market Dynamics in the United States, 2023–2025. It asks how the incidence of AI exposure is associated with basic labor market dynamics in the early AI period.

The recordingEvery aspect of assembling the paper — data analysis through to composition — is recorded and broadcast. That archive becomes the material for a second paper, forthcoming with two co-authors at the University of Hong Kong.

EveningsI will not discuss the paper itself with anyone. But each night I host a live conversation with colleagues and other researchers about AI-assisted research: how AI changes what authorship means, what the comparative advantage of a human researcher is in an AI-intensive world, how we should be training researchers now, and whatever else the guest wants to argue about. Come on stream →

The stakesLivestream challenges are supposed to have stakes.

Can I write an academic paper that survives desk rejection at a Scopus-indexed journal?

If it works<br>The masalewali chaanp at New Punjab Club.

Lamb chops, marinated twice over 48 hours, in Central. Eaten alone, on camera, with no one to split the bill with.

If it doesn't<br>24 additional hours of service to the economic geography community.

Reviewing, letters, discussant duty — whatever is asked, until the hours are paid. Also livestreamed, in full.

BWhat the project is about

The bigger things this project is about, besides the best lamb chops in Hong Kong.

01 · Tacit and explicit knowledge<br>How does AI change the relationship between tacit and explicit knowledge in academic research?

A longstanding argument in economic geography is that economically valuable knowledge is often tacit: difficult to codify and acquired through experience and practice. Generative AI seems to undermine this. Interacting with a model requires the user to explicate mental processes that would otherwise remain instinctive, and the model supplies codified answers at a distance. My hypothesis is that prompt-based research does not eliminate the importance of tacit knowledge so much as relocate it, for instance to recognizing that a question has been posed badly, deciding what to ask next, or detecting that a fluent answer is somehow wrong. By recording my interactions with models, I can observe behaviors that I am not thinking about at the time, and that I could not fully articulate if I tried. The footage also adds to one of the smallest archives in the world: tacit knowledge videos.

02 · Transparency in academic production<br>Is recording everything the last stable frontier of academic openness?

Coming on the heels of a replication crisis, AI has introduced an entirely new way for academic integrity — however defined — to be undermined. The movement toward open access and preregistration has productively made academic production more open. But once tools can stand in for so many parts of the work, full transparency may be the only stable frontier of openness left.

03 · Academic content creation<br>Will anyone actually watch scholarship happen?

The riskiest experiment here is the one about content. The creator economy has revealed pent-up demand for things once considered genuinely weird: people playing video games, people unboxing gadgets. Will academics and other weirdos turn out for live scholarship? This is one attempt at finding out.

CAbout Lantau

Lantau is Hong Kong's largest island, and it holds one of the most connected places on earth: the international airport, the bridge to Macau and Zhuhai, the rail line into Kowloon.

It also holds Chi Ma Wan. The desk sits at 22°13′21″N, 113°59′03″E — a beach on the western shore of the peninsula, inside Lantau South Country Park , country park behind and open sea in front, on a shoreline that once stood in for somewhere else in a Jean-Claude Van Damme film.

Chi Ma Wan Peninsula, south Lantau · the shoreline, and the view from the balcony · illustrations

The independent variable<br>How remote, exactly?

From the desk<br>Straight line<br>Door to door

University of Hong Kong<br>17.1 km<br>TBC

Nearest research library<br>17.1 km<br>TBC

Nearest...