4. AI for science is a very big deal.
It’s early days yet, but the potential for AI to help make a genuine and important scientific discovery is greater than ever.
Google DeepMind has developed Co-Scientist, a multipurpose tool that can help researchers dig up and compare previous results, generate hypotheses, and devise experiments to test them. OpenAI told me this year that its North Star is the goal of building a fully automated researcher by 2028.
Mathematicians are excited too. Fundamental math underpins many everyday technologies, from internet security to video streaming. The last few months have seen a string of claims that AI has cracked unsolved math problems. And software that can solve really hard math problems will be able—so the argument goes—to solve more general-purpose real-world problems too.
What are the downsides? Some scientists are warning that an overreliance on AI tools could narrow the scope of research because scientists may choose problems that are most suited to AI assistance. There are also concerns that AI-assisted research will lead to a flood of inaccurate or fake results: science slop.
5. AI is everywhere all at once.
So where does that leave us? There are a lot of exciting things, a lot of worrying things, and a lot of hot air. It can be exhausting to keep up, and yet it all feels inescapable. Some people will tell you we’re in a race to the top; some will tell you we’re in a race to the bottom. But it’s really not clear where we’re headed.
AI companies want us to march to their tune and buy into the propaganda about artificial general intelligence, whatever that means. They are selling a vision that feels inevitable, but it isn’t.
We’ve built a technology that can do humanlike things, and I think that makes it hard to get our heads around the fact that it is still just a technology.
Something is happening. Maybe even something comparable to the invention of electricity or the internet. But technologies like that take time to settle and bring lasting change.
Get ready for a marathon, not a sprint.
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