AI is Shaping Science’s Future – Resistance is Futile | Science News

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Modern science depends on too much data for even large teams of humans to process.

New Delhi: Last week, the Nobel Prize in Natural Sciences for 2024 was announced. The Chemistry prize went to David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for using Artificial Intelligence to tackle a long-standing problem in biochemistry, accurately predicting how proteins will fold. The Physics honour went to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton for using the concepts of physics to develop the neural networks that underpin the artificial intelligence technologies in widespread use today. Everyone and their grandmothers were surprised by decision to award the prizes to AI. The announcement even managed to surprise and flabbergast Geoffrey Hinton, the Godfather of AI, who in a press conference said, “My message is this: if you believe in something, don’t give up on it until you understand why that belief is wrong.”

The Nobel Prize can only be split three ways at most, but the frontiers of modern science are pushed by massive international collaborations of thousands of scientists from hundreds of universities. Hinton acknowledged this by saying, “I think of the prize as a recognition of a large community of people who worked on artificial neural networks for many years. I’d particularly like to acknowledge my two main mentors: David Rumelhart, with whom I worked on the backpropagation algorithm … and my colleague Terry Sejnowsky, who I worked with a lot in the 1980s on Boltzmann machines and who taught me a lot about the brain.” Hinton also went on to acknowledge his colleagues and even his students.

AI’s impact on science is only beginning

What modern scientists are achieving would be impossible without the assistance of AI. Proteins can be made up of chains of thousands of amino acids, which would be impossible for any scientist to figure out. Mapping all the 140,000 neurons in the brain of an adult fruit-fly, along with the 50 million connections between them is a staggeringly impossible task to achieve manually. AI is absolutely needed to model particle interactions in accelerators, statistically derive the most plausible visual representations of black holes, and understanding climate change, let alone tackling it. AI promises to revolutionise science with the dawn of the intelligence age, and humans can either sit and whinge or wholeheartedly embrace the change.

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