“The machine did something no human could do”: Will robots and AI win Nobel Prizes ?

AI is testing artists and writers, but scientists believe it could also revolutionize research and even figure prominently in the Nobel Prize winners. Angela Weiss/POOL/AFP

Along with image generators and chatbots, artificial intelligence (AI) is testing artists and writers, but scientists believe it could also revolutionize research and even figure prominently in the Nobel Prize winners.

In 2021, Japanese scientist Hiroaki Kitano launched what he calls the Nobel Turing Challenge. He challenges researchers to create a "AI scientist"capable of autonomously conducting Nobel Prize-worthy research by 2050.

Some researchers are working hard to create such an artificial colleague and a hundred "scientific robots" are already at work in science, explains Ross D. King, professor of artificial intelligence at Chalmers University in Sweden.

The specialist published an article in 2009 in which he presented, with other researchers, a scientific robot named "Adam", the first machine to produce scientific discoveries autonomously.

“We built a robot that discovered new scientific ideas, tested them and confirmed that they were correct,” King told AFP.

The robot was programmed to autonomously formulate hypotheses, design experiments to test them and even program other laboratory robots to perform the experiments and then learn from the results.

“Not trivial” discoveries

“Adam” was tasked with exploring the inner workings of yeast and discovered previously unknown "gene functions".

These discoveries are "modest" but "not trivial" nonetheless, the authors said in their paper.

A second scientific robot called "Eve" was later created to study drug candidates for malaria and other tropical diseases.

With such robots, "it costs less money to conduct research and they work around the clock,"explains Ross D. King, adding that they are also more rigorous in monitoring processes.

The researcher concedes, however, that AI is far from being on par with a Nobel Prize-winning scientist. That would require robots "much smarter" able to “understand the big picture” to compete with the Nobels.

“Not about to be replaced”

“The scientific tradition is not about to be replaced by machines”,“That doesn't mean it's impossible,” she adds, adding that it is “certainly” possible. It is clear that AI is and will continue to impact the way science is conducted.

A good example of this is Google Deepmind's AI model Alphafold, which predicts the three-dimensional structure of proteins based on their amino acid.

“We knew there was a relationship between amino acids and the final three-dimensional shape of proteins, and that we could use machine learning to find it,”, Strümke says.

But these calculations are too complex for humans, and “the machine has done something that no human could do,” she continued.