“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.
Alphafold has also highlighted the weakness of current AI models such as neural networks, she said.
They are very good at processing massive amounts of information and finding an answer, but not able to explain why that answer is correct.
So if the more than 200 million protein structures predicted by Alphafold are “extremely useful”, Strumke explained, “they don't tell us anything about microbiology”.
AI-Assisted
For her, science seeks to understand the universe and not just“make the right guess”.
However, Alphafold's groundbreaking work has led experts to put its designers among potential Nobel Prize candidates.
Google DeepMind CEO John M. Jumper and CEO and co-founder Demis Hassabis have already been awarded the prestigious Lasker Prize in 2023.
They are on the radar of analyst firm Clarivate, which predicts potential Nobel laureates in science based on citations in research papers.
David Pendlebury, the firm's director, admits that while Jumper and Hassabis' 2021 paper has been cited thousands of times, and it would be unusual for the Nobel jury to recognize work so soon after its publication.
Nobels usually recognize discoveries that are decades old.
But he believes AI-assisted research will soon feature prominently in the work awarded Nobel prizes.
“I'm sure that in the next decade, there will be Nobel Prizes that are in some way assisted by computer science, and computer science “These days, it's increasingly AI,” Pendlebury told AFP.