Article by James Evans and Eamon Duede: “With the emergence of AI in science, we are witnessing the prelude to a curious inversion – our human ability to instrumentally control nature is beginning to outpace human understanding of nature, and in some instances, appears possible without understanding at all. With rapid adoption of AI across all scientific disciplines, what does this mean for the future of scientific inquiry? And what comes after science?…Historically, human curiosity motivated the search to increase our scientific understanding of nature, driving us to develop new methods (including science itself), which often also yielded increased control. Algorithms, understood as tools, were never invested with the same capacity. In the emerging new era, entire regions of the scientific enterprise may not yield the same degree of human understanding despite improved control. Such a result has the potential to reduce the curiosity that drives us to seek out new questions, methods, and solutions, attenuating scientist engagement. Moreover, although algorithms for science have increased in their decision-making capacity, only a few have explicitly sought to invest them with flexibility and explicitly encoded curiosity for sustained performance.
If successful, science “after science” must rely increasingly on human curiosity..(More)”.
