Nobel announcements this week focused heavily on the use of AI, sparking debate over traditional science.
ADVERTISEMENTArtificial intelligence (AI) rose to the upper echelons of scientific success this week, winning in the Nobel Prize in Physics And chemistry.
The awards highlight the impact of technology in all aspects of our lives, but have also sparked debate and even outrage on social media from researchers over how AI relates to these scientific disciplines.
“I am speechless. I love machine learning and artificial neural networks as much as anyone, but it’s hard to see this as a discovery of physics,” Jonathan Pritchard, astrophysicist at Imperial College from London. written the.
“I guess the Nobel Prize was hit by the AI hype,” he added.
The Nobel Prize is typically awarded for decades-old research after its impact has been assessed as “the greatest benefit to humanity.”
The winners
Geoffrey Hinton, one of the so-called “godfathers of AI,” and professor and physicist John Hopfield were honored. the Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday for their work beginning in the 1980s, which drew on physical concepts to invent artificial neural networks that triggered and influenced the development of AI.
A day later, AI made Nobel headlines again after Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, DeepMind Director John Jumper, and University of Washington professor David Baker jointly won the victory. the Chemistry prize for their work on proteins.
Baker was praised for his work on an AI-based protein prediction tool called RoseTTAFold and for his work developing new proteins. Hassabis and Jumper, meanwhile, developed an AI system that solved a 50-year-old problem of predicting the structure of a protein.
“It is far too premature to talk about the involvement of AI in all prices,” Hassabis said at a press conference.
“Human ingenuity comes first – asking the question, developing the hypothesis – and AI systems can’t do any of that. They just sort of analyze the data at the moment,” he said. he said, adding that it was “interesting that the committee decided to make a statement” by winning the two AI-related awards.
Is AI related to physics and chemistry?
“My first reaction was that we’re not taking what AI is seriously enough,” said David Vivancos, CEO of deep learning and AI organization MindBigData.com.
“I’m a big admirer of (Hinton and Hopfield) and they’ve made a wonderful discovery. But the fact is that this is not the domain of physics, unless we think that physics is everything,” he told Euronews Next.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, physics is described as “the branch of science concerned with the nature and properties of non-living matter and energy”, that is, something that is physically present.
Vivancos explained that physics “is related to something physical, it’s something real,” while in terms of AI behavior, “it’s more related to something that happens in the computer mind rather than a physical being.
But could AI be linked to chemistry? In the case of the Nobel Prizes, this is arguably possible because it is computational chemistry, which uses computer simulation to help solve complex chemical problems.
ADVERTISEMENT“Using AI to predict protein structure is a huge advancement with myriad uses in biology, medicine and beyond,” said Andy Cooper, professor of chemistry and director of the Materials Innovation Factory and the Leverhulme Center for Functional Materials Design at New York University. University of Liverpool, said in a statement.
“AI will also impact other areas of chemistry, but the area of proteins has particular characteristics.
“First, there is a large amount of well-organized training data. Second, proteins are structurally complex but quite simple in composition: they are built from a fairly narrow selection of building blocks,” he added.
There are different types of AI, such as generative AI, but generally speaking, AI is defined as technology that allows computers and machines to simulate human learning, understanding, and problem solving .
ADVERTISEMENTAI’s “triumph of interdisciplinarity”
If AI is to fit into a traditional science, then perhaps it is closer to mathematics, Vivancos said.
But he also posited that it could be biology or neuroscience because of the algorithms that can help researchers sift through vast libraries of genetic data.
AI can fit into most categories and will undoubtedly impact all of our lives at some level. For example, the technology has also been used to manage road traffic in real time, in navigation applications such as Google Maps and in everyday objects such as robot vacuum cleaners.
The Nobel Prizes in chemistry and physics awarded for the use of AI show the technology’s “triumph of interdisciplinarity,” said Virginia Dignum, a professor in the department of computer science at Umeå University in Sweden. , who also leads the university’s social and ethical artificial intelligence research. band.
ADVERTISEMENT“Real scientific advances are no longer the domain of a single discipline but require a broad perspective and the combination of different ideas,” she told Euronews Next.
“AI here is an accelerator and support for the exploration of large research spaces, a tool capable of analyzing large data sets, predicting results and even suggesting new hypotheses, thus strengthening the capabilities of researchers in fields like biology, physics, chemistry and medicines,” she added.
But Dignum said these awards are not about AI’s place in the Nobel Prizes, but about the open-mindedness and “respectful attitude of scientists” and how much can be learned.
“Perhaps it is time to modernize the Nobel Prizes to recognize that the discoveries that really matter transcend the traditional division between disciplines,” Dignum said.
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