STOCKHOLM: Artificial intelligence is already disrupting industries from banking and finance to film and journalism, and scientists are investigating how AI might revolutionise their field — or even win a Nobel Prize.

In 2021, Japanese scientist Hiroaki Kitano proposed what he dubbed the “Nobel Turing Challenge”, inviting researchers to create an “AI scientist” capable of autonomously carrying out research worthy of a Nobel Prize by 2050.

Some scientists are already hard at work seeking to create an AI colleague worthy of a Nobel, with this year’s laureates to be announced between Oct 7 and 14. And in fact, there are around 100 “robot scientists” already, according to Ross King, a professor of machine intelligence at Chalmers University in Sweden.

In 2009, King published a paper in which he and a group of colleagues presented “Robot Scientist Adam” — the first machine to make scientific discoveries independently. “We built a robot which discovered new science on its own, generated novel scientific ideas and tested them and confirmed that they were correct,” King said.

The robot was set up to form hypotheses autonomously, and then design experiments to test these out. It would even programme laboratory robots to carry out those experiments, before learning from the process and repeating.

‘Not trivial’

“Adam” was tasked with exploring the inner workings of yeast and discovered “functions of genes” that were previously unknown in the organism. In the paper, the robot scientist’s creators noted that while the discoveries were “modest” they were “not trivial” either. Later, a second robot scientist — named “Eve” — was set up to study drug candidates for malaria and other tropical diseases.

According to King, robot scientists already have several advantages over your average human scientist. “It costs less money to do the science, they work 24/7,” he explained, adding that they are also more diligent at recording every detail of the process.

At the same time, King conceded that AI is far from being anywhere close to a Nobel-worthy scientist. For that, they would need to be “much more intelligent” and able to “understand the bigger picture”.

‘Nowhere near’

Inga Strumke, an associate professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, said that for the time being the scientific profession is safe. “The scientific tradition is nowhere near being taken over by machines anytime soon,” she said.

However, Strumke added that “doesn’t mean that it’s impossible”, adding that it’s “definitely” clear that AI is having and will have an impact on how science is conducted.

One example of how it is already in use is AlphaFold — an AI model developed by Google DeepMind — which is used to predict the three-dimensional structure of proteins based on their amino acid. “We knew that there was some relation between the amino acids and the final three-dimensional shape of the proteins... and then we could use machine learning to find it,” Strumke said.

She explained that the complexity of such calculations was too daunting for humans. “We kind of have a machine that did something that no humans could do,” she said.

Published in Dawn, October 4th, 2024