Communications of the ACM
Scientists, Too, Are Being Automated
A combination of artificial intelligence and nimble robots are allowing scientists to do more, and be faster, than they ever could with mere human hands and brains.
"We're in the middle of a paradigm shift, a time when the choice of experiments and the execution of experiments are not really things that people do," says Bob Murphy, the head of the computational biology department at Carnegie Mellon University.
Automated science is "moving the role of the scientist higher and higher up the food chain," says Murphy. Researchers are focusing their efforts on big-picture problem-solving rather than the nitty-gritty of running experiments.
He says it will also allow scientists to take on more problems at once—and solve big, lingering ones that are too complex to tackle right now.
Outside academia, pharmaceutical companies are using AI to extract information from academic papers and other written materials, which can surface new hypotheses to test.
These developments won't crack every outstanding problem, but they will potentially allow scientists to vastly expand the problems they can take on.
From Axios
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