💡 Will AI Spark the New Scientific Revolution?
Eric Horvitz, Microsoft’s Chief Science Officer, gave an interview at the recent World Science Festival about how artificial intelligence is changing the present and future of fundamental science.
Highlights
➡️ Science mainly does pattern recognition, sorting, sifting, and diagnosing. You may have an expert over here and an expert over there, but very few people can cross a wide range of disciplines. AI systems don't know any boundaries in the kind of data they can be trained on. We're just starting to see the glimmers of what that might mean for science if these systems become the glue to bring specialties together and take us to generalizations that perhaps we would have never considered.
➡️ We see an incredible acceleration of some of the things we've done in the past, where it might take several years of analysis to months or even weeks. Especially when it comes to discovering antibiotics, as we're facing a crisis of antibiotic resistance in medicine right now. AI can now generate and scope down possibilities and then help do the end-run game to determine the best experiments, saving us time and money and increasing our longevity.
➡️ Researchers at Washington University used a computational microscope driven by AI technologies to study the proteins’ interaction and function. Biologists who looked at the results said they had no idea what those were, raising new questions and directions about how biology works.
➡️ AI systems are impressively creative and will become even more so over time. Their ability to synthesize, generalize, abstract, and compose in new ways — isn't that what most creative folks do? This will lead to a merger of neuroscience and bring us new understandings of the mind.
➡️ Combining AI and classical computational methods puts us on a discovery pipeline. The teams at Microsoft have been working on the pursuit of less expensive power batteries. AI methods helped discover them much faster. From your initial possibility of 30 million compounds, we settled on a few and then just one candidate that uses 70% less lithium. It replaces it with sodium and is much less expensive.
➡️ In humanity's history, we have had the Stone Age and the Bronze Age. And here we are, becoming masters of new materials that might change the nature of what a skyline looks like someday.
➡️ These AI tools we've created will probably have as powerful an effect on humanity as our invention of language has had in terms of how our culture evolved. The following 50 years will have a name in history. They will be transformational.
More on the topic:
An 8-hour (!) interview with Elon Musk
#interview @hiaimediaen
