Why AI cannot do good science without humans

Training and mentoring the next generation of researchers is an important role for humans. Credit: Getty Does humanity need science? The Nobel prizewinner Max Perutz posed this question in a landmark essay 1 in 1989. His conclusion, unsurprisingly, was ‘yes’. Had he lived to see the era of artificial intelligence, he might have inverted his framing of the question: does science need humanity? Read the paper: Accelerating scientific discovery with Co-Scientist Two studies in Nature provide a glimpse of what some are interpreting as humanity’s shrinking role in scientific discovery in Perutz’s own field, molecular biology. Both describe a pivotal step towards truly AI-driven drug discovery , in which a system of connected AI agents is trained to autonomously navigate multi-step workflows. The system trawled scholarly literature, formed hypotheses, interpreted data and engaged in internal debate to arrive at candidate drugs to treat a particular disease. The results are impressive, but also highlight something else: AI scientists can and should empower human researchers. They cannot and should not replace them. Read the paper: A multi-agent system for automating scientific discovery In one study, a team based at FutureHouse, a non-profit AI research laboratory in San Francisco, California, asked its AI system, called Robin, to find a treatment for the eye disorder dry age-related macular degeneration 2 . …