When the Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel created his prize, which was awarded since 1901, he did not know any person faster than the lion or swimming beyond the dolphin. Our dominance has arisen as a kind because we were the strongest or fastest, but because of our ingenuity – our ability to imagine, design and build.
Has leading scientific discoveries become more difficult to find them?
Today, human ingenuity is expressed through the machines we create. Almost all the great scientific penetration during the past fifty years, from the discovery of gravitational waves to the human genome sequence and the graph of protein structures using artificial intelligence tools (AI), depends on a machine that can feel more or more accurate or calculate faster than that human.
However, prestigious scientific prizes still framing achievements mainly as a humanitarian effort. The Nobel Awards have been repeatedly went to people whose discoveries have become only possible through unusual technologies. However, the machines and societies on which they were built are rarely recognized as the reporting of participants.
If our highest honors reflects the reality of modern discovery, the machines that I have needed need to be recognized. This can be done through the current prizes, by creating a new category or by preparing new prizes.
Machines are not only tools in the service of science – they are science. Consider the experience of laser interference, Ligo Wave Observatory (LIGO). The detection of gravitational waves in 2015 was rewarded for the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2017, just two years later.
Although Albert Einstein predicted the presence of these waves 100 years ago using his imagination, paper and pen, their observation depends on an engineering achievement that can only be achieved in the past few decades: two tunnels, every four kilometers long, with 10 kilometers with length detection. Proton width. Likewise, the JWST Telescope turns our view of the universe. The construction of the Great Hadron Correction was a penetration like Boson Higgs later discovered by the facility. The Cryo electron microscope has made a revolution in biology.
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The Nobel season is when the world looks at science. If we photographed the breaches as purely human victories, then we promote an old vision in which the machines are just tools.
This negligence matters. Prizes not only honor the past; It forms the future. Winning one pays more papers on this topic. Although the prizes are concentrated in a small network of scientific institutions, they can intertwine with the creation of channels through which knowledge can spread. It gives credibility and the situation on people, ideas and specialties signs to the audience, which is considered progress.
The risks rise. Artificial intelligence accelerates the discovery of drugs, simulating the good protein, and winning the gold medals of the International Sports Olympics. The machines we build not only our arrival – they also reshape our. When the Google Deepmind Alphago Ai defeated the best players in the world, not only ended the competition: the game itself has transformed, with human heroes now adopted strategies that no one had imagined before. Science may face a similar shift. In an increasingly dependent research environment, scientists who work with them may be more effective who have put the pace of discovery.
It is time for prizes to explicitly honor human and machine partnerships. Through this, I mean the scientific achievements that were insight or basic discovery possible only due to a machine designed for this purpose and that extended human capabilities in a decisive way. These may range from large -scale experimental processes, advanced sensors to strong algorithms and integrated systems that make the largest questions responsible for scientific methods.