AI Is Ushering in a New Scientific Revolution
Current AI methods are great for classification. That said, I’m not convinced AI is making discoveries. What I mean by that, is that AI is often non-explainable, can be non-deterministic and only as good as it’s training data.<p>For instance, asteroid discovery. Yes AI can be used to discover asteroids. BUT every asteroid needs to be checked by a human and some will undoubtably be false positives. We also miss some unknown true positives.<p>We often (depending on method) can’t explain why [in-fact] why something is a true positive vs false positive from the network itself.<p>Which is why I say AI doesn’t make discoveries. It’s not identifying something knew, it’s identifying something that looks like what it’s seen before. It’s error rates in the scientific frontier is also going to be unknown; as we often lack data. Using AI could potentially limit the scope of new discoveries - depending how heavily it’s relied on by hyper optimizing on the wrong items.<p>Anyway, sorry for the rambling, as a research in deep learning I find this trend something to monitor.