
Don’t Expect AI to Revolutionize Science
Data science is a downstream phenomenon. Thinking isn't.The September 2023 cover of The Economist features a robot sitting under an apple tree, raising a finger to some Eureka! moment, after an apple falls from the tree and hits it on the head. Anyone even remotely familiar with the history of science knows the image belongs to Isaac Newton, who gave an account of an apple falling to the ground while sitting in his garden at Woolsthorpe Manor in 1666. As he later recounted, he asked himself why the apple should fall perpendicularly to the ground, which gave rise to the idea that the very same force pulling the apple to earth kept the moon falling to the earth, and the earth to the sun. The apple, in other words, Read More ›