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We all know the science fiction trope of ‘robots taking over the world and humans are left to be their slaves?’. Well, with AI advances, it’s starting to look like a possible reality, except for if this happened, science would die with our freedom. The polarising difference between people and our (current) allies is emotion. In fact, emotion is what makes us so painstakingly human. Creativity, interest and value all stem from it, yet these are commonly associated with only art, drama, and dance. Not science. So why would science die if robots were our overlords?
Let’s run with this dystopian future. When it comes to the heavily funded research for the cure for cancer, scientists are asking the big questions: can we map a tumour microenvironment? Can we kill only cancer cells in the body? Can we reduce different cancers to a set of common traits? These enquiries require curiosity, which is an emotion that we can’t code for in an AI algorithm. Furthermore, the whole scientific method relies on scientists being able to create new questions and devise new experiments to answer them. Since AI are incapable of this thought process, without a human programmer manipulating their code, cancer research would cease to exist along with any future scientific discoveries.
Not only is creativity needed for the future in science; it was what made the heart of science beat in the past. I’m sure apples falling from trees were many people’s enemies before the 17th century, although only one creative individual saw this possible concussion as the answer to what kept the moon in place: gravity. Newton, with DaVinci, Einstein, Curie and many more, saw problems from new angles and possibilities due to their bewildering imagination. A quote that captures this, written by Oren Harari is, “The electric light didn’t come from the continuous development of candles.” So, in this dystopian world of AI superiority, it wouldn’t be absurd to suggest that candle factories would be commonplace.
Creativity is the use of imagination or original ideas to create something new. Arguably, this domain is being explored in the world of AI and considerable advancements have already been made. For reference, DeepMind, a British AI research company, programmed an AI to compete in the notorious and psychologically revealing game of AlphaGo. In one game against the ‘Go world champion’, this AI played a shocking and ‘unscripted’ move that on first look seemed like an amateur mistake and would lead to the AI’s defeat, but instead it transpired to be the move that won the machine the game. In light of robots dictating the human race, this AlphaGo move isn’t anything to worry us, nevertheless, it shows initiative from the AI itself that wasn’t written by a human in a line of code. This stunning move only justifies further the creativity in science that was needed for this small step in robotic invention and, consequentially, the giant leap for AI. Science went from Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer who suggested we could write algorithms for machines to compute, to an invention of artificial intelligence that can, of its own accord, outsmart a human.
Even so, scientists, as humans, have the privilege of channelling their emotions to produce something creative, whether that be a hypothesis, an experiment, or even a whole invention. We hold the key to the spontaneity that unlocks apples falling from trees to the creation of the theory of gravity. AI may be able to beat us at board games; yet they still, and will always, fail to ask those out-of-the-box questions that lead to a cure for cancer. We can utilise our robot creations to aid us in answering these questions, however, if society ever finds itself under the rulership of AI, the willingness to invent, enquire and create will be knocked down bringing science crumbling down with it.