Amplify scientific discovery with artificial intelligence

Abstract

Technological innovations are penetrating all areas of science, making predominantly human activities a principal bottleneck in scientific progress while also making scientific advancement more subject to error and harder to reproduce. This is an area where a new generation of artificial intelligence (AI) systems can radically transform the practice of scientific discovery. Such systems are showing an increasing ability to automate scientific data analysis and discovery processes, can search systematically and correctly through hypothesis spaces to ensure best results, can autonomously discover complex patterns in data, and can reliably apply small-scale scientific processes consistently and transparently so that they can be easily reproduced. We discuss these advances and the steps that could help promote their development and deployment.