At the core of Al-for-science hype is the idea that Al is somehow going to accelerate science and help us solve pressing scientific problems much faster. In 2016, Al researcher and Sony executive Hiroaki Kitano proposed a "grand challenge" of designing an Al system that could "make major scientific discoveries in biomedical sciences and that is worthy of a Nobel Prize and far beyond." In 2021, he rebranded this exercise as the Nobel Turing Challenge—a combination of Nobel ambitions and the Turing Test, which we'll discuss in the next chapter-and started a series of workshops to publicize this goal. His vision is an autonomous agent that can "do science" on its own, rapidly scaling the number of scientific discoveries available to humanity.

The absurdist writer Douglas Adams caricatured this kind of wishful thinking perfectly in the late 1970s, with the characters in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy who developed a supercomputer to give them the ultimate answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything. That answer, they learned after generations of waiting, was 42. Of course, such an answer is useless without the corresponding question, and their supercomputer wasn't powerful enough to determine the question. It was powerful enough, however, to design an even bigger computer (the planet Earth, as it happens) that could, given 10 million years, calculate the question. We can't delegate science to machines, because science isn't a collection of answers. It's a set of processes and ways of knowing.

— The AI Con by Emily M. Bender, Alex Hanna (30%)