"...A promising approach is “literature-based discovery” (LBD) which, as its name suggests, aims to make new discoveries by analyzing scientific literature...such language-based inference methods can become an entirely new field of research at the intersection between natural-language processing and science...A paper...published this year in Nature Human Behaviour, extends this approach in a novel way. It starts with the observation that LBD systems tend to focus on concepts within papers and ignore their authors. So they trained an LBD system to take account of both. The resulting system was twice as good at forecasting new discoveries in materials science...and could also predict the actual discoverers with more than 40% accuracy....In future, researchers might come to rely on such systems to monitor the deluge of new scientific papers, highlight relevant results, suggest novel hypotheses for research—and even link them up with potential research partners, like a scientific matchmaking service. AI tools could thus extend and transform the existing, centuries-old infrastructure of scientific publishing... If LBD promises to supercharge the journal with AI, “robot scientists”, or “self-driving labs”, promise to do the same for the laboratory. These machines go beyond existing forms of laboratory automation, such as drug-screening platforms. Instead, they are given background knowledge about a particular area of research, in the form of data, research papers, and patents. They then use AI to form hypotheses, carry out experiments using robots, assess the results, modify their hypotheses, and repeat the cycle..." https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2023/09/13/how-scientists-are-using-artificial-intelligence
The article recently published in The Economist (excerpt above), presents an optimistic perspective on AI's potential to significantly augment and potentially revolutionize the field of science. However, it is crucial to contemplate the potential unintended consequences of these advancements, which may exacerbate the high economic inequalities between rich countries and poor countries (the 10th goal of the UN SDGs). Ultimately worsening the escalating issue of illegal emigration from the latter to the former, which today motivated EU Chief Ursula von der Leyen's trip to the island of Lampedusa, where an impressive number of 199 boats carrying around 8,500 migrants arrived between September 11th and 13th. https://www.dw.com/en/eu-and-italian-leaders-visit-lampedusa-amid-migrant-spike/a-66837104
