Dec 04, 2023
For centuries, science has been driven by human intellect. But for those of us who’ve grown up mostly in the last century, the course of science has been taking a dramatic shift with the ascent of artificial intelligence. What will science look like in the future and how will it impact us as we age? This is one of the key questions that Dr. Benjamin Lewin, the author of “Inside Science,” tackles in today’s episode of 45 Forward. Drawing on 25 years of experience as the founding editor of “Cell,” the world’s leading journal in biology, Dr. Lewin will also address some provocative issues, including how traditional scientific research has been done—and sometimes distorted—by factors such as pressure to publish, changes in the way science is communicated, and the shift away from hypothesis-driven science toward data-driven science. AI offers some stunning potential, Dr. Lewin notes, making it possible for scientists to get instant results from experiments that used to take years of work, potentially leading to new treatments of diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson’s disease. On the other hand, the move toward using masses of big data to find correlations is a concern, because correlations can be misleading, and such a transition to “big science” may leave us with no individual researchers being able to see the whole picture.