What the A.I. Nobels teach us about humanity

Good morning. Today, my colleagues Alan Burdick and Katrina Miller explain a recent shift in the world of science. We’re also covering 2024 election polling, the West Bank and “Pod Save America.” —David Leonhardt

Google’s DeepMind office in London. Alastair Grant/Associated Press

Computed science

Technology observers have grown increasingly vocal in recent years about the threat that artificial intelligence poses to the human variety. A.I. models can write and talk like us, draw and paint like us, crush us at chess and Go. They express an unnerving simulacrum of creativity, not least where the truth is concerned.

A.I. is coming for science, too, as this week’s Nobel Prizes seemed keen to demonstrate. On Tuesday, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to two scientists who helped computers “learn” closer to the way the human brain does. A day later, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to three researchers for using A.I. to invent new proteins and reveal the structure of existing ones — a problem that stumped biologists for decades, yet could be solved by A.I. in minutes.

The Nobel Committee for Chemistry announced the winners last week. Jonathan Nackstrand/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Cue the grousing: This was computer science, not physics or chemistry! Indeed, of the five laureates on Tuesday and Wednesday, arguably only one, the University of Washington biochemist David Baker, works in the field he was awarded in.

The scientific Nobels tend to award concrete results over theories, empirical discovery over pure idea. But that schema didn’t quite hold this year, either. One prize went to scientists who leaned into physics as a foundation on which to build computer models used for no groundbreaking result in particular. The laureates on Wednesday, on the other hand, had created computer models that made big advancements in biochemistry.

These were outstanding and fundamentally human accomplishments, to be sure. But the Nobel recognition underscored a chilling prospect: Henceforth, perhaps scientists will merely craft the tools that make the breakthroughs, rather than do the revolutionary work themselves or even understand how it came about. Artificial intelligence designs and builds hundreds of molecular Notre Dames and Hagia Sophias, and a researcher gets a pat for inventing the shovel.

An old prize in a new world

But grant humans their due. Science has always involved tools and instruments, and our relationship to them has grown more complex with their sophistication. Few astronomers look at the sky anymore, or even put an eye to a telescope. Sensors on Earth and in space “observe,” gathering mind-boggling reams of data; computer programs parse and analyze it for patterns familiar and strange; and a team of researchers scrutinizes it, sometimes from halfway across the world. The heavens are pixels on a monitor. Who owns the discovery? Where does the machinery end and the human begin?

If anything, by highlighting the role of A.I. in science, the Nobel Committee underscored what an anachronism its recognition has become. The prizes conceived by Alfred Nobel in 1895 rewarded a certain romantic view of science: the lone genius (typically male) planting flags on the continents of Physics, Chemistry and Medicine. But the world’s current problems, from climate change and food insecurity to cancer and extinction, don’t respect those boundaries. Rare is the pure biologist or chemist; increasingly common is the geochemist, the paleogenomicist, the computational evolutionary theorist, the astrobiologist.

A.I. is blurring these divisions only further. Richard Socher, the chief executive of You.com and another godfather of A.I., has argued that the technology’s greatest contribution will come as it links and mines the databases of heretofore disparate disciplines, from crystallography to neuroscience, to forge new and unexpected collaborations among scientists.

“Among” is the key word. Science is ever more of a team effort, a beautiful, essential reality that the Nobels, with their strict rules and categories, are unable to properly celebrate. “It is unfortunate that, due to the statutes of the Nobel Foundation, the prize has to go to no more than three people, when our marvelous discovery is the work of more than a thousand,” Kip Thorne, a physicist at Caltech, said after winning the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2017.

And if the Nobel Committee is now rewarding the contributions of A.I., should it not also recognize the researchers whose results it learned from? To crack the protein structure problem, AlphaFold, the A.I. that led to this year’s Chemistry prize, was trained on a databank encapsulating the work of more than 30,000 biologists.

No human can exist alone — and our machines definitely can’t, at least not yet. What they do with their time reflects the choices made by us. What they discover with it is a distillation of what we ourselves have learned, or hope to. A.I. is us: a grand sampling of humanity, a better sum of parts than so far we’ve managed to assemble each on our own. That’s worth a prize or two.

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JD Vance Philip Montgomery for The New York Times

This week’s subject for The Interview is Senator JD Vance, Trump’s running mate. We spoke about his changing views on Trump, his conversion to Catholicism and his rhetoric.

You’ve talked about childless cat ladies. You’ve called childless people sociopathic, psychotic, deranged. And I know that you’ve said that those comments were sarcastic. But it’s hard to hear those words entirely as a joke. What do you actually think of childless women in society?

Well, as I said when I made those comments — and look, they were dumb comments. I think most people probably have said something dumb, have said something that they wish they had put differently.

You said it in several different venues.

In a very, very short period of time. It was sort of a thing that I picked up on. I said it a couple of times in a couple of interviews, and look, I certainly wish that I had said it differently. What I was trying to get at is that — I’m not talking about people who it just didn’t work out for, for medical reasons, for social reasons, like set that to the side, we’re not talking about folks like that. What I was definitely trying to illustrate ultimately in a very inarticulate way is that I do think that our country has become almost pathologically anti-child. I put this in a couple of different ways, right?

So, there’s one, it was actually when I was in law school — I was on a train between New York and New Haven, I think I was doing, like, law-firm interviews or something. And obviously I didn’t have kids then. And there’s this young girl who gets on the train. She’s probably 21 or 22. She’s a young Black female. I could tell by the way she was dressed, she didn’t have a whole lot of money; she had a couple of kids with her, and I remember just watching her and thinking, “This is a really unbelievably patient mother.” The reason I noticed her is because her kids, like a lot of kids that age, are complete disasters, especially on public transportation, they turn it up to 11. But she was being so patient. But then everybody around her was also noticing the kids being misbehaved, and they were so angry, and they were sighing and staring every time her 2-year-old made a noise. And that was a moment that stuck with me, and of course I’ve had similar experiences riding with my own kids on various modes of public transportation, and again it just sort of hit me like, OK, this is really, really bad.

I do think that there’s this pathological frustration with children that just is a new thing in American society. I think it’s very dark. I think you see it sometimes in the political conversation, people saying, well, maybe we shouldn’t have kids because of climate change. You know, when I’ve used this word, sociopathic? Like, that, I think, is a very deranged idea: the idea that you shouldn’t have a family because of concerns over climate change. Doesn’t mean you can’t worry about climate change, but in the focus on childless cat ladies, we missed the substance of what I said.

Read more of the interview here.

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