After science

Twenty-five years ago, Ted Chiang wrote a prescient science fiction short that began: “It has been 25 years since a report of original research was last submitted to our editors for publication, making this an appropriate time to revisit the question that was so widely debated then: What is the role of human scientists in an age when the frontiers of scientific inquiry have moved beyond the comprehensibility of humans?” He went on to describe a scientific future in which digitally enhanced humans or “metahumans” drove techno-scientific advance. With the rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI), deep reinforcement learning, and other emergent AI designs used to automate the full spectrum of scientific functions, the next 25 years of science promise to transform the role of human involvement, experience, and engagement with science in complex ways, while simultaneously increasing mechanistic control over the world.