The Philosophy Department welcomes you to join us for a colloquium on "How Will AI Change Science?" from Prof. John Symons, a philospoher of technology from Kansas University. Prof. Symon's lecture will take place 5:00-6:30pm on Thursday, December 7 in RSC 261 (Olive Room). The talk is free and open to the public.
Here is a summary of Prof. Symon's talk:
AI has already had a dramatic influence on the practice of science. AlphaFold is perhaps the most prominent example of the kinds of successful applications of machine learning to scientific discovery. In this talk we begin with a reflection on protein folding in order to examine the potential of AI in science while carefully considering the risks of hallucinatin, deskilling, and opacity. Are we on the verge of a posthuman kind of science? I argue that we are not and that by thinking about domain specific machine learning we can see where science will remain a distinctly human enterprise.