Related Articles
By Alan Burdick and Katrina Miller
We are journalists on The Times’s Science desk.
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.
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.
THE LATEST NEWS
2024 Election
Kamala Harris is struggling to win over Latino voters, while Donald Trump has maintained his strength with the group, according to a Times/Siena College poll.
Dissatisfaction with the economy and Trump’s populist conservative message are possible explanations for his gains among Black and Hispanic voters, Nate Cohn writes.
Harris released her medical information and said that Trump, in refusing to release his own, did not want the American people to see “if he is fit to be the president.”
Trump is in a cantankerous mood in the final stretch of the campaign. One reason: He is trailing Harris in the race for cash.
Officials in California are working on a plan to insulate the state’s environmental regulations in the event of a second Trump administration.
Middle East
Hamas tried to persuade Iran to join the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, according to minutes of planning meetings obtained by The Times.
The Israeli military struck Hezbollah targets in Lebanon and its soldiers clashed with militants in the southern part of the country. At least a dozen people have been killed over the past day, the Lebanese Health Ministry said.
Traveling around the occupied West Bank is harder with a Palestinian license plate. The Times took two bus trips that tell a story of separate and unequal roadways.
More International News
Dogs are a salve for loneliness in South Korea, where many people are choosing to remain single or childless.
Russia has intensified its attacks on Black Sea port infrastructure and civilian shipping in Odesa, Ukraine.
Alex Salmond, the former first minister of Scotland who campaigned for the country to leave the United Kingdom, died at 69.
The Nairobi National Museum in Kenya is home to thousands of prehistoric treasures dating back millions of years. It lacks the money to keep them safe, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Other Big Stories
Governments across Europe, East Asia and North America are trying to raise their fertility rates. Japan has been trying for 30 years.
President Biden declared a major disaster in Florida for communities affected by Hurricane Milton, freeing federal funding for the state’s recovery.
A senior adviser to Mayor Eric Adams of New York had ties with groups connected with the Chinese government. He still kept her close.
THE SUNDAY DEBATE
Will Harris’s appearance on the popular podcast “Call Her Daddy” help her electorally?
Yes. The “Call Her Daddy” appearance excited Harris’s base of young, liberal women, and it accomplished its mission: to “reintroduce Harris to a friendly audience and stress the importance of this election,” USA Today’s Sara Pequeño writes.
No. While Harris talks to young women, Trump is appearing on podcasts that appeal to a voter base she needs: young men. “There are enough women to have her get to the majority, but that may be a case of winning the battle and losing the war,” Daniel Pfeiffer says for Times Opinion.
FROM OPINION
The election workers who stand up to conspiracy theories, at a great cost to their own safety, deserve our praise and gratitude, the editorial board writes.
Here are columns by Maureen Dowd on the missing urgency to beat Trump and Ross Douthat on the presidential candidates on podcasts.
MORNING READS
“Pod Save America”: The hosts of the political podcast have outlasted the wave of anti-Trump #Resistance that made it popular. That’s where things get complicated.
Dual citizens: Some U.S.-born children of Mexican immigrants are returning to the country that their parents once left.
A secretive dynasty: Boar’s Head made its owners wealthy. They have remained silent as the company faces scandal.
Vows: From wingman to main man.
Lives Lived: David Garrard Lowe was a writer and architectural historian who helped stem the tide of urban renewal that was leveling large swaths of American cities in the decades after World War II. He died at 91.
BOOK OF THE WEEK
“John Lewis: A Life,” by David Greenberg: To appreciate the scope of this 696-page biography of John Lewis, an Atlas of the civil rights movement who had Sisyphean tendencies, flip to the back of the book. There, you’ll find 131 pages of notes, indexes, acknowledgments, credits and bibliography — evidence of Greenberg’s comprehensive, collaborative approach, which included interviews with two former presidents and a gaggle of fellow historians. It’s easy to canonize Lewis; his quest for racial equality and human dignity extended to his dying days. But Greenberg resists the urge. Instead he examines Lewis’s evolution from shy farm boy to tireless Freedom Rider to frustrated activist to congressional stalwart through the lens of a single question: Why did he always turn back to hope? The answers are timely and timeless. Read our review of “John Lewis: A Life.”
More on books
Han Kang is the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Best known for “The Vegetarian,” she is the first writer from South Korea to receive the award.
In his latest presidential chronicle, Bob Woodward imposes an arc and a moral on the mess and sprawl of recent history.
THE INTERVIEW
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.
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE
Click the cover image above to read this week’s magazine.
THE MORNING RECOMMENDS …
Relieve stress with a 7-minute workout.
Use an app to meditate.
Buy a gift for a recently engaged couple.
MEAL PLAN
Each week, we feature recipes that Emily Weinstein thinks you can easily whip up for a weeknight meal. Now, Emily has collected her favorites into a cookbook: “Easy Weeknight Dinners: 100 Fast, Flavor-Packed Meals for Busy People Who Still Want Something Good to Eat.” (You can order your copy here.)
In honor of the book’s debut, the Five Weeknight Dishes newsletter this week features the dish pictured on the cover: Melissa Clark’s chicken with tomatoes, pancetta and mozzarella.
NOW TIME TO PLAY
Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was billionth.
Can you put eight historical events — including Queen Elizabeth I, hurricane ratings and the discovery of prairie dogs — in chronological order? Take this week’s Flashback quiz.
And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands.
Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times.
Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com.
<
