Funding AI instead of Science? Welcome to 1905!
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There are lots of things wrong with the present giddiness about AI. Here I’m just focusing on one.
The investment of half a trillion $$$ into fostering AI while slashing science funding by a similar amount reminds me of the year 1905.
Why 1905?
Not that there was a similar colossal fool in charge of affairs as the current one in the White House, although as much as foolishness is concerned, and its disastrous worldwide effects when a leader is afflicted by it, we have to give some credit to Wilhelm II, the last Kaiser of Germany, who was forced to abdicate in 1918, marking the end of the German Empire and its 300 year run of the Hohenzollerns, after starting a war that left the whole Europe in shambles.
No, I’m referring to the general assumption at that time that all there was to know was already known, and further research would just amount to ‘decorating the cake.’ Similarly, investing exclusively in AI, which mines existing data but does noting to contribute to them, amounts to the idea that nothing possibly could add more data that would expand our horizon of empirical knowledge.
The foolishness of this assumption at the turn of the 20th century was borne out by four papers by Albert Einstein appearing in 1905, which changed our entire understanding of the laws of the universe, and carried the germs of today’s technology: (1) the photoelectric effect – empirical data that forced Einstein to believe that energy is bundled into quanta; (2) special relativity, establishing the constancy of the speed of light; (3) Brownian motion, the explanation of random motion of small particles in a liquid; (4) equivalence of mass and energy, as captured in the famous equation E = mc2.
With this precedent, making this assumption (that nothing new will surface) again in 2025 is foolishness squared.
My point is, in the absence of science funding, and faced with a huge increase in the funding for AI feeding from yesterday’s science, we will be trapped in the constantly regurgitated understanding of the world from yesterday.
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