An open access publication of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences
Winter 2004

The automation of discovery

Author
Clark Glymour

Clark Glymour is Alumni University Professor of Philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University, and Senior Research Scientist at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition and John Pace Eminent Scholar at the University of West Florida. He is the author or coauthor of numerous articles and books, including “The Mind's Arrows” (2001), “Computation, Causation and Discovery” (1999), and “Thinking Things Through” (1995).

Scientific revolutions are sometimes quiet. Despite a lack of public fanfare, there is mounting evidence that we are in the midst of such a revolution–premised on the automation of scientific discovery made possible by modern computers and new methods of acquiring data.

Consider, for example, the following developments:

  • Using data from the 1970s, about eight years ago a team of data analysts working in Holland predicted that low-level lead exposure is more dangerous to children’s cognitive development than had previously been thought–a prediction confirmed by recent reanalyses of later observations;
  • Using measurements of reflected solar energy (technically, the visible-near infrared spectrum), a computer identified minerals in rocks from a California desert lake as accurately as had a team of human experts at the site who had access both to the spectra and to the actual rocks; • In Antarctica, a robot traversing a field of ice and stones picked out the rare meteorites from among the many rocks; • Scientists at the Swedish Institute for Space Physics realized that an instrument aboard a satellite was malfunctioning and they recalibrated it from Earth;
  • An economist working for the World Food Organization found that current foreign aid practices have no impact on extreme poverty;
  • Climate researchers traced the global increase in vegetation and its causes over the last twenty years;
  • A team of biologists and computer scientists reported determinations of the genes in yeast whose function is regulated by any of a hundred regulator genes;
  • A kidney transplant surgeon measured the behavior of rat genes that had been aboard the space shuttle;
  • A biologist reported a determination of (possibly) all of the human genes in . . .
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