Month: May 2025

Is Science Inevitable?

Linzhuo Li, Yiling Lin, Lingfei Wu

Using large-scale citation data and a breakthrough metric, the study systematically evaluates the inevitability of scientific breakthroughs. We find that scientific breakthroughs emerge as multiple discoveries rather than singular events. Through analysis of over 40 million journal articles, we identify multiple discoveries as papers that independently displace the same reference using the Disruption Index (D-index), suggesting functional equivalence. Our findings support Merton’s core argument that scientific discoveries arise from historical context rather than individual genius. The results reveal a long-tail distribution pattern of multiple discoveries across various datasets, challenging Merton’s Poisson model while reinforcing the structural inevitability of scientific progress.

Read the full article at: arxiv.org

Science, Promise and Peril in the Age of AI

It started as a fantasy, then a promise — inspired by biology and animated by the ideas of physicists — and grew to become a powerful research tool. Now artificial intelligence has evolved into something else: a junior colleague, a partner in creativity, an impressive if unreliable wish-granting genie. It has changed everything, from how we relate to data and truth, to how researchers devise experiments and mathematicians think about proofs. In this special series, we explore how AI is changing what it means to do science and math, and what it means to be a scientist.

Read the full article at: www.quantamagazine.org

The Magic of Code How Digital Language Created and Connects Our World—and Shapes Our Future, by Samuel Arbesman

In the tradition of classics such as The Lives of a Cell, a bold reframing of our relationship with technology that is more positive and human centered.
In the digital world, code is the essential primary building block, the equivalent of the cell or DNA in the biological sphere—and almost as mysterious. Code can create entire worlds, real and virtual; it allows us to connect instantly to people and places around the globe; and it performs tasks that were once only possible in science fiction. It is a superpower, and not just in a technical sense. It is also a gateway to ideas. As vividly illustrated by Samuel Arbesman, it is the ultimate connector, providing new insight and meaning into how everything from language and mythology to biblical texts, biology, and even our patterns of thought connect with the history and nature of computing.

While the building block of code can be used for many wondrous things it can also create deeper wedges in our society and be weaponized to cause damage to our planet or our civilization. Code and computing are too important to be left to the tech community; it is essential that each of us engage with it. And we fail to understand it to our detriment.

By providing us with a framework to think about coding and its effects upon the world and placing the past, current, and future developments in computing into its broader setting we see how software and computers can work for people as opposed to against our needs. With this deeper understanding into the “why” of coding we can be masters of technology rather than its subjects.

More at: www.publicaffairsbooks.com

Artificial Intelligences: A Bridge Toward Diverse Intelligence and Humanity’s Future

Michael Levin

Advanced Intelligent Systems,

Recent discussions and debate around artificial intelligence (AI) and its status are notably incomplete, missing the implications of highly relevant aspects of the emerging fields of diverse intelligence (DI) and synthetic morphology, as well as of basic facts of developmental biology. Herein, it is argued that human flourishing is impossible without an appreciation of the space of possible beings and of the ways in which today’s intelligent machine debates are about universal existential questions facing biological beings, not just AI. The inevitable arrival of a wide set of unconventional bodies and minds as humans modify and create new forms will disrupt untenable old narratives of what people are and how to recognize their sentient allies in unfamiliar guises. Herein, the issues engendered by the advent of AI from the perspective of the field of DI and the evolutionary history of the bodies and minds are discussed.

Read the full article at: advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com