Collection
Artificial Researchers and Scientific Discoveries
Humanity faces grand challenges, and the hope is that scientific progress will provide us with inventions, innovations, and breakthroughs that help us meet those challenges. Scientific progress, in turn, depends crucially on scientific discoveries. Now, in light of the rapid advances we are seeing in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) all around us, the question arises as to how AI can contribute to new scientific discoveries, or even make them on its own. Could there even be AI researchers – and what should that mean?
This is the overarching question of this Special Issue on "Artificial Researchers and Scientific Discoveries", which gathers experts from a variety of backgrounds to explore further questions such as the following: What role might AI play in scientific discovery? Could AI find something on its own and communicate the results of its research? What about its creative capabilities? Could AI meet the criteria for authorship, and how could AI contribute to science communication? Could it make suggestions for science policy?
In short, this Special Issue is about identifying and also evaluating different requirements, possibilities, and limitations for AI researchers and AI in scientific discovery.
Editors
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Jan G. Michel
Jan G. Michel (jan.michel@hhu.de) has served as Professor of Philosophy at the University of Düsseldorf, following positions at the Universities of Münster, Bochum, and Connecticut. His research is at the intersections of philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and philosophy of science. He is currently working to develop the philosophy of scientific discovery as a new field of research. In addition, he works on questions of meaning and AI. His work is characterized by interdisciplinary collaborations as well as an expansive understanding of the scope of science. He is an Associate Editor of Philosophia: A Global Journal of Philosophy.
