In which a robot and I have a fun dorm-room chat about the future of science.

This particular conversation started out as me asking Claude about potential AI discoveries in materials science. The discussion then segues into the more general question of what types of scientific research AI is best at, and what areas of research might see the biggest acceleration from AI. It turns out that I’m actually more bullish than Claude on AI’s capacity for breakthrough ideas — Claude thinks humans will retain the edge in creativity and invention, but I bet AI will get good at this very quickly.

My bet is that the constraints on AI science will be a subset of the constraints on human science. Whenever data is sparse, both AI and humans will struggle to do more than come up with conjectures (and ideas for how to gather more data). And when humans have already discovered most of what there is to know about some natural phenomenon, AI won’t be able to get much farther because there just isn’t much farther to go.

I do suspect, however, that AI is going to discover some truly groundbreaking science that humans never could have discovered on their own. I explained why in my New Year’s essay three years ago:

Basically, human science is all about compressibility. We take some natural phenomenon — say, conservation of momentum — and we boil it down to a simple formula. That formula is very easy to communicate from person to person, and it’s also very easy to use. These are what we call the “laws of nature”.