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The Silicon Illusion: Why AI Cannot Substitute for Scientific Understanding


William Burns examines AI’s role in science, questioning its impact on knowledge and scientific progress.

A 2021 study of declassified archives argued that a Vietnam War-era project codenamed Igloo White – electronic sensors hidden in the jungle, linked to computers intended to target US bombing – was in reality “an enormous bureaucratic mire” that North Vietnamese opponents readily spoofed. The cancer researcher and winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, William G. Kaelin Jr., warned that his profession must build “houses of brick” rather than “mansions of straw” when it came to evidence for scientific claims. "I worry about sloppiness in biomedical research,” he wrote in Nature, adding that “the causes are diverse, but what I see as the biggest culprit is hardly discussed…the goal of a [scientific] paper seems to have shifted from validating specific conclusions to making the broadest possible assertions.”

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