The Robot Scientist Adam

Despite science's great intellectual prestige, developing robot scientists will probably be simpler than developing general AI systems because there is no essential need to take into account the social milieu. Computer science is increasingly setting the general scientific agenda. Using computers to execute experiments produces ever-greater amounts of scientific data. 1 This growth in data has, in turn, required the ever-greater use of computers for modeling and analysis. Computer science is also changing how researchers express and communicate scientific knowledge. Most such knowledge is expressed using only natural language—the exception that proves the rule being mathematics. The desire to make scientific data more amenable to computer analysis motivates developments such as ontologies and the Semantic Web. 2 These developments provide general benefits, since scientific knowledge is best expressed using formal logic, as this promotes semantic clarity, which in turn supports the free exchange of scientific knowledge.