New eras of technology have always enabled novel waves of research. This week’s TL;DR Tuesday contribution comes from an innovator who has witnessed and indeed driven the evolution of many such waves of novel tech. In this week’s TL;DR Shorts episode, we hear from the co-founder of Applied Invention, Dr Danny Hillis. Danny and his team tackle big ideas across science, tech, and public policy. A true pioneer in AI and parallel computing, Danny has a passion for exploring complex systems and finding creative ways to solve tough problems.
Danny uses agriculture as example of an area of research vital to the survival of humanity where we aren’t doing enough research. Any fellow BBC Countryfile fan will know that farmers work incredibly hard tending to their agricultural land, and responding to the dynamic needs placed on them by the changing climate and other factors. Though they may like to, they often don’t have time to do experiments and contribute to the corpos of research information in this space in a way they would like to.
However, if we we start to collect data from the automation of the mechanisation farmers used to work the land, we can allow these “robots” to conduct a series of experiments that humans don’t have the time to do.
Danny believes that in the future these machines will also contribute to planning future experiments to explore such research spaces. He believes that the future of automated science will be done by AI – allowing humans to increase the number of experiments they can conduct, increase the amount of data gathered, and increase the number of hypotheses that are being tested.
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