Designing AI for Disruptive Science

Designing AI for Disruptive Science

Why scaling AI won’t automatically lead to paradigm shifts.

In On Exactitude in Science, the writer Jorge Luis Borges imagines an empire so devoted to cartography that its mapmakers draw a map as large and detailed as the empire itself. “In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map,” Borges writes, “inhabited by Animals and Beggars.” Borges’s map is a parable for knowledge, and one of its lessons is that too much detail can quickly become impractical — a map at that scale would be perfect but useless.

But with today’s AI systems, one might wonder if such a map is so absurd after all. Computers and the Internet have already helped us to digitize much of human knowledge, and AI enables us to scan it quickly and easily. For instance, large language models are trained on trillions of words spanning much of recorded human knowledge. In biology, systems like AlphaFold learn from large databases to predict a protein’s folded structure from its amino acid sequence.

This means that, in some domains, something resembling Borges’s life-sized map has become extremely useful. And given the rate of progress on this front, it may seem like advancing science now simply requires building ever larger and more navigable versions of such AI systems, effectively mapping every field.

A lack of practicality, however, was never the sole flaw of Borges’s map. The deeper problem is that adding detail only gives you more of the same kind of information — more roads, more mountains, more villages — when what you might need is a completely different schematic.

Consider the map of the London Underground. Until 1933, the map plotted stations at geographically accurate locations in London. But this made central London, where most stations clustered, an unreadable tangle, while the outer suburbs, devoid of relevant data, took up most of the space. The draughtsman Harry Beck solved this inefficiency by abandoning geographic accuracy and instead redrawing the network as a circuit diagram of colored lines and evenly spaced stations.

A scientific paradigm can also be thought of as a kind of map, but unlike Beck, scientists do not usually know in advance what their maps will be used for. Instead, new paradigms are driven by the desire to explain complex phenomena with a simple and unified set of principles. Such principles tend to have knock-on implications that stretch far beyond the phenomena that inspired them.

For instance, by the mid-nineteenth century, electricity and magnetism were described by a patchwork of separately discovered laws, each explaining a different phenomenon. The physicist James Clerk Maxwell simplified the field by replacing this patchwork with four short equations. But they also implied the existence of electromagnetic waves that could travel through space, including low-frequency waves no one had yet detected. These waves eventually became the basis for radio.

Current AI, by contrast, is not set up to do this. It excels at prediction within existing frameworks, but paradigm shifts require replacing these with simpler alternatives whose implications haven’t yet been explored. A computational system trained on electromagnetic measurements may have predicted these results perfectly, but would never have found radio.

Seen in that light, even as AI becomes more central to scientific work, we risk falling into what one might call hypernormal science, where we get ever better at prediction within current models, alongside a weakening capacity to ask completely new categories of questions. Much like Borges’s empire of cartographers, we risk confusing more detail for a true understanding of the territory.

To avoid this kind of myopia, we must deliberately build AI that helps us devise new conceptual vocabularies. In other words, we must build visionary machines rather than merely predictive ones.

How Paradigms Work

Before exploring how to build such visionary AI, it helps to look more closely at how paradigm shifts in science actually happen. Science usually progresses by adding facts within an existing paradigm, which functions like a rulebook for a field. But over time, evidence accumulates that an existing paradigm cannot explain, requiring a new one.

One might expect that a new paradigm would immediately replace the old one as it better explains the facts. Instead, they tend to gain preeminence only after becoming useful for new applications.

One example is the development of special relativity. In the late nineteenth century, physicists could describe light with wave equations. Because every familiar wave (like sound or water) seemed to need a material carrier, the scientific consensus was that light must also travel through an invisible medium, dubbed the luminiferous ether. The academic establishment was profoundly attached to this concept; Lord Kelvin, the elder statesman of British physics, even declared the ether was the only thing in physics we could be absolutely certain existed.

Albert A. Michelson and Edward W. Morley reasoned that if the ether existed, the Earth’s motion would create an “ether wind,” making light traveling along that wind move at a slightly different effective speed than light traveling across it. Michelson and Morley sent light along two perpendicular paths and expected that because of this speed difference, one beam would come back slightly later than the other. But their experiment revealed no detectable difference.

This result didn’t immediately convince the academic community to abandon the concept of ether. Many physicists (including Michelson) instead adopted an interim position, that the ether’s effects must be hidden in some way. Most prominently, Hendrik Lorentz proposed that the ether existed, but that objects moving through it would shorten in the direction of travel, canceling the expected signal.

An alternative paradigm was ultimately offered by Albert Einstein, then a 26-year-old patent clerk in Bern, Switzerland. His theory of special relativity posited two principles: that the laws of physics are the same in every uniformly moving frame, and the speed of light in a vacuum is the same for all such observers. Through these principles, Einstein was attempting to introduce “a simple and consistent theory,” by which “the introduction of a ‘luminiferous ether’ will prove to be superfluous.”

Initially, Lorentz’s and Einstein’s theories both explained the known experimental data similarly well. But Einstein’s theory proved far more fruitful over time. If light’s speed were genuinely constant, then space and time could not be absolute. This eventually led to the demonstration that mass and energy had to be equivalent, as per Einstein’s famous equation, E=mc², which now underpins technologies from nuclear power to medical imaging.

A paradigm can take hold even if incomplete, provided its core idea is sufficiently useful. For instance, Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection offered a single principle that could explain the diversity of living species even though it still lacked an explanation for how traits actually passed from parent to offspring. In the late 1860s, he posited the missing mechanism, the erroneous notion of “pangenesis.” In it, he speculated that every cell in the body sheds tiny particles called “gemmules” that collect in the reproductive organs and transmit traits to offspring. Despite this error, Darwin’s core vision survived, and spread amongst biologists, before genetics supplied the necessary, physical mechanisms.

Thus, Einstein and Darwin were both able to generate simple and elegant theories that could make predictions beyond current evidence, even when some details were missing or wrong. In both cases, their decisive advantage was not technical skill within the paradigm, but rather a willingness to step outside it.